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I find the effects of overwork to be quite interesting- a lack of space for self makes it impossible to perform actually life enriching behaviors such as retrea

I find the effects of overwork to be quite interesting- a lack of space for self makes it impossible to perform actually life enriching behaviors such as retreats, meditations, socialization, and hobbies. This means there's simply no room for any other entertainment or enrichment beyond the most shallow/fast/addictive stuff - social media, twitter wars, the thrill of buying nice things. (EDIT: I should emphasize why it's so interesting to me because people often overwork with the justification for life enrichment, but the actual act of overworking reduces space/time for life enrichment!

tunnuz 7y ago
Nicely said.
Sharlin 7y ago
Conveniently, consuming shiny things and lowest-common-denominator mass media is what the Western society very much encourages us to do. Work, consume, repeat.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- McWobbleston 7y ago
  It's the most efficient way to extract value from us
  - walrus01 7y ago
    When I was a teenager, old people told me that my political views would grow more conservative as I got older. If anything, as I've watched growing income inequality and the further concentration of wealth among the one percent, I can better appreciate the point Karl Marx was trying to get across to people.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Being conservative has little to do with consumption culture.
    - danlindley 7y ago
      I'd argue that rationale was based on a very different economic evironment to what we have now, and arguing that today, a failing to know and understand the different challenges that are faced by the very people they may empart this idea to.
    - atemerev 7y ago
      I was born in the USSR, where Marxist socialism was implemented: no significant private property (you own your clothes and furniture, but not your apartment, a car is borderline suspicious), and most certainly no private business ownership. Life was pretty miserable back then, if you ask me. Even in capitalist societies there are still places like that, with free healthcare, basic necessities available for everyone, guaranteed roof over your head, and even full employment. These are called prisons.
      - jahaja 7y ago
        It's a big problem that our current political imagination is so narrow to only allow the false dichotomy of either neo-liberalism or Stalinism. The number of top-down Stalinist within the general leftist movement is tiny.
        crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        Indeed. Since capitalism is "lots of smaller dictatorships(companies) with a set of rules for all", and the migration to communism was "get rid of the smaller dictatorships and make a nation-wide dictatorship". "Communism" ala USSR, North Korea, etc just moved the problem to a strictly worse area, and something you could not get away with. At least in capitalism, there are better and worse 'masters'.
        dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        The modern democratic and republican parties are chock full of pro-totalitarian, pro-authoritarian, "pro-state control of people's lives" politicians (of course they're inconsistent and they'll say or vote the opposite when they are pandering to their base though). If the "modern socialist" types gained tons of traction tomorrow and became mainstream within the democratic party people like Feinstein and other authoritarians won't stop pushing regressive authoritarian policy. They'd just do it in a way that's sculpted to line up with the (newly) popular "socialist" sentiment. So the end result would be pretty darn Stalinist IMO. So yes, you're right that current socialists are generally not in favor of secret police and shipping undesirables to the gulag but you're also wrong because if socialism becomes popular it will include all the totalitarians on that side of the isle who do want secret police and gulags. As regrettable as it may be I don't see any path for going from the status quo to something more socialist without the current crop of totalitarian jerks in the ruling class turning it into a 1984 dystopia (the technical, procedural and much of the precedent for said dystopia already exists) along the way.
  - bpyne 7y ago
    And the most efficient way to keep people from reflecting on their lives, realizing how far from their "ideal lives" they are.
- esoterica 7y ago
  And it’s still less toxic a hobby than being annoyingly smug on the internet.
  - mrosett 7y ago
    Ha! I’m going to file that line away.
  - alexandercrohde 7y ago
    A zinger.... except is this even remotely true? Buying bigger TVs every year and disposing of them in landfills (and sacrificing your quality of life to afford it) seems a bit more toxic than "being smug on the internet." Plus, isn't the remark itself exactly what it accuses others of... smug?
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    I doubt it's being smug on the internet that has brought us to the brink of a global ecological disaster.
    - maybeMaybeNacht 7y ago
      on the internet And yet, being smug everywhere else probably did.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Depends which social class and country are we talking about here its not as cut and dried as that.
apoptosis12 7y ago
Maybe its by design - give people too little time to live their lives that they come to depend on services and consumption thus perpetuating capitalism.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
This is exactly by design. It encourages consumerism and the idea of consuming your limited free time with entertainment and superficial activities. But it goes far beyond that. With limited free time people cannot develop political consciousness and drive social change. There are historical examples: most dictatorships go/went very far to keep people busy and preserve the status quo. Universities, on the other hand, has been often driving social change given that students usually have more free time and freedom to organize their time.
- bpyne 7y ago
  "Bread and circuses" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
- spoovy 7y ago
  It's a natural desire to work hard to improve your life, no government needed to design that. If anything modern liberal democracies have reduced the tendency to work constantly (compared to most of our history) by creating regular days off (weekends, bank holidays etc) and annual holidays. For me, the always-on thing is more a consequence of the internet/smartphone revolution, and I doubt DARPA, Berners-Lee, Apple etc al were all working in cahoots to prevent social change.
everdrive 7y ago
This is exactly correct. The more one overworks, the worse his impulse control becomes. After a long enough stretch of overwork (months, years) one can be transformed into something else entirely. Fat, drinking too much, angry at the internet. He could see it happening every day, and every day lose the fight to stress and easy relief.
- mjfl 7y ago
  I can’t think of any of the big founders that were fat alcoholics - bill gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, bezos? Pretty sure they all work all the time, as in no weekends, get emails at 11 pm every day, at least when they worked.
  - everdrive 7y ago
    Yes, absolutely. I apologize, I didn't mean to aim this at founders. I was just thinking about overwork in general, and its effects on people.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    Software/IT is full of people working crazy schedules to get their products out. The early days of ID software. They worked their day jobs and then worked nights/weekends to create their own games. The early days of eBay when Pierre Omidyar was up all night fixing the site as it crashed. People at Netscape sleeping under their desks so they didn't waste time driving to/from work.
  - chrstphrhrt 7y ago
    Musk had an overweight phase. I think he likes nice wine.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    There is a vast difference between being at the top of of the apparatus vs being enmeshed in it. A) The people you mention were essentially post scarcity long before they were household names. B) They had substantially more agency in their work than mid and low level workers. C) No one in their work life is akin to a “boss.” They have customers, advisors, peers, employees, investors, etc - no bosses.
bko 7y ago
I don't have a source, but I'm pretty sure that the people who enjoy what you call the most shallow/fast/addictive entertainment probably work the least. I don't think people that are unemployed (voluntarily or not) or work few hours enjoy many of those life enriching behaviors. Personally I find that those are most enjoyed by those who work a lot professionally, although not at the extreme end, and make time for it. [edit] Found a link suggesting that video game use is correlated with unemployment or working fewer hours. It's not clear whether those individuals are using it to fill time or are dropping out of the labor force to pursue more of these types of leisure activities. > They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice. https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-worl...
radcon 7y ago
I don't think it's just overwork that has this effect. Work, in general, along with the constant pressure to remain "employable" forces us to structure our lives in a way that leaves very little time and/or energy for other meaningful endeavors: > I begin with a simple-sounding question: at what point does a day’s work truly end? Whilst our jobs might contractually oblige us to work a certain amount of hours per day, it is clear that we do not simply step out of our workplaces and into a world of freedom. This was brought to light by Theodor Adorno in a short but poignant essay from the 1970s called ‘Free Time’. Adorno questioned the extent to which workers are truly autonomous in their time outside work, arguing that the covert aim of non-work time is simply to prepare people for the recommencement of work: free-time is not free at all, but a mere ‘continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life’. This is because it involves activities which often have a similar quality to work (looking at screens, doing chores), but also because more alienating or exhausting forms of work produce a powerful need for recuperation. By draining people’s physical and mental energies, work that is alienating ensures that much of the worker’s non-work time is spent winding down, retreating to escapist forms of entertainment, or consuming treats which compensate for the day’s travails. https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/free-time-pressures-employability-refusal-work/ https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/free-time-pressures-empl...

tunnuz 7y ago

Nicely said.

Sharlin 7y ago

Conveniently, consuming shiny things and lowest-common-denominator mass media is what the Western society very much encourages us to do. Work, consume, repeat.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
McWobbleston 7y ago
It's the most efficient way to extract value from us
- walrus01 7y ago
  When I was a teenager, old people told me that my political views would grow more conservative as I got older. If anything, as I've watched growing income inequality and the further concentration of wealth among the one percent, I can better appreciate the point Karl Marx was trying to get across to people.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Being conservative has little to do with consumption culture.
  - danlindley 7y ago
    I'd argue that rationale was based on a very different economic evironment to what we have now, and arguing that today, a failing to know and understand the different challenges that are faced by the very people they may empart this idea to.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    I was born in the USSR, where Marxist socialism was implemented: no significant private property (you own your clothes and furniture, but not your apartment, a car is borderline suspicious), and most certainly no private business ownership. Life was pretty miserable back then, if you ask me. Even in capitalist societies there are still places like that, with free healthcare, basic necessities available for everyone, guaranteed roof over your head, and even full employment. These are called prisons.
    - jahaja 7y ago
      It's a big problem that our current political imagination is so narrow to only allow the false dichotomy of either neo-liberalism or Stalinism. The number of top-down Stalinist within the general leftist movement is tiny.
      - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        Indeed. Since capitalism is "lots of smaller dictatorships(companies) with a set of rules for all", and the migration to communism was "get rid of the smaller dictatorships and make a nation-wide dictatorship". "Communism" ala USSR, North Korea, etc just moved the problem to a strictly worse area, and something you could not get away with. At least in capitalism, there are better and worse 'masters'.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        The modern democratic and republican parties are chock full of pro-totalitarian, pro-authoritarian, "pro-state control of people's lives" politicians (of course they're inconsistent and they'll say or vote the opposite when they are pandering to their base though). If the "modern socialist" types gained tons of traction tomorrow and became mainstream within the democratic party people like Feinstein and other authoritarians won't stop pushing regressive authoritarian policy. They'd just do it in a way that's sculpted to line up with the (newly) popular "socialist" sentiment. So the end result would be pretty darn Stalinist IMO. So yes, you're right that current socialists are generally not in favor of secret police and shipping undesirables to the gulag but you're also wrong because if socialism becomes popular it will include all the totalitarians on that side of the isle who do want secret police and gulags. As regrettable as it may be I don't see any path for going from the status quo to something more socialist without the current crop of totalitarian jerks in the ruling class turning it into a 1984 dystopia (the technical, procedural and much of the precedent for said dystopia already exists) along the way.
- bpyne 7y ago
  And the most efficient way to keep people from reflecting on their lives, realizing how far from their "ideal lives" they are.
esoterica 7y ago
And it’s still less toxic a hobby than being annoyingly smug on the internet.
- mrosett 7y ago
  Ha! I’m going to file that line away.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  A zinger.... except is this even remotely true? Buying bigger TVs every year and disposing of them in landfills (and sacrificing your quality of life to afford it) seems a bit more toxic than "being smug on the internet." Plus, isn't the remark itself exactly what it accuses others of... smug?
- Sharlin 7y ago
  I doubt it's being smug on the internet that has brought us to the brink of a global ecological disaster.
  - maybeMaybeNacht 7y ago
    on the internet And yet, being smug everywhere else probably did.
walshemj 7y ago
Depends which social class and country are we talking about here its not as cut and dried as that.

apoptosis12 7y ago

Maybe its by design - give people too little time to live their lives that they come to depend on services and consumption thus perpetuating capitalism.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

This is exactly by design. It encourages consumerism and the idea of consuming your limited free time with entertainment and superficial activities. But it goes far beyond that. With limited free time people cannot develop political consciousness and drive social change. There are historical examples: most dictatorships go/went very far to keep people busy and preserve the status quo. Universities, on the other hand, has been often driving social change given that students usually have more free time and freedom to organize their time.

bpyne 7y ago
"Bread and circuses" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
spoovy 7y ago
It's a natural desire to work hard to improve your life, no government needed to design that. If anything modern liberal democracies have reduced the tendency to work constantly (compared to most of our history) by creating regular days off (weekends, bank holidays etc) and annual holidays. For me, the always-on thing is more a consequence of the internet/smartphone revolution, and I doubt DARPA, Berners-Lee, Apple etc al were all working in cahoots to prevent social change.

everdrive 7y ago

This is exactly correct. The more one overworks, the worse his impulse control becomes. After a long enough stretch of overwork (months, years) one can be transformed into something else entirely. Fat, drinking too much, angry at the internet. He could see it happening every day, and every day lose the fight to stress and easy relief.

mjfl 7y ago
I can’t think of any of the big founders that were fat alcoholics - bill gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, bezos? Pretty sure they all work all the time, as in no weekends, get emails at 11 pm every day, at least when they worked.
- everdrive 7y ago
  Yes, absolutely. I apologize, I didn't mean to aim this at founders. I was just thinking about overwork in general, and its effects on people.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Software/IT is full of people working crazy schedules to get their products out. The early days of ID software. They worked their day jobs and then worked nights/weekends to create their own games. The early days of eBay when Pierre Omidyar was up all night fixing the site as it crashed. People at Netscape sleeping under their desks so they didn't waste time driving to/from work.
- chrstphrhrt 7y ago
  Musk had an overweight phase. I think he likes nice wine.
- pbourke 7y ago
  There is a vast difference between being at the top of of the apparatus vs being enmeshed in it. A) The people you mention were essentially post scarcity long before they were household names. B) They had substantially more agency in their work than mid and low level workers. C) No one in their work life is akin to a “boss.” They have customers, advisors, peers, employees, investors, etc - no bosses.

bko 7y ago

I don't have a source, but I'm pretty sure that the people who enjoy what you call the most shallow/fast/addictive entertainment probably work the least. I don't think people that are unemployed (voluntarily or not) or work few hours enjoy many of those life enriching behaviors. Personally I find that those are most enjoyed by those who work a lot professionally, although not at the extreme end, and make time for it. [edit] Found a link suggesting that video game use is correlated with unemployment or working fewer hours. It's not clear whether those individuals are using it to fill time or are dropping out of the labor force to pursue more of these types of leisure activities. > They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice. https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-worl...

radcon 7y ago

I don't think it's just overwork that has this effect. Work, in general, along with the constant pressure to remain "employable" forces us to structure our lives in a way that leaves very little time and/or energy for other meaningful endeavors: > I begin with a simple-sounding question: at what point does a day’s work truly end? Whilst our jobs might contractually oblige us to work a certain amount of hours per day, it is clear that we do not simply step out of our workplaces and into a world of freedom. This was brought to light by Theodor Adorno in a short but poignant essay from the 1970s called ‘Free Time’. Adorno questioned the extent to which workers are truly autonomous in their time outside work, arguing that the covert aim of non-work time is simply to prepare people for the recommencement of work: free-time is not free at all, but a mere ‘continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life’. This is because it involves activities which often have a similar quality to work (looking at screens, doing chores), but also because more alienating or exhausting forms of work produce a powerful need for recuperation. By draining people’s physical and mental energies, work that is alienating ensures that much of the worker’s non-work time is spent winding down, retreating to escapist forms of entertainment, or consuming treats which compensate for the day’s travails. https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/free-time-pressures-employability-refusal-work/ https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/free-time-pressures-empl...