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> The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. Not to mention most of our time. People nowadays spend far more time at work than

> The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. Not to mention most of our time. People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever.

magashna 7y ago
Than ever? Surely Americans in the industrial revolution worked longer.
mox1 7y ago
You think that today in 2019, we spend more time at "work" than at any other time in history? That's just false. Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6. You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?
- JackFr 7y ago
  And less of our time at work is spent actually working.
  - LandR 7y ago
    This might sound good in theory, but time spent at work not working can be soul destroying.
- arcadeparade 7y ago
  You're not thinking on a long enough timescale. Hunter gatherers only worked 10 hours a week :)
  - Balero 7y ago
    They only hunter/gathered for that long. How much time was spent in meetings, how much time preparing food, fixing clothes, patrolling territory, scouting things out, making home improvements etc. If the modern person only worked for food, then I think a few hours a week would suffice.
    - intuitionist 7y ago
      ah yes, meetings, that famous bane of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
      - badpun 7y ago
        I wonder if they have a scrum master, who tells everyone what to do, but no one has ever seen him hunting.
- dexwiz 7y ago
  Physically you are right. Mentally, maybe not. If you are in an information based job like writing or programming, then it’s very easy to carry your job around in your head. I may only program for a few hours a day, but the problems definitely come home with me. It takes a considerable amount of self awareness to both realize this and stop it.
  - toxik 7y ago
    This is definitely true. "Open-world" jobs are par for the course in the Western world, where deciding what you have to do is part of the job, along with predicting, strategizing, and reflecting. It is a lot more cognitively engaging and also heavy. Farming and mining certainly have aspects of this, but a majority of the work was drone work -- exactly the type of work to go first in automatization. What's left is necessarily cognitively difficult work.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Halve the working time of today by 50% and we would reach levels that could be called "not insane".
- bjourne 7y ago
  The situation in the late 19th century was a historical aberration and workers neither since nor previously worked that many hours. Note also that in that period, Western society was full of day laborers, hobos and other chronically underemployed people. That is how capitalists could force workers into working insane hours at low pay. Because if they didn't want to do it, then there were thousands of others that were willing to. And importantly, most women were not employed which they are now. Given these factors it is not certain that the average person worked harder in the 19th century than the average person does today. The average factory worker certainly did, but that is different. I don't get what is with these snarky replies all over Hacker News these days. His point was that people work a lot. Quarreling over whether some people some time during history has worked even more is missing it.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    Even 'unemployed' women worked really hard back then. Without electricity, all the washing, managing the home heater, cooking, cleaning tasks have to be done on muscle power alone. Doing a load of laundry on a hand washer and scrubbing board takes forever and is pretty brutal. So is getting up super early to put coal in the furnace (and then keeping it going all day every day). Running a stove you have to load with wood means starting really early. Churning butter by hand. Possibly grinding flour by hand. Making everyone's clothes by hand - when the sewing machine came out it made Singer incredibly rich because it saved so many women so many hours sewing their family's clothes by hand. Nearest extant comparison would probably be Amish women.
    - bjourne 7y ago
      Yes, that is why I wrote that women of that time were "not employed" not "not working". Household chores can be considered work, but that brings into question what is work and what is leisure? Raising kids is certainly a lot of work but it is also entirely optional so why isn't it leisure? arvinism however wrote "more time at work than ever" which can't mean anything other than hours in employment.
  - astura 7y ago
    There's no snark in that comment.
- tsss 7y ago
  The average farmer definitely worked less than 40 hours. During harvest season it was more than that no doubt but overall the time spent on work was less and more diverse. It was only with industrialization and capitalism that work took over such an enormous amount of our time. At the beginning of the 20th century, people fought back hard to get the amenities like 40h week and sick leave that make work bearable today. It certainly wasn't Henry Ford who introduced the 5 day work week. It was the workers who protested for it while people like Henry Ford sent strike breakers and police with machine guns to mow them down.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dahfizz 7y ago
> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. Do you have anything supporting this claim? The facts say otherwise: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours It's easy and fun to be pessimistic, but to claim that people today work more than ever is ludicrous.
lm28469 7y ago
> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. A few generations ago kids worked at 10, there were no weekly limit, no weekends, no vacations, no security, no form of compensation if you get injured/die while working, no pension, no sick leave &c. In first world countries we never worked so little for so much comfort. > By the act of 1892 one day in the week, not necessarily Sunday, had to be given for entire absence from work, in addition to eight recognized annual holidays > Children may not be employed in industrial work before 12 years, and then only 8 hours a day at work > The first attempt to secure legislation regulating factory employment related to the hours of labour, which were very long - from twelve to thirteen hours a day. > Boys of 13 may be employed in certain work underground, but under 16 may not be employed more than 8 hours in the 24 from bank to bank. A law of 1905 provided for miners a 9 hours' day and in 1907 an 8 hours' day from the foot of the entrance gallery back to the same point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law
- jdietrich 7y ago
  I don't think it's particularly helpful to compare the present day to the late 19th century. The fact that things used to be worse does not excuse the fact that things also used to be better; living standards for the average American have regressed in many ways since the 1970s, which should be a cause of urgent concern.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    lm28469 was responding to the previous poster's specific claim that we now work longer hours "than ever".
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    >living standards for the average American have regressed in many ways since the 1970s, With women's entry into the workforce plus the 1964 Hart-Cellar Act's lifting of immigration quotas the workforce more than doubled in the 70s. At that rate how was work compensation ever supposed to keep up? I'm not saying the trade-off wasn't worth it, but you can't 2-3x the labor pool and then pretend we don't know why wages decreased while competition for scare resources increased.
testvox 7y ago
Don't we spend less time at work than ever? Makes more sense to me that loneliness would be caused by too much free time rather than not enough.
ghostcluster 7y ago
> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. Average hours worked has gone down steadily over the last two centuries: > 1830 69.1 hours per week > 1880 60.7 > 1929 50.6 > 1988 42.4 > As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
BurningFrog 7y ago
People nowadays know less about history than ever.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
twoheadedboy 7y ago
I find it pretty concerning whenever I see someone's github page with tons of green squares on the bottom and top row. Why do people work so much on the weekends?

> The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. Not to mention most of our time. People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever.

magashna 7y ago

Than ever? Surely Americans in the industrial revolution worked longer.

mox1 7y ago

You think that today in 2019, we spend more time at "work" than at any other time in history? That's just false. Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6. You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?

JackFr 7y ago
And less of our time at work is spent actually working.
- LandR 7y ago
  This might sound good in theory, but time spent at work not working can be soul destroying.
arcadeparade 7y ago
You're not thinking on a long enough timescale. Hunter gatherers only worked 10 hours a week :)
- Balero 7y ago
  They only hunter/gathered for that long. How much time was spent in meetings, how much time preparing food, fixing clothes, patrolling territory, scouting things out, making home improvements etc. If the modern person only worked for food, then I think a few hours a week would suffice.
  - intuitionist 7y ago
    ah yes, meetings, that famous bane of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
    - badpun 7y ago
      I wonder if they have a scrum master, who tells everyone what to do, but no one has ever seen him hunting.
dexwiz 7y ago
Physically you are right. Mentally, maybe not. If you are in an information based job like writing or programming, then it’s very easy to carry your job around in your head. I may only program for a few hours a day, but the problems definitely come home with me. It takes a considerable amount of self awareness to both realize this and stop it.
- toxik 7y ago
  This is definitely true. "Open-world" jobs are par for the course in the Western world, where deciding what you have to do is part of the job, along with predicting, strategizing, and reflecting. It is a lot more cognitively engaging and also heavy. Farming and mining certainly have aspects of this, but a majority of the work was drone work -- exactly the type of work to go first in automatization. What's left is necessarily cognitively difficult work.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Halve the working time of today by 50% and we would reach levels that could be called "not insane".
bjourne 7y ago
The situation in the late 19th century was a historical aberration and workers neither since nor previously worked that many hours. Note also that in that period, Western society was full of day laborers, hobos and other chronically underemployed people. That is how capitalists could force workers into working insane hours at low pay. Because if they didn't want to do it, then there were thousands of others that were willing to. And importantly, most women were not employed which they are now. Given these factors it is not certain that the average person worked harder in the 19th century than the average person does today. The average factory worker certainly did, but that is different. I don't get what is with these snarky replies all over Hacker News these days. His point was that people work a lot. Quarreling over whether some people some time during history has worked even more is missing it.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Even 'unemployed' women worked really hard back then. Without electricity, all the washing, managing the home heater, cooking, cleaning tasks have to be done on muscle power alone. Doing a load of laundry on a hand washer and scrubbing board takes forever and is pretty brutal. So is getting up super early to put coal in the furnace (and then keeping it going all day every day). Running a stove you have to load with wood means starting really early. Churning butter by hand. Possibly grinding flour by hand. Making everyone's clothes by hand - when the sewing machine came out it made Singer incredibly rich because it saved so many women so many hours sewing their family's clothes by hand. Nearest extant comparison would probably be Amish women.
  - bjourne 7y ago
    Yes, that is why I wrote that women of that time were "not employed" not "not working". Household chores can be considered work, but that brings into question what is work and what is leisure? Raising kids is certainly a lot of work but it is also entirely optional so why isn't it leisure? arvinism however wrote "more time at work than ever" which can't mean anything other than hours in employment.
- astura 7y ago
  There's no snark in that comment.
tsss 7y ago
The average farmer definitely worked less than 40 hours. During harvest season it was more than that no doubt but overall the time spent on work was less and more diverse. It was only with industrialization and capitalism that work took over such an enormous amount of our time. At the beginning of the 20th century, people fought back hard to get the amenities like 40h week and sick leave that make work bearable today. It certainly wasn't Henry Ford who introduced the 5 day work week. It was the workers who protested for it while people like Henry Ford sent strike breakers and police with machine guns to mow them down.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dahfizz 7y ago

> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. Do you have anything supporting this claim? The facts say otherwise: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours It's easy and fun to be pessimistic, but to claim that people today work more than ever is ludicrous.

lm28469 7y ago

> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. A few generations ago kids worked at 10, there were no weekly limit, no weekends, no vacations, no security, no form of compensation if you get injured/die while working, no pension, no sick leave &c. In first world countries we never worked so little for so much comfort. > By the act of 1892 one day in the week, not necessarily Sunday, had to be given for entire absence from work, in addition to eight recognized annual holidays > Children may not be employed in industrial work before 12 years, and then only 8 hours a day at work > The first attempt to secure legislation regulating factory employment related to the hours of labour, which were very long - from twelve to thirteen hours a day. > Boys of 13 may be employed in certain work underground, but under 16 may not be employed more than 8 hours in the 24 from bank to bank. A law of 1905 provided for miners a 9 hours' day and in 1907 an 8 hours' day from the foot of the entrance gallery back to the same point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law

jdietrich 7y ago
I don't think it's particularly helpful to compare the present day to the late 19th century. The fact that things used to be worse does not excuse the fact that things also used to be better; living standards for the average American have regressed in many ways since the 1970s, which should be a cause of urgent concern.
- jlawson 7y ago
  lm28469 was responding to the previous poster's specific claim that we now work longer hours "than ever".
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  >living standards for the average American have regressed in many ways since the 1970s, With women's entry into the workforce plus the 1964 Hart-Cellar Act's lifting of immigration quotas the workforce more than doubled in the 70s. At that rate how was work compensation ever supposed to keep up? I'm not saying the trade-off wasn't worth it, but you can't 2-3x the labor pool and then pretend we don't know why wages decreased while competition for scare resources increased.

testvox 7y ago

Don't we spend less time at work than ever? Makes more sense to me that loneliness would be caused by too much free time rather than not enough.

ghostcluster 7y ago

> People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever. Average hours worked has gone down steadily over the last two centuries: > 1830 69.1 hours per week > 1880 60.7 > 1929 50.6 > 1988 42.4 > As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

BurningFrog 7y ago

People nowadays know less about history than ever.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

twoheadedboy 7y ago

I find it pretty concerning whenever I see someone's github page with tons of green squares on the bottom and top row. Why do people work so much on the weekends?