15 ms·

Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a toll on society

245 points by robtherobber 7y ago

michaelbrooks 7y ago
And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country. I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.
- ghego1 7y ago
  Be aware that if you live for tomorrow and that tomorrow never comes, you might end up regretting not having lived for today :-)
  - haskellandchill 7y ago
    yea and if you live for today you could be in the street tomorrow
    - kibwen 7y ago
      Though sadly there are a fair number of folks who both live for tomorrow and also fear ending up in the street tomorrow.
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  Ut's not true for every country. I live in a socialist state, albeit the earned fought-out ameneties are at risk. I have time to see my family and friends as I can, to a certain extend, trust they will be available when I am off work. Vote for change!
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    > I live in a socialist state I would bet you do not, but out of curiosity, what state is that?
    - jhoechtl 7y ago
      Austria. While 'socialist' is certainly no longer true, the labour security we have has been errected during the 70ies and 80ies, when the socialist party reigned with absolute majority.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I wonder how much of it is life phase related essentially. Spending less time with friends when growing up and having responsibilities and being pulled elsewhere was a part of forgotten tropes like the romantic friendship.
- monkeydust 7y ago
  Very true, here in UK. Spend more time chatting to friends in WhatsApp then meeting them... Hard to sync diaries with work, kids, commitments.
Porthos9K 7y ago
They aren't your friends. They're your competitors. Welcome to capitalism. This is the sort of thing leftists are talking about when they talk about atomization.
- env123 7y ago
  Hence, the rise of individualism and then, narcissism
- CalRobert 7y ago
  I see you're greyed, but I think you're getting at a deeper point. There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. There are only so many places in good schools, whether it be good public districts or private (fee-paying) schools. You now have to compete with your friends for places there. The introduction of fake scarcities was needed when we discovered how to produce more wealth than we could possibly actually need (about 280k per person in the US, per recent NYtimes article). This way you still work to enrich capital owners instead of enjoying the fruits of your labour.
  - isoskeles 7y ago
    > There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. If it's illegal to build new homes, that's certainly not a free market or "capitalism."
    - NoGravitas 7y ago
      Capitalism is government by the owners of capital; under capitalism markets are normally distorted to the benefit of owners of capital (sometimes individually, sometimes as a class). The state is one tool used for this.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    tbh I don't think this is very compelling. my coworkers are certainly my competition for raises/promotions, but the company is large and successful enough that everyone I'm friendly with could get a raise and there would still be money to give me one too. outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment. the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.
legitster 7y ago
I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white) people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the Beaver family. Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)
  - Vysero 7y ago
    "I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat" - I share this sentiment but often wonder if it will be the same then as it would be now. I know that time passes more quickly when you are older. That and memories and events become less significant. Perhaps the wise move would be to make as many good memories as possible now while I am younger.
    - non-entity 7y ago
      And I somewhat agree, but at the same time, it feels as if I've missed making prerequisite good memories that most people have and that makes it hard to make good new ones. Without any family or friends it just makes sense to put all my time and effort into takinh my career in a direction I (hope) I'll enjoy so that I can salvage at least some resemblance of satisfaction with life.
      - harshalizee 7y ago
        that's a very expensive and risky bet to make.
ptah 7y ago
productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what went wrong
- CalRobert 7y ago
  You earn far more by working a lot more. You use it to pay for housing, education, and healthcare. You are in competition with your peers, who also have increased productivity, so it's a wash at best.
  - war1025 7y ago
    What a sad way of looking at the world. The only way to actually win is to step off the damn hedonic treadmill.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > You are in competition with your peers I am? I honestly don't care what they do, how much they make, etc; if they are doing better (financially), great for them. Myself? I'm what I call "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - I have no unsecured debt, I have no car payments, I use my credit cards wisely and pay off the amount owed monthly if not weekly. The only debt I have is my mortgage, and honestly I could pay it off in full tomorrow if I wanted to. Many of so-called peers who might be making more, aren't anywhere near as lucky. Some of them I know struggle and live paycheck-to-paycheck. I used to be there myself. I can empathize with the situation. Buying a house changed all of that. My wife and I changed our financial situation completely. It took a few years of ramen and beans, but we did it. Anyone can do it - but the first step is to stop competing with your peers, and stop trying to "keep up with the Jones". In the end, when you're dead, you're dead. Nobody is going to say "well, s/he had more than their neighbor/peer over there, at least" - and the fact is, even if they do, you'll be dead; you won't care.
    - blockmarker 7y ago
      Not parent commenter, but you are competing. You might not compete for the nicest car, but you are competing for housing, healthcare and education. Houses aren't expensive because they are built with gold, but because everyone needs one.
CalRobert 7y ago
This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in France on a Sunday, for instance). If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.
- MrMorden 7y ago
  If it's a good thing to ban retail from opening on Sunday, it's also a good thing to do the same to restaurants, transit, and everything excepting emergency services. The UK only restricts retail over 280 m^2, and only in England and Wales—a Scot-lead UK government blocked deregulation in 2006, and more recently Scots did it again. France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest (at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else will lose more control.
joewrong 7y ago
give them a call
Reschi 7y ago
I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just life. TLDR: man up
- sudosteph 7y ago
  The world is worthless. "Everything you got" is usually not enough. Good people are hard to come by. Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. That is life. Or at least a life that is worth living.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bonniemuffin 7y ago
I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine. The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them. Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.
- nikanj 7y ago
  In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook. Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
  - mrec 7y ago
    There seems to be an obvious opportunity for upscale takeout food delivery here. Much easier to split a bill than cooking chores.
    - kcolford 7y ago
      I'd even say aggregate the food costs by offering one big meal for the group (instead of individual meals like a restaurant). As long as you can select by dietary restrictions it would work for most people.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit. We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.
matwood 7y ago
People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you genuinely want to interact with. I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  >>>I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non-optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and interests. I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when they are in meat-space.
  - matwood 7y ago
    This is a great point I hadn't considered. Interacting with people you do not agree with not only causes one to learn to compromise, but also softens extreme viewpoints.
cryoshon 7y ago
>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week. what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this. after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes. the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends. This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff. Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility. Its been much less stressful.
  - johnsimer 7y ago
    I'm about to make this transition I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life
ghostcluster 7y ago
If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone down steadily in the US over the past 200 years: > 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/ In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  Yeah but for what quality of life? Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up. So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same standard of living has increased. So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.
  - fourseventy 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure the standard of living in 2019 is higher than in 1830
  - war1025 7y ago
    I am never sure how to take these "standard of living" claims. In many ways, the world we live in today is nothing like the one that existed 50/60 years ago.
  - akavi 7y ago
    > wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up ...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have at worst been flat for certain sectors. The vast majority of people have seen inflation adjused wage increases.
sharadov 7y ago
Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back. The Bay area seems like everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
  The downside of LA is that everybody is rather spread out, separated from each other by long commutes in traffic through the sprawl. It's a tough city to make new friends.
  - sharadov 7y ago
    I agree, LA has no center. But if you live in either - Los Feliz/Eagle Rock, Sherman Oaks/Studio City, West Holywood, the beach cities, you can make friends who are local.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense, much of the same applies. The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME. Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.
derision 7y ago
I see my friends all the time. We are very busy, but we make time. If you care, you can make time.
- war1025 7y ago
  A thing we've found very helpful is if something ends up working out well time / place-wise, just suggest doing the same thing again next week. It's like building any new habit. You have to be very intentional about it to start with, then it becomes easy.
majos 7y ago
Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per day [1]? A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month. Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption
- kcolford 7y ago
  Yes there is overlap, but it's not a predictable overlap and there's no easy way to find out if your time off overlaps with someone else without first reaching out to them (which is a whole other barrier). It's so much easier to turn on netflix or whatever. If it wasn't so easy to do that then maybe people would go through the other hurdle to test if someone they know is available.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I'm not sure what all is wrapped into "TV" in today's numbers, but average household watching as been, to my way of thinking, astoundingly high forever. It was 7 or 8 hours a day going back to the 70s and 80s. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...
  - intopieces 7y ago
    Is this statistic for the total hours watched each person or the whole family, meaning 4 people watching 1 hour of TV is 4 hours of viewing? Because I don’t see how anyone, even people who don’t sleep much, could have 8 hours a day for television. That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.
    - ghaff 7y ago
rmah 7y ago
LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always been this way.
- ghaff 7y ago
  My first suspicion upon reading this was that some writer or editor observed that they weren't getting together with friends as much as they used to and spun a story with some plausible theories and anecdotes out of it. The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random nights and weekends. I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be convinced.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    No, I come from a country where having friends is not strange at any age. The US are weird and can't put my finger on it but I never felt so detached. I will definitely leave when I'm done working, I hate the lifestyle here, it's so hollow and boring.
    - solean 7y ago
      The US is a big place. You would have a different experience in Georgia than you would in SF.
      - luckydata 7y ago
        I lived in California and Michigan. In most of the ways that matter it's not that different.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Nah. My father and grandfather's generation had regular community and social groups to attend - usually very regularly. Lions Club, Rotary, Townswomen's Guilds, Women's Institutes, Working Men's clubs - often tied to the ship yard or other major works. Dozens of others, some tied more to place, church or community than others, but all roughly performing some combination of social and doing worthy works. They were hooked into the fabric of society enough that they contributed to social care, elder care, welfare, special needs and a whole selection of other roles that modern government have placed on the individual. Spun as giving "choice", the intent was to remove that bedrock foundation. The removal of that foundation was as much part of 80s monetarism/neoliberalism as deregulation or privatisation. We gained individualism and private everything, and lost all the community resources that glued those individuals together. Someone inevitably mentions Bowling Alone in these threads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
olah_1 7y ago
Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous, but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.
BadassFractal 7y ago
On that note, any hobbies / pastimes that you're passionate about that actually lead to more time with friends and new serendipitous connections?
pastor_elm 7y ago
This article misses a fundamental point. Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc. But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  >>>But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort. How much of that is due to demographic changes in the Western professional class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure. https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-bars-thriving https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-ba... https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social-issues/metoo-dealmaking-escort-bars-thrives-corporate-east-asia-including-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769
rayiner 7y ago
> Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name. What a remarkable understatement.
bettyx1138 7y ago
i work a predictable 40 hours a week schedule but it's corporate, conformist malaise that's killing me.
jjpwojwpwf 7y ago
Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving, I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that myself. Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends? That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  This is an example of how we are seeing the limits of our Spiral Dynamics stage orange societal systems. In order to remedy these issues we'll have to evolve into a stage green society and it will be fought violently by red/orange stage people like Trump. It will be painful but necessary in order to survive and rescue the ecology of the planet from the consequences of the prosperity that stage orange ushered in.
  - jjpwojwpwf 7y ago
    I'll openly admit that I am an annoying pessimist, but I don't think the solution is going to come in the form of anything that a book from 1995 could possibly recognize as progress. To be blunt, what I mean is that a lot of problems we have nowadays come from the mere existence of modern technology, not exclusively from just the way people live. It's a bit hard for me to admit because I used to be an avid technologist (and am currently employed as a computer engineer), but it's gets harder and harder to deny everyday. No one in the world gets to choose what technology is the next logical step, and the decision to pursue its development is ultimately an arms race with the entire world as competitors. It is just not possible for any philosophy, economic system, or culture to change that fact. The good side-effects are inseparable from the bad. If you have nuclear energy, you have atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. If you have fast computer networking, you have on-demand entertainment and surveillance networks. If you can store information forever, you can instantly know someone's worst act and they can remember yours.

245 points by robtherobber 7y ago

And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country. I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.

ghego1 7y ago
Be aware that if you live for tomorrow and that tomorrow never comes, you might end up regretting not having lived for today :-)
- haskellandchill 7y ago
  yea and if you live for today you could be in the street tomorrow
  - kibwen 7y ago
    Though sadly there are a fair number of folks who both live for tomorrow and also fear ending up in the street tomorrow.
jhoechtl 7y ago
Ut's not true for every country. I live in a socialist state, albeit the earned fought-out ameneties are at risk. I have time to see my family and friends as I can, to a certain extend, trust they will be available when I am off work. Vote for change!
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > I live in a socialist state I would bet you do not, but out of curiosity, what state is that?
  - jhoechtl 7y ago
    Austria. While 'socialist' is certainly no longer true, the labour security we have has been errected during the 70ies and 80ies, when the socialist party reigned with absolute majority.
Nasrudith 7y ago
I wonder how much of it is life phase related essentially. Spending less time with friends when growing up and having responsibilities and being pulled elsewhere was a part of forgotten tropes like the romantic friendship.
monkeydust 7y ago
Very true, here in UK. Spend more time chatting to friends in WhatsApp then meeting them... Hard to sync diaries with work, kids, commitments.

Porthos9K 7y ago

They aren't your friends. They're your competitors. Welcome to capitalism. This is the sort of thing leftists are talking about when they talk about atomization.

env123 7y ago
Hence, the rise of individualism and then, narcissism
CalRobert 7y ago
I see you're greyed, but I think you're getting at a deeper point. There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. There are only so many places in good schools, whether it be good public districts or private (fee-paying) schools. You now have to compete with your friends for places there. The introduction of fake scarcities was needed when we discovered how to produce more wealth than we could possibly actually need (about 280k per person in the US, per recent NYtimes article). This way you still work to enrich capital owners instead of enjoying the fruits of your labour.
- isoskeles 7y ago
  > There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. If it's illegal to build new homes, that's certainly not a free market or "capitalism."
  - NoGravitas 7y ago
    Capitalism is government by the owners of capital; under capitalism markets are normally distorted to the benefit of owners of capital (sometimes individually, sometimes as a class). The state is one tool used for this.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  tbh I don't think this is very compelling. my coworkers are certainly my competition for raises/promotions, but the company is large and successful enough that everyone I'm friendly with could get a raise and there would still be money to give me one too. outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment. the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.

legitster 7y ago

I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white) people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the Beaver family. Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.

non-entity 7y ago
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)
- Vysero 7y ago
  "I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat" - I share this sentiment but often wonder if it will be the same then as it would be now. I know that time passes more quickly when you are older. That and memories and events become less significant. Perhaps the wise move would be to make as many good memories as possible now while I am younger.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    And I somewhat agree, but at the same time, it feels as if I've missed making prerequisite good memories that most people have and that makes it hard to make good new ones. Without any family or friends it just makes sense to put all my time and effort into takinh my career in a direction I (hope) I'll enjoy so that I can salvage at least some resemblance of satisfaction with life.
    - harshalizee 7y ago
      that's a very expensive and risky bet to make.

ptah 7y ago

productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what went wrong

CalRobert 7y ago
You earn far more by working a lot more. You use it to pay for housing, education, and healthcare. You are in competition with your peers, who also have increased productivity, so it's a wash at best.
- war1025 7y ago
  What a sad way of looking at the world. The only way to actually win is to step off the damn hedonic treadmill.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > You are in competition with your peers I am? I honestly don't care what they do, how much they make, etc; if they are doing better (financially), great for them. Myself? I'm what I call "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - I have no unsecured debt, I have no car payments, I use my credit cards wisely and pay off the amount owed monthly if not weekly. The only debt I have is my mortgage, and honestly I could pay it off in full tomorrow if I wanted to. Many of so-called peers who might be making more, aren't anywhere near as lucky. Some of them I know struggle and live paycheck-to-paycheck. I used to be there myself. I can empathize with the situation. Buying a house changed all of that. My wife and I changed our financial situation completely. It took a few years of ramen and beans, but we did it. Anyone can do it - but the first step is to stop competing with your peers, and stop trying to "keep up with the Jones". In the end, when you're dead, you're dead. Nobody is going to say "well, s/he had more than their neighbor/peer over there, at least" - and the fact is, even if they do, you'll be dead; you won't care.
  - blockmarker 7y ago
    Not parent commenter, but you are competing. You might not compete for the nicest car, but you are competing for housing, healthcare and education. Houses aren't expensive because they are built with gold, but because everyone needs one.

CalRobert 7y ago

This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in France on a Sunday, for instance). If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.

MrMorden 7y ago
If it's a good thing to ban retail from opening on Sunday, it's also a good thing to do the same to restaurants, transit, and everything excepting emergency services. The UK only restricts retail over 280 m^2, and only in England and Wales—a Scot-lead UK government blocked deregulation in 2006, and more recently Scots did it again. France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest (at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else will lose more control.

joewrong 7y ago

give them a call

Reschi 7y ago

I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just life. TLDR: man up

sudosteph 7y ago
The world is worthless. "Everything you got" is usually not enough. Good people are hard to come by. Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. That is life. Or at least a life that is worth living.

deleted 7y ago

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bonniemuffin 7y ago

I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine. The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them. Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.

nikanj 7y ago
In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook. Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
- mrec 7y ago
  There seems to be an obvious opportunity for upscale takeout food delivery here. Much easier to split a bill than cooking chores.
  - kcolford 7y ago
    I'd even say aggregate the food costs by offering one big meal for the group (instead of individual meals like a restaurant). As long as you can select by dietary restrictions it would work for most people.
  - leetcrew 7y ago

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago

I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit. We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.

matwood 7y ago

People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you genuinely want to interact with. I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.

CapricornNoble 7y ago
>>>I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non-optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and interests. I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when they are in meat-space.
- matwood 7y ago
  This is a great point I hadn't considered. Interacting with people you do not agree with not only causes one to learn to compromise, but also softens extreme viewpoints.

cryoshon 7y ago

>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week. what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this. after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes. the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.

dkersten 7y ago
Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends. This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff. Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility. Its been much less stressful.
- johnsimer 7y ago
  I'm about to make this transition I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life

ghostcluster 7y ago

If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone down steadily in the US over the past 200 years: > 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/ In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.

nickthemagicman 7y ago
Yeah but for what quality of life? Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up. So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same standard of living has increased. So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.
- fourseventy 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the standard of living in 2019 is higher than in 1830
- war1025 7y ago
  I am never sure how to take these "standard of living" claims. In many ways, the world we live in today is nothing like the one that existed 50/60 years ago.
- akavi 7y ago
  > wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up ...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have at worst been flat for certain sectors. The vast majority of people have seen inflation adjused wage increases.

sharadov 7y ago

Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back. The Bay area seems like everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
The downside of LA is that everybody is rather spread out, separated from each other by long commutes in traffic through the sprawl. It's a tough city to make new friends.
- sharadov 7y ago
  I agree, LA has no center. But if you live in either - Los Feliz/Eagle Rock, Sherman Oaks/Studio City, West Holywood, the beach cities, you can make friends who are local.
wutbrodo 7y ago
For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense, much of the same applies. The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME. Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.

derision 7y ago

I see my friends all the time. We are very busy, but we make time. If you care, you can make time.

war1025 7y ago
A thing we've found very helpful is if something ends up working out well time / place-wise, just suggest doing the same thing again next week. It's like building any new habit. You have to be very intentional about it to start with, then it becomes easy.

majos 7y ago

Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per day [1]? A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month. Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption

kcolford 7y ago
Yes there is overlap, but it's not a predictable overlap and there's no easy way to find out if your time off overlaps with someone else without first reaching out to them (which is a whole other barrier). It's so much easier to turn on netflix or whatever. If it wasn't so easy to do that then maybe people would go through the other hurdle to test if someone they know is available.
ghaff 7y ago
I'm not sure what all is wrapped into "TV" in today's numbers, but average household watching as been, to my way of thinking, astoundingly high forever. It was 7 or 8 hours a day going back to the 70s and 80s. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...
- intopieces 7y ago
  Is this statistic for the total hours watched each person or the whole family, meaning 4 people watching 1 hour of TV is 4 hours of viewing? Because I don’t see how anyone, even people who don’t sleep much, could have 8 hours a day for television. That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.
  - ghaff 7y ago

rmah 7y ago

LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always been this way.

ghaff 7y ago
My first suspicion upon reading this was that some writer or editor observed that they weren't getting together with friends as much as they used to and spun a story with some plausible theories and anecdotes out of it. The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random nights and weekends. I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be convinced.
- luckydata 7y ago
  No, I come from a country where having friends is not strange at any age. The US are weird and can't put my finger on it but I never felt so detached. I will definitely leave when I'm done working, I hate the lifestyle here, it's so hollow and boring.
  - solean 7y ago
    The US is a big place. You would have a different experience in Georgia than you would in SF.
    - luckydata 7y ago
      I lived in California and Michigan. In most of the ways that matter it's not that different.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Nah. My father and grandfather's generation had regular community and social groups to attend - usually very regularly. Lions Club, Rotary, Townswomen's Guilds, Women's Institutes, Working Men's clubs - often tied to the ship yard or other major works. Dozens of others, some tied more to place, church or community than others, but all roughly performing some combination of social and doing worthy works. They were hooked into the fabric of society enough that they contributed to social care, elder care, welfare, special needs and a whole selection of other roles that modern government have placed on the individual. Spun as giving "choice", the intent was to remove that bedrock foundation. The removal of that foundation was as much part of 80s monetarism/neoliberalism as deregulation or privatisation. We gained individualism and private everything, and lost all the community resources that glued those individuals together. Someone inevitably mentions Bowling Alone in these threads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

olah_1 7y ago

Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous, but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.

BadassFractal 7y ago

On that note, any hobbies / pastimes that you're passionate about that actually lead to more time with friends and new serendipitous connections?

pastor_elm 7y ago

This article misses a fundamental point. Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc. But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.

CapricornNoble 7y ago
>>>But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort. How much of that is due to demographic changes in the Western professional class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure. https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-bars-thriving https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-ba... https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social-issues/metoo-dealmaking-escort-bars-thrives-corporate-east-asia-including-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769

rayiner 7y ago

> Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name. What a remarkable understatement.

bettyx1138 7y ago

i work a predictable 40 hours a week schedule but it's corporate, conformist malaise that's killing me.

jjpwojwpwf 7y ago

Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving, I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that myself. Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends? That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.

mikelyons 7y ago
This is an example of how we are seeing the limits of our Spiral Dynamics stage orange societal systems. In order to remedy these issues we'll have to evolve into a stage green society and it will be fought violently by red/orange stage people like Trump. It will be painful but necessary in order to survive and rescue the ecology of the planet from the consequences of the prosperity that stage orange ushered in.
- jjpwojwpwf 7y ago
  I'll openly admit that I am an annoying pessimist, but I don't think the solution is going to come in the form of anything that a book from 1995 could possibly recognize as progress. To be blunt, what I mean is that a lot of problems we have nowadays come from the mere existence of modern technology, not exclusively from just the way people live. It's a bit hard for me to admit because I used to be an avid technologist (and am currently employed as a computer engineer), but it's gets harder and harder to deny everyday. No one in the world gets to choose what technology is the next logical step, and the decision to pursue its development is ultimately an arms race with the entire world as competitors. It is just not possible for any philosophy, economic system, or culture to change that fact. The good side-effects are inseparable from the bad. If you have nuclear energy, you have atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. If you have fast computer networking, you have on-demand entertainment and surveillance networks. If you can store information forever, you can instantly know someone's worst act and they can remember yours.