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I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reali

I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone. 2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so far removed from their work. Trying to combine work and life is a natural thing, because people used to be tied up in it. Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this. I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. The solution to burnout at work is to create greater separation between work and home. But the problem itself is that we even need to do this. People can't live to enjoy what they do any more. You need to trade the majority of your waking hours for money you need to live. And when you do live, you're dreading returning to work and feeling burnout anyway. How depressing. This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health. Issues will be resolved faster. Nobody wants to be constantly angry in their own home. So if you're angry all the time while WFH, maybe you'll be more likely to look elsewhere. Taking breaks from work while at home is so much more refreshing. I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this.

jacobolus 6y ago
> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate of maternal death in childbirth (play 5+ rounds of not-quite-russian-roulette and the odds get pretty grim). Starvation and disease were ubiquitous. Many people suffered some now-trivial injury and ended up as lifelong cripples. The work was literally backbreaking and elderly people’s (i.e. >50 years old) bodies were just wrecked after a career of hard manual labor, assuming they lived that long at all. People’s indoor time was spent in small dark rooms with an open hearth worse than the worst second-hand cigarette smoke you can possibly find, and unbelievably uncomfortable beds. In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) and everyone was slightly malnourished, especially in the winter. People generally just shat outside near their houses and hoped the dogs would take care of it. If they wanted water (for drinking, bathing, ...) they’d have to carry it on their heads/backs from the nearest well or stream; water is very heavy. People had to make literally everything in an extremely labor-intensive way from scratch: clothes, food, housing, furniture, toys, tools, etc. Raising sheep (or finding some other fiber) and then carding the wool, spinning the wool, weaving every piece of fabric on a hand loom, sewing fabric into clothes takes unbelievable amounts of human time. Making a small hut by hand takes weeks if not months of work (and the result is usually drafty, leaky, and not very comfortable). Making bread by hand including growing the grain and grinding it is nearly a full time job for everyone in the society. If for whatever reason you were different from the expected norms (or just got unlucky and crossed the wrong gossipy neighbor) the rumors about you would mercilessly destroy your social life, and possibly result in exile or death if neighbors decided you were (e.g.) a witch. The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits. Etc. There’s a reason that the world has now experienced several centuries of dramatic migration away from rural peasant farming and toward horribly exploitative urban factory labor.
- pault 6y ago
  GP is talking about pre-WWII civilization, not medieval serfdom.
  - jholman 6y ago
    @Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII". I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides. And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.
    - Thorentis 6y ago
      I did indeed have medieval serfs and particular feudal society in mind in my comment, and meant 500-600 years ago by "a few". I probbaly should have said "several". The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.
      - jacobolus 6y ago
        The feudal system (summary: rule by gangs of heavily armed thugs who force their local peasants to work by threatening to kill them otherwise, and take whatever liberties with them they like, including theft, kidnapping, rape, murder, ...) is given a “bad rap” because is was and is horrendously exploitative, leading to very bad outcomes for nearly everyone. It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.
  - bildung 6y ago
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. Division of labor is a tragedy. In the long run, it destroys the soul.
- fjeifisjf 6y ago
  And non-division of labor starves the body of actual food, shelter, and medicine.
stonedartist 6y ago
>I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this. This is the best way to put it! It's all make believe and facade. As naive as this sounds, we have to separate our work time and personal time. I don't know if that means we should have dual personalities akin to having different themes/profiles on phones, or we should have a clear separation of activities, but without one, is what leads to OPs path, and I have been there.
seer 6y ago
Anecdotally, the best professional experience in my 15+ career in tech was one startup. There the founders were very into doing “work-life harmony” instead of “work-life balance”. They made a point to have their friends meet your friends and each colleagues’s friends. Our partners and spouses knew each other. There was a big push to make sure your work is not simply something that you work and leave in the office, but that you’re part of the tribe. They genuinely cared. It was an incredible experience. Everyone was very passionate. The company grew in revenue 1000%. Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there. I’m obviously massively oversimplifying here and there were more factors, but the feeling of belonging was very real. And I know it was not just me as we have ex-colleagues gatherings from time to time and the sentiment is shared.
- fjeifisjf 6y ago
  That sounds like a work cult. We're all these families still your friends after leaving the company?
  - seer 6y ago
    Yeah I admit it was a little bit cultish. Exactly what my partner complained of when I joined the startup. But as time went by it became a lot better. I mean real cults short-circuit normal human tribal behavior for their own survival. And we usually consider it bad as the stuff the cult demands usually go against the society at large. But in my case it was a rather productive and a moderately lucrative enterprise for all involved. Its just that instead of “oh honey your off to work see ya in 8hours” it was more “oh say hi to this and that for me” kinda thing. Just more human all around. Anyway to answer your question - yeah we do stay in touch with some, not all of course.
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  >Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there. Got a little essay on that: https://realminority.wordpress.com/ https://realminority.wordpress.com/
watwut 6y ago
> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. I always wonder where and when exactly when people say things like that. Because whatever period I look at, there were wast groups of people who did not lived like this happy ideal.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  It is like that right now in many small villages in Italy, Spain, Germany, and possibly other places I haven't visited. This overwhelming sense of anonymity is in my opinion typical for US suburbs and US mega shopping malls. Most other countries have smaller and more intimate town squares, optimized for waking rather than driving.
  - watwut 6y ago
    They have huge unemployment.
ozim 6y ago
Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field. Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror. You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.
- addHocker 6y ago
  Anxiety is just a normal feeling, if you are a animal out in the wild.
KineticLensman 6y ago
> This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health. Alternatively, it extends the reach of companies further into the home environment, and may exacerbate the existing trend for people not to switch off, which in turn makes it harder to achieve a good life-work balance. Imagine having a pressurised call-centre type role from home. Some people may feel greater pressure to appear 'corporate' in the home environment, others might not mind their kids or cats interrupting a Zoom meeting. Not everyone can create a suitable WFH environment in a nice spare room. Whether this actually happens depends on corporate culture, the personalities and goals of the managers and employees, whether a crunch is on, and many other factors. But I'm not convinced that a tighter integration between work and home is necessarily always going to be a positive, from a mental health perspective.
- 101404 6y ago
  True. I am hoping for a trend where it becomes normal that a kid interrupts some business meeting, or you talk to your coworker or CEO in a video chat while they are cooking or folding clothes or something. Almost as if you were talking to real people.
  - fjeifisjf 6y ago
    Ask a parent (usually mother) what happens if they try to bring a kid to their (non coronavirus era) office because they don't have anyone else to care for the kid that day. Almost always completely unacceptable, for reasons ranging from arbitrary fake professionalism to lack of interest in setting up a support structure and expecting employees to sacrifice their personal lives for the company. I can only hope this "fake macho work persona" bubble-burst carries forward into post-covid.
    - 101404 6y ago
      I will try to overlook the sexism in your posting. In my company, its not umgingen that someone brings their kid to work. Be it to show the kids what they are doing all day, or because of some logistics thing, or daycare closed or whatnot. Never a problem. Also not uncommon to work from home for the same reason. And it's usually the men who do that (sorry if that doesn't fit into your stereotype).
fjeifisjf 6y ago
I take issue with this drone nonsense. If you are helping people for money you are doing good with your life. If you are comfortable at work and not being physically or emotionally abused, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "drone". Not everyone should be a celebrity changing the world in their own big way. Imagine if the whole world was being constantly reshaped in 7 billion ways!
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  I think what drone means isn't that working typical office jobs at megacorps is bad and you should rather go and try to change the world, but that you are very replaceable in such jobs and there's not really a personal connection and that is the issue.

jacobolus 6y ago

> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate of maternal death in childbirth (play 5+ rounds of not-quite-russian-roulette and the odds get pretty grim). Starvation and disease were ubiquitous. Many people suffered some now-trivial injury and ended up as lifelong cripples. The work was literally backbreaking and elderly people’s (i.e. >50 years old) bodies were just wrecked after a career of hard manual labor, assuming they lived that long at all. People’s indoor time was spent in small dark rooms with an open hearth worse than the worst second-hand cigarette smoke you can possibly find, and unbelievably uncomfortable beds. In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) and everyone was slightly malnourished, especially in the winter. People generally just shat outside near their houses and hoped the dogs would take care of it. If they wanted water (for drinking, bathing, ...) they’d have to carry it on their heads/backs from the nearest well or stream; water is very heavy. People had to make literally everything in an extremely labor-intensive way from scratch: clothes, food, housing, furniture, toys, tools, etc. Raising sheep (or finding some other fiber) and then carding the wool, spinning the wool, weaving every piece of fabric on a hand loom, sewing fabric into clothes takes unbelievable amounts of human time. Making a small hut by hand takes weeks if not months of work (and the result is usually drafty, leaky, and not very comfortable). Making bread by hand including growing the grain and grinding it is nearly a full time job for everyone in the society. If for whatever reason you were different from the expected norms (or just got unlucky and crossed the wrong gossipy neighbor) the rumors about you would mercilessly destroy your social life, and possibly result in exile or death if neighbors decided you were (e.g.) a witch. The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits. Etc. There’s a reason that the world has now experienced several centuries of dramatic migration away from rural peasant farming and toward horribly exploitative urban factory labor.

pault 6y ago
GP is talking about pre-WWII civilization, not medieval serfdom.
- jholman 6y ago
  @Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII". I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides. And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    I did indeed have medieval serfs and particular feudal society in mind in my comment, and meant 500-600 years ago by "a few". I probbaly should have said "several". The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      The feudal system (summary: rule by gangs of heavily armed thugs who force their local peasants to work by threatening to kill them otherwise, and take whatever liberties with them they like, including theft, kidnapping, rape, murder, ...) is given a “bad rap” because is was and is horrendously exploitative, leading to very bad outcomes for nearly everyone. It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.
- bildung 6y ago

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

> I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. Division of labor is a tragedy. In the long run, it destroys the soul.

fjeifisjf 6y ago
And non-division of labor starves the body of actual food, shelter, and medicine.

stonedartist 6y ago

>I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this. This is the best way to put it! It's all make believe and facade. As naive as this sounds, we have to separate our work time and personal time. I don't know if that means we should have dual personalities akin to having different themes/profiles on phones, or we should have a clear separation of activities, but without one, is what leads to OPs path, and I have been there.

seer 6y ago

Anecdotally, the best professional experience in my 15+ career in tech was one startup. There the founders were very into doing “work-life harmony” instead of “work-life balance”. They made a point to have their friends meet your friends and each colleagues’s friends. Our partners and spouses knew each other. There was a big push to make sure your work is not simply something that you work and leave in the office, but that you’re part of the tribe. They genuinely cared. It was an incredible experience. Everyone was very passionate. The company grew in revenue 1000%. Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there. I’m obviously massively oversimplifying here and there were more factors, but the feeling of belonging was very real. And I know it was not just me as we have ex-colleagues gatherings from time to time and the sentiment is shared.

fjeifisjf 6y ago
That sounds like a work cult. We're all these families still your friends after leaving the company?
- seer 6y ago
  Yeah I admit it was a little bit cultish. Exactly what my partner complained of when I joined the startup. But as time went by it became a lot better. I mean real cults short-circuit normal human tribal behavior for their own survival. And we usually consider it bad as the stuff the cult demands usually go against the society at large. But in my case it was a rather productive and a moderately lucrative enterprise for all involved. Its just that instead of “oh honey your off to work see ya in 8hours” it was more “oh say hi to this and that for me” kinda thing. Just more human all around. Anyway to answer your question - yeah we do stay in touch with some, not all of course.
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
>Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there. Got a little essay on that: https://realminority.wordpress.com/ https://realminority.wordpress.com/

watwut 6y ago

fxtentacle 6y ago
It is like that right now in many small villages in Italy, Spain, Germany, and possibly other places I haven't visited. This overwhelming sense of anonymity is in my opinion typical for US suburbs and US mega shopping malls. Most other countries have smaller and more intimate town squares, optimized for waking rather than driving.
- watwut 6y ago
  They have huge unemployment.

ozim 6y ago

Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field. Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror. You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.

addHocker 6y ago
Anxiety is just a normal feeling, if you are a animal out in the wild.

KineticLensman 6y ago

> This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health. Alternatively, it extends the reach of companies further into the home environment, and may exacerbate the existing trend for people not to switch off, which in turn makes it harder to achieve a good life-work balance. Imagine having a pressurised call-centre type role from home. Some people may feel greater pressure to appear 'corporate' in the home environment, others might not mind their kids or cats interrupting a Zoom meeting. Not everyone can create a suitable WFH environment in a nice spare room. Whether this actually happens depends on corporate culture, the personalities and goals of the managers and employees, whether a crunch is on, and many other factors. But I'm not convinced that a tighter integration between work and home is necessarily always going to be a positive, from a mental health perspective.

101404 6y ago
True. I am hoping for a trend where it becomes normal that a kid interrupts some business meeting, or you talk to your coworker or CEO in a video chat while they are cooking or folding clothes or something. Almost as if you were talking to real people.
- fjeifisjf 6y ago
  Ask a parent (usually mother) what happens if they try to bring a kid to their (non coronavirus era) office because they don't have anyone else to care for the kid that day. Almost always completely unacceptable, for reasons ranging from arbitrary fake professionalism to lack of interest in setting up a support structure and expecting employees to sacrifice their personal lives for the company. I can only hope this "fake macho work persona" bubble-burst carries forward into post-covid.
  - 101404 6y ago
    I will try to overlook the sexism in your posting. In my company, its not umgingen that someone brings their kid to work. Be it to show the kids what they are doing all day, or because of some logistics thing, or daycare closed or whatnot. Never a problem. Also not uncommon to work from home for the same reason. And it's usually the men who do that (sorry if that doesn't fit into your stereotype).

fjeifisjf 6y ago

I take issue with this drone nonsense. If you are helping people for money you are doing good with your life. If you are comfortable at work and not being physically or emotionally abused, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "drone". Not everyone should be a celebrity changing the world in their own big way. Imagine if the whole world was being constantly reshaped in 7 billion ways!

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
I think what drone means isn't that working typical office jobs at megacorps is bad and you should rather go and try to change the world, but that you are very replaceable in such jobs and there's not really a personal connection and that is the issue.