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We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours

• NoblePublius 5y ago
  I stopped reading after the typo (“own” instead of “owns”) in the third sentence. Writing is your job?
• holyknight 5y ago
  what a useless and long rant. Thousand of words whining about the income inequality to end proposing a lot of banana republic heaven legislation that it's proven to cause unemployment and worsen job quality overall.
  • Yoric 5y ago
    Proven?
  • KaiserPro 5y ago
    I'm working in a country with an effective hourly weekly cap. Its not a banana republic. all but two of the countries in the G7 have maximum weekly hour limit of 48. Also, if you were to look up what a banana republic was, you'd see that this kind of legislation is the opposite of what they would do. after all, if you have a captive workforce, why limit the hours? just make them work more, its not like they can go anywhere.
  • shlant 5y ago
    wow lots of ad hominem in these comments with very little substance or evidence. Seems to have struck a nerve.
  • ktownsend 5y ago
    To me, it sounded more like a call for a bit of empathy and thinking about the foundation upon which the modern economy is built than "a lot of banana republic heaven legislation". Something sorely needed, in my own experience (looking in the mirror at me here!). I've been lucky, through no real merit of my own, to have ended up in a position where what interests me happens to be somewhat in demand, and financially valuable. I ended up in my field out of personal interest and curiousity, and the unexpected opportunities came on their own. True, those opportunities came through learning and effort, but the fact that I was able to invest the non-trivial time (2-3 years) involved learning those skills is, in itself, exceptional today. It's important to understand the context in which my own present success was possible, and that not everyone begins from the same starting line, and some people will never escape that arbitrary setback. I'm not sure how a bit of empathy and looking outside our own narrow privileged silo is banana republic legislation, but calls for an honest assessment of the cost of things seemed refreshingly honest to me, and the article clearly communicated her point of view.
  • whoknew1122 5y ago
    I'm really confused what 'banana republic heaven legislation' is. Do you know a banana republic is? A banana republic is a country which is being exploited by foreign companies who are extracting scarce resources (e.g. exotic produce, minerals) in unsustainable ways. The leaders of banana republics, being beholden to foreign companies (and often the governments/militaries where those companies are headquartered) want to extract the most resources for the least amount possible. 'Banana republic heaven legislation' would do away with minimum wages, overtime, and even health and safety legislation. Banana republic heaven legislation would be exactly opposite what the author suggests.
    • Der_Einzige 5y ago
      The idea is that many of the tinpot dictators in these countries use socialism, communism, it's iconography and it's cultural ideas to win power and then they end up either 1. Doing nothing and being just as corrupt as others with a different name, 2. Going full on authoritarian and subduing all resistance, leading to tyranny and horror or 3. Trying to pull an Allende and genuinely supporting left-wing policies without the usual corruption or military authoritarianism. Unfortunately, the people in the third camp always end up being beaded by the sword of Damocles...
• ItNeverEndsForU 5y ago
  This is a tactic we used to see in hip-hop promotion. A smaller, lesser influential person would try to call out an established name to try and curry "underdog points" in the hope to stoke a conflict. It gets you cheap but large promotion if you can pull it off. If it didn't work, at least you can say you fought the good fight. No real risk. No actual loss.
  • jnnx 5y ago
    Did you even read the actual article? She wasn’t promoting herself at all. She was very clear and concise about what she was saying, and why she was saying it. I understand that a certain set of Fanbois will always see the world in this myopic lens, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the real world actually works…
  • modularform12 5y ago
    Exactly. There is Tim Ferris and there are these whiny losers who want to take from others to fund their miserable existence.
  • KaiserPro 5y ago
    I'm assuming you didn't actually read the article, considering you've not comprehended the argument here. OP is a pains to point out that there isn't much wrong with tim, its just what he's peddling is bullshit. They they go on to make a fairly obvious point that we can't all work four hour weeks, not with the world as it is.
  • shlant 5y ago
    the "they are just doing this for clout" retort is tired and lazy. Please stick to addressing the authors arguments instead of assuming their intentions as a way of invalidating their points.
  • ItNeverEndsForU 5y ago
    > accusations that I didnt read anything > accusations of fanboy Not only did I read this weak attempt to pass of petty gripes as brave political stances, but I've read the author's other petty stances, too. https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-flying-f-ck-what-teachers-think-so-heres-some-photos-of-women-bathing-f1aaa4335b95 https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-fl... What a delightful screed. I really enjoy it's mask-off partisan nonsense, her dedication to single-issue fixation, and her ability to shoehorn that issue into any context she can conceive of. A real wordsmith.... who is just shoehorning her gripes using the exact tactic I described above. Maybe Teen Vogue can snap up this shining star before she starts her own Substack Incoming fangirl downvoting in 3, 2, 1...
• philmcp 5y ago
  "We could pass income laws with a 35-hour cap on all positions." This is kinda what I'm working on: I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance.
  • stanrivers 5y ago
    Is this essentially a place where both employers and employee agree to a 35 hour work week, and then they all agree on the compensation differences because of that arrangement... and then if all good, it just magically works? I feel like the hard part will be policing this going forward, no? "You said only 35 hours" "Yeah, but we have a deadline and it just moved closer"
    • strken 5y ago
      You probably want employers who think a 35 hour work week is quantifiably better value, and understand they're harming retention and productivity by having workers work more. I'm convinced that the marginal hours between 35 and 40 are much less productive than the marginal hours between 25 and 30, and the marginal hours between 50 and 55 may actually be negative.
      • donatzsky 5y ago
        > the marginal hours between 50 and 55 may actually be negative. It has in fact been proven to be negative: https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-work-six-lessons-2005/ https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo... https://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you-less-productive-1725646811 https://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-yo...
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        , the problem with that is the marginal benefit argument only works white collar workers, who still net value unless it truly goes negative. Blue collar worker value is usually tied to hours on the job. Also, having personally struggled with overwork and burnout, I can say 60 and 80 weeks can be productive.. Until they aren't.
• loceng 5y ago
  Just implement UBI adjusted to inflation paid for by VAT and then people are anti-exploitable since they're then not dependant on a job for survival; if you can't infer how this benefits reducing weekly work hours in negotiation and that's why you're downvoting then you're an idiot.
  • KaiserPro 5y ago
    I don't see how VAT can raise enough for UBI, it needs income tax as well. edit "I would say it would need income and corporation tax as well" (makes it a bit clearer that its a personal assertion rather than researched.)
    • loceng 5y ago
      You may eventually be able to do it just with VAT; Andrew Yang doesn't like income tax, taking money away for work they're doing, but he hasn't put that forward as a policy proposal yet - ideally better to implement things step by step.
  • elzbardico 5y ago
    VAT is the worst tax you can choose to pay for UBI. The poorer someone is, more of their income goes into purchasing stuff. So, you'd penalize people who don't earn that much, while letting off people who earn enough to be able to actually invest part of their income instead of buying stuff.
    • loceng 5y ago
      No, you're assuming a flat VAT on everything. The solution to that is adjust what and how much of a VAT is applied, e.g. staples like diapers, period products, etc. perhaps have a 0% tax, and then you could say put an 80% VAT on advertising.
      • jdasdf 5y ago
        When will central planners learn that is a terrible idea?
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  A few people can structure their lives such that they can get by on passive income in some form- stocks and property are the oldest and most popular form- but it’s impossible to construct an economy where everyone can do that. So that means it’s always going to be a small minority that live that way. There are limits to individual self-liberation. At some point you have to look at reforming the society as a whole to make everyone’s conditions better.
  • eevilspock 5y ago
    “Reform” is the right world, because if anybody did a truly honest first moral principles analysis, it is immoral.
• null_object 5y ago
  Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've seen so far are giving it a negative spin I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'. I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
  • adamsiem 5y ago
    I’ve been thinking a lot lately how structured development programs, in the US workplace versus university, are not as popular as they should be. Pipelines like this are less common for young people in the post-4HWW world, where people strive for independence versus collective success. The latter to be had via hard work and building.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • SyzygistSix 5y ago
      I agree but I also think focusing on collective success allows us to all benefit from the increase in productivity and all stop working so many hours. In an age of abundance and ever increasing productivity, the work week should be getting shorter, not longer.
  • 5y ago
• pinky1417 5y ago
  I’m no Tim Ferriss fanboy, but her “exploitation” critique is wrong. Paying people overseas for what would be a low salary in one’s home country isn’t exploitation. Say you’re paying someone abroad $3 an hour while minimum wage in your country is about $8. Median wage in this abroad country is $1.50 an hour. Your employee could expect to make that if she weren’t working for you. Are you exploiting her? I suppose, based on the non-loaded dictionary definition of exploit as “ make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).” But so what? You’re making her better off than she would otherwise be. She’s free to leave or argue for a higher wage. If you left - or were banned from hiring overseas workers - you’d be making her worse off.
  • JBiserkov 5y ago
    But why pay them $3 when you could pay them $1.500000000001 and the "better off" "argument" still applies?
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      Short answer, retention. That's why Ford paid his workers $5 a day.
      • pinky1417 5y ago
        Retention is one reason. Two other reasons are friction of switching jobs + labor not being highly commoditized. Friction: If I'm getting paid $80k a year as a junior dev, I'm probably not going to switch to a similar job for $85k - yeah, I'm better off, but it can be a minor pain to switch jobs. Imperfect markets: in mythical EconLand, if company A is paying a worker $1.50 an hour to make widgets and company B offers $1.500001 an hour, the worker will instantly switch to company B unless A matches the wage. In reality, there's a cost to switching and the worker doesn't know if her manager at B will be a pain-in-the-butt who negates the $0.000001 increase in hourly wage. Friction and asymmetric information like this is one reason we don't see hyper-precise pricing outside highly commoditized goods (EUR/USD spreads, pork bellies, etc.).
    • orwin 5y ago
• lsalvatore 5y ago
  Tim recently addressed this exact argument with "my books are not for everyone". He's not saying everyone on Earth should have a 4 hour work week.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • open-source-ux 5y ago
    > Tim recently addressed this exact argument with "my books are not for everyone" That isn't a counter-argument to the criticism of the 4-Hour Work Week book. It feels like a cop-out on the part of Ferris. In the 4-Hour Work Week, Ferris offers the advice that outsourcing tedious or menial tasks to economically poor countries allows you to reach your 4-hour work goal (the presumption being that you reside in a economically rich country that allows you to outsource to a cheaper country). Disclaimer: I'm in the camp of readers who dislike the 4-Hour Work Week. Not just for the central premise of the book (outsource cheaply), but also for the excessively wordy style of writing that pads out the book.
  • ccthr 5y ago
    yes... only the worthy and entitled deserve it clearly! The plebs should work 60 hours to support the lifestyle of the wealthy elites. In all seriousness though it's clear his book is aimed at people that have a chance of creating enough wealth to escape wage slavery. For many people in the world this is simply not an option - I think that is the point the author is trying to make?
• afpx 5y ago
  What a depressing, pessimistic view. Eventually, yes, we can get to the point where most people work fewer hours. But, writing that vision off because "inequality is baked in" without providing context or thoughtful or innovative solutions seems like a waste of an article, especially one that hits the HN front page. Someone below mentioned self-promotion, and I can see why it seems like it is. Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer?
  • shlant 5y ago
    the fact that this article has triggered so many in the comments by pointing out an uncomfortable truth (you can call it "pessimistic" if you like, doesn't invalidate the message) shows that (at minimum) it has served a useful purpose of stoking conversation
  • KaiserPro 5y ago
    > Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer? To point out the snake oil thats being sold here. Its easy to have a four hour work week if you're rich. The motivation of the speaker is to point out that what Tim is espousing is essentially unachievable unless you have a whole bunch of startup capital. It also points out that achieve the four hour week, you need to exploit people, either directly or indirectly. So I'd say the motivation here is moral. > Eventually, yes, we can get to the point where most people work fewer hours. well given that "share of the national profit" movements have been about for almost a hundred years: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Great_Britain_and_Northern_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Great_B...) I'd say that the whole limited working week thing is a pipe dream. Well, not as the OP points out without creating a gopher underclass.
    • afpx 5y ago
      If it was a moral argument, the author should have done a little bit more work. This reader is not convinced that she added anything useful to the narrative.
      • KaiserPro 5y ago
• roenxi 5y ago
  It is the ineffectiveness of the solutions that upsets me more than anything else. These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor". The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like. "4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    My personal opinion is lowering costs needs to be given a far higher priority than redistributing wealth. If we could radically lower the costs of health care and education in the US, for example, that would do far more for rising the standard of living than taxing and redistributing wealth.
    • medvezhenok 5y ago
      And yet we should still tax (but possibly not redistribute) wealth. Wealth consolidation leads to power consolidation and I don't want de-facto monarchs/oligarchs in society running shadow operations (and especially (!) interfering with the free market in their favor). So my rationale to tax the rich has nothing to do with redistribution, and more to do with power decentralization.
      • jimbokun 5y ago
        This is the tragedy of Citizens United. It destroyed any hope of divorcing money from excessive political power.
• stewx 5y ago
  Valid points: - The four-hour work week is a fantasy - Comfortable lifestyles are generally only possible when other people are doing the hard work on your behalf, particularly service industry workers Dubious points: - The US dollar is strong in impoverished countries due to colonialism (there may be some truth to this, but there are many other factors) - "Tax breaks" (no definition provided) never create jobs - Universal basic income is achievable if we "make everyone pay their fair share" (depends on how big the cheques are. $100/month, or $2,500/month?)
  • randomopining 5y ago
    USD is strong because it's stable and used to facilitate transactions for international trade. Countries banking systems hold liquidity in USD or USD denominated bonds. Nothing to do with colonialism.
    • jimbokun 5y ago
      Right, it's more an artifact of US being the last major economy standing after WWII.
      • randomopining 5y ago
        Yeah that, plus obviously the combination of innovation, natural resources, and trade ties to most of the productive nations. Despite the detractors, anarchists, and anti-US sentiment. The US was the glue that held together the world from 1945-now -- promoting a generally rules based order and peaceful trade that propelled us to a new level of world wealth.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams. It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world. I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice. Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go. That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack. There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article. It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
  • starfallg 5y ago
    > It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber. It's just not as glamorous nor as profitable writing a humble book on getting rich by being at the right place at the right time through knowing the right people.
• caffeine 5y ago
  Yuck. Just a long-winded plug for communism interspersed with bouts of self-pity, drawing on 4hww and Tim Ferris name as a gimmick to get readers.
• prepend 5y ago
  This was part of my issue with Four Hour Work Week, it externalized costs and seems like a net negative karma wise. I’m a fan of Tim Ferris, bought books, listened to him for years, his material has really helped me. But 4HWW seemed somehow off for me as it seems to fake it enough that customers stick around and even love the product, but if everyone did it, we would just have superficial stuff and not real. So I don’t judge people but it’s not for me. And I’m sort of envious of people who can do it without worrying about it all the time like I feel I would. I’ve never encountered a 4HWW product, other than Ferriss himself, that I liked. It just annoyed me with their anti patterns that work for some customers but not me. Atheletic Greens is a good example in my mind, although not sure if they actually use 4HWW. I like the idea of a “healthy supplement” but it costs 3x the random green powder at Whole Foods, but it well marketed and forces subscriptions and auto renews. So it takes a hippy idea and weaponizes it for slackers like me. So I’d rather just guy the green stuff from the co-op, but now I’m always hearing athletic greens marketing and wondering if I chose wrong. The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are. So it’s not a bad thing, people really like it. But it seems like the automation has so much potential to help customers more but instead scoops it up for the owner.
  • SQueeeeeL 5y ago
    "The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are." Yeah, there's a lot of irony to marketing, especially in this space. 'Authentic' products don't need marketing, leaders in a space will seek them out and stock them of their own accord. The purpose of dark patterns is to essentially circumvent this positive feedback loop authentic use produces, forcing passive consumption of a subpar product.
    • prepend 5y ago
      I find that funny too. I, as I expect many, prefer authentic experiences but I frequently see products marketed as “authentic” with complete bullshit. So now, I pretty much always filter out anything that explicitly uses the word authentic. I feel like there’s a mental arms race between real signals and marketers who early identify and then misuse them. 4HWW seemed to accelerate that.
• doggodaddo78 5y ago
  How to make money: Write a book about "quick and easy shortcuts to get rich." If you really want to get rich via the right mindset gleaned from an actual billionaire, I would suggest the book written by the late Felix Dennis with the ironic title How to Get Rich. For some reason, I think Mike Myers' documentary Supermensch has a good deal to offer about what a successful mindset looks like.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  You know, there’s a striking parallel between the passive income mentality and the “personal is political” self-actualization ethos of the 60’s counterculture. The counterculture was never really a political movement; it was all about freedom to become ones true self by flaunting the rules of society and engaging in all sorts of impulsive behavior. It was all about the deification of the sacred self. That’s why it transitioned so smoothly into the ayn rand capitalism of the 80’s and 90’s. In that sense there’s not much open air separating Tim Ferris and Timothy Leary. Both were encouraging their followers to drop out of society in order to turn inward in search of their private, individual nirvana, separated from the real world around them, full of people doing the hard, boring work of keeping things going. Both are pied pipers though in that the vast majority of their followers will not achieve the self-liberation they crave.
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    I should say too that this whole attitude is older than the 60’s; the original Jeffersonian American vision was the self-supporting yeoman farmer. And right now today you have evangelical Christianity and new age spiritualism, which both promise self-actualization in one form or another. In evangelical Christianity you have a personal relationship with god- god talks to you individually and it’s up to you to interpret his wishes. There is no priest or community to tell you what god’s will is. That’s why the evangelicals and the new age people hate each other so much- they’re contesting the same turf. And the thing is- it worked, for a really long time. You can deny collective interests and make everything personal, if you can hand out free land like it’s candy. And then we had the period in the mid 20th century when all Europe was destroyed, and profits were so high that conflicts could be again papered over by crazy fast economic growth. It’s only now that cracks are finally starting to show, now that the economy has globalized and the free stuff is running out. If I’m right about this, then we will see the re-emergence of collective struggle in the next few decades and the decline of the self as the center of all effort and struggle.
  • SyzygistSix 5y ago
    >In that sense there’s not much open air separating Tim Ferris and Timothy Leary. I think this is accurate but only in that sense. Leary and his friends, like Robert Anton Wilson, had a strong sense of social justice and saw a world in which everyone benefited, and were very much concerned with scaling their ideas so that everyone worked less and enjoyed the benefits of a wealthier world. They would be disappointed in a world where people are working longer hours for less pay while productivity and profits increase dramatically.
• api 5y ago
  Sometimes I feel like someone else is paying for my 40-60 hour work week. A bunch of people far poorer than myself are working 80-120 hours to mine rare Earths, assemble electronics, stitch clothes, dig coal, and so on, so that I can live in relative-to-them luxury. Not only do I work only 40-60 hours a week but it's indoors, in air conditioning, doing work that is largely interesting and not very dangerous. I even have time to punctuate it by posting shit like this. The four hour work week is bullshit but it's just the snake oil we all consume distilled to greater purity. I'm sipping wine while Ferriss is selling 150 proof fire water. You enter the global upper middle class already primed for a shot at being part of the global rich by simply being born in the developed world. https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/davos/global-wage-calculator/index.html https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/davos/global-... (There are several global wage calculators online. I use them whenever I start pitying myself.)
• czbond 5y ago
  You have a 40+ hour workweek, until you put in enough intelligently focused 80 hour work weeks coupled with some dumb luck, to possibly arrive at anything resembling a 4 hour workweek. I'm really tired of seeing online 'equality' warriors think entrepreneurship is easy and should be used to pay for all of society's financial hardships; entrepreneurship is a significant toll that can cause financial ruin and mental instability just to have a chance at arriving at any sort of time liberation. When you create something you place your own time, finances, energy at risk - in many cases you get a low ROI in return. But like all educations, one can get better and improve over time. One must vision the system, design the system, find ways to finance the system, execute the system, manage the system, and optimize the processes. Then possibly, you might be able to receive benefits from that system - but it is in no way guaranteed. So don't pity the founder, but don't denigrate them either; actions taken on own volition mean founders must enjoy or live with the outcomes.
  • bantunes 5y ago
    I think a lot of people's main problem with entrepreneurship is that it's by and large a rich kid's game. I know a few "serial entrepreneurs" - every time they failed, their parents or the social network they grew over the years at their private school were there to pick up the pieces and back them for the next attempt. Until they made it and didn't need help any more and could pay for their own flat and live off their projects. It's a problem in a lot of professions too, like law or even acting https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/14/working-class-actors-diversity-quotas-eddie-marsan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/14/workin... Most people have zero shots, or at best one, in them until they have to get back to paying their bills - and get stuck in the rat race forever. No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc. The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks to build his or hers business. However hard that is to pull off, people won't respect it because it's just privilege asserting itself most of the time.
    • dvh1990 5y ago
      The most profitable games are always a rich kid's game first and foremost, because power begets power. This doesn't mean that you don't get a shot at doing what you want. Yes, your odds as a "nobody" are lower. But that's why being somebody, or having privilege, is so desired. There are problems with this. Chances aren't always given out on merit, a fact that is a detriment to society. The other issue is what this article talks about: People selling a pipe dream.
• deleted 5y ago
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• jurassic 5y ago
  The author has crab in a bucket mindset. One person having enough success to have the lifestyle they want does not mean somebody they employ is being victimized by them. This might resonate with some, but for me it is a big turn-off. It smacks of jealousy and a rejection of all personal responsibility in charting a path to where you want to go in life. Tim's book isn't without flaws (and is now significantly dated in many of the details), but one of the core messages is to recognize we all have a choice to do something other than work 50 years at a job we hate and then retire/die. Tons of people go through life without considering any alternatives to the path they are on, or developing the self-knowledge about what they actually want, which is a big reason so many people end up so unhappy. He also emphasizes creating repeatable systems that you can then automate with software or hand off to other people. This helps you scale your business and income, but more importantly it preserves your time for other things you value more. The blog author thinks this is somehow a bad thing, but if nobody ever realized the efficiencies of exchanging money for services then most of us would be naked and starving; a huge chain of such exchanges is needed to produce the modern miracles of cheap clothing and food that are the foundation of modern living. Tim didn't actually retire to the beach for a hedonic 4-hour lifestyle with servants refilling the wine glass and fanning him with palm fronds; the guy works harder than most people with a new huge book every couple of years, lots of active investing, and running a major podcast almost every week. The difference between him and other people is that he's not wasting time on stuff that other people could do for him. I'm not a "bro", but I guess I'll stand here and defend Tim's book because it gave me a lot to think about.
  • ilaksh 5y ago
    But "we" don't all have a choice to just "decide" to stop working full time. That's the point.
    • jurassic 5y ago
      You have a choice to do something other than what you're doing right now. Having clear goals for where you want to end up that guide your choices, you can eventually stop working a job you hate and do something you find more fulfilling to generate the money you need. So the choice is do you want to work toward a goal like that or instead just soothe your dissatisfaction by complaining about how rich people have more than you and life's not fair. That's basically what the author is doing.
• foxhop 5y ago
  When I read through the 4 hour work week, I was never thinking yeah other people will work for me. No I thought, wow, if I only had to work for 4 hours per week I could actually focus in my life's work. My goal is to retire early so that I may begin my life's work. Sounds like the author thinks her life work might be creating housing for homeless, I'm curious if she has started working towards that journey.
• timwaagh 5y ago
  I don't think shaming people for doing what's in their best interest is ultimately progress. I smell a lot of vitriol in the article. I would never read Mr Feriss, because I think it's just a fad. Realistically if you work 4 hours to live a normal lifestyle, why not work 40 and get on top of the pyramid? But after reading this I'm definitely more interested in reading his work, not less. Maybe there's actually some useful info in there.
  • k-mcgrady 5y ago
    >> if you work 4 hours to live a normal lifestyle, why not work 40 and get on top of the pyramid The point is that you don't need to get to the top of the pyramid to get what you want. If you list all the things you want (including things like sports cards, travel etc.) the monthly income you need to do this things (e.g. lease the sports car) is less than you think. That monthly income target (+maximising free time to do what you like) should be your goal, not "being a millionaire/being a CEO etc.".
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    Because working more hours will never get you to the top of the pyramid. It doesn't scale. Ferriss got to the point of working 4 hours a week by agressively delegating almost everything about his business. He never would have been able to achieve financial independence just by cranking out more hours.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  Personally I think that social democracy as it exists in some European countries is a starting point for thinking about what direction we want to go, but it is by no means the beautiful outcome that people think it is. I just don't think that social mobility outcomes and health outcomes in social democracies have been as idyllic as people want to believe. Certainly in some ways and some countries much better than the US, but it's not a final solution. I think that we need to reengineer society to properly integrate high technology. With more fairness, but with less idealism and more practicality. Without Social Darwinism but also with an understanding of things like primate mating instincts and group hierarchies.
• dotBen 5y ago
  The inequality the Medium post author writes about exists around us regardless or whether we work for 4hrs or 40hrs a week. I'm not sure pulling in Tim's book especially adds to their point, particularly when you consider it is easy for the rest of he to dismiss the inequality and 'layer cake' of society if we ourselves are not enjoying a 4hr work week.
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  I'm in research, I think it'd be physically impossible to be a successful researcher with only 4 hours a week. There is simply a lot to do, from reading, studying, and thinking, to grants, planning, gathering data, analyzing, to publishing, conferences, teaching, and disseminating knowledge. If all these curious and hardworking researchers followed Tim's lifestyle, innovation would collapse and diseases and problems would gain the upper hand. I doubt Tim would want his doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, or dentist to stop making new advances, and just do 4 hours of work a week.
  • caymanjim 5y ago
    I don't think he wants or cares about everyone adopting his lifestyle. It's about how he can do it by outsourcing work to others. He's selling that fantasy. Nowhere is it claimed to be a philosophy for universal adoption.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      The contradiction lies in the fact that he wrote a book with millions of people as his audience. That's the problem with "print capitalism" and the actual audience size of one.
  • junkilo 5y ago
    or hotel brands that offer consistent hospitality services all over the world. Each of which requires a 24x7 multi-skilled staff.. or the piles of humans feeding the internet, tech and social media 24x7
• rob74 5y ago
  It's all nice and well to rail about Tim Ferriss... until you realize that all of us (in the developed world) are profiting from people in less developed countries, or even people in our own country, working (much) more than 40 hours per week for less than we would get for 4 hours. If all these people would have acceptable work conditions, we would have to pay way more for clothing, food, electronics... you name it.
  • jakelazaroff 5y ago
    > If all these people would have acceptable work conditions, we would have to pay way more for clothing, food, electronics... you name it. Are you saying that would be bad?
    • rob74 5y ago
      Definitely not, sorry if it sounded like that...
  • maxdw101 5y ago
    EXACTLY. Very well said. All this talk of 4 hours and so on are fine when your stomach is full and you have built up a capitalist society that feeds off the poor in a different society.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      Why do you suppose those poor are willing to be fed off of? Maybe because they don't much in the way of better work alternatives. But guess what happens in places like India and China after a couple decades of exploitation by the rich countries? They have a huge rise in the middle class, reduction in abject poverty, emergence of their own big companies, and their country becomes significant economic players on the world stage. The pie isn't a fixed size. It grows with increased economic activity. What happens in countries that are closed off to all the global "exploitation"? I'll let you work that out for yourself.
  • lurker619 5y ago
    Nope, if people in less developed countries had acceptable work conditions and were able to realize their potential in terms of skills and passion, we'd have 10x the number of innovative companies/products/technology. Life isn't zero-sum.
• joyeuse6701 5y ago
  “more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet.“ Hard to take the author’s point seriously with phrases like this. It comes off as a tantrum born of envy, written in today’s lefty lingo. There are better arguments against the 4hww here in the comments than hers.
  • mehphp 5y ago
    I agree. Can we stop with this type of talk? It's a huge turn off, and that is coming from someone who considers himself left of center. Who do they think they are reaching with this rhetoric?
    • Workaccount2 5y ago
      Sam Harris had a recent podcast where he talks about how he was recently at a dinner with a bunch of big tech CEO's and leaders. He asked them why they are all capitulating to woke twitter nonsense, and how if they just ignored it then it would die out. They pretty much told him that ignoring it was impossible, and they couldn't even entertain the idea. So there is your answer. That kind of rhetoric has a lot of power right now. The thrust behind this was that companies need to go back to being apolitical, and it's workers need to leave their politics and ideologies at the door.
      • therealdrag0 5y ago
        > how if they just ignored it then it would die out. Doesn't fully undermine your point, but I remember his proposal being stronger than that. I think he was more proposing to basically blacklist twitter SJW warriors from industry. Whereas now they feel like they can make a fuss and if they get fired they can just get hired by a competitor, he wanted leaders to have a public stance that they wont hire people like that.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Presumably you would not agree that this "type of talk": 1. identifies a particular type of person 2. characterizes them in a specific way that, like other group characterizations, is simultaneously an exaggeration, a truth, and a point of view 3. encourages us to think about that the assumptions we carry around about what a "default" model for life should look like I know people who are very well described by this sort of language, even though (like any group characterization) it necessarily does not capture their whole selves. The description reminds me to not just accept that these people (or anyone else) have some natural born right to whatever position they end up in life, and that we can question whether we do in fact value what they do and say. It leads to questions like "Why are almost all the people who do <insert type of work> like this?", in ways that we frequently do for other sorts of work but tend not to ask about "success".
• apples_oranges 5y ago
  I like Ferris and disagree with the article but she's right, he is bragging and name-dropping a lot. Must be a worthwhile marketing tactic if he's doing it so much..
• k-mcgrady 5y ago
  Is anyone actually advocating everybody have a 4-hour work week? Of course not. Tim Ferriss doesn't even specifically advocate a work week of 4 hours. The point is to delegate to the maximum so you can spend as much of your time doing what you choose - which can include working. Unfortunately there are always going to be jobs that need done and some of them suck. We should pay these people well and we should appreciate the work that they do. Unless we completely change our economic systems some people are going to have easier lives than others. A medium article bitching about that isn't going to change it. There are people with much easier lives than the author - but the author also has a much more privileged life than most. Reducing the worlds inequalities and problems to "millions of “enlightened” bros" and "fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet" is ridiculous.
• anm89 5y ago
  So you aren't allowed to be a minimalist once your bank account reaches a certain figure?
• Invictus0 5y ago
  I'm convinced that attacking educated white males is just the absolute laziest thing you can do in a piece of writing. Not sure what I expected from "injustice mag".
• uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
  How much money is in the world and how far would it go if we evenly divided among every person? How long until it gravitated for whatever reason back into agglomerations by 1% of the population? There is no equity in the distribution of matter, accumulation begets accumulation. Why would it be different for money?
• dvh1990 5y ago
  4HWW is a how-to guide to hacking capitalism as an individual, and is a case-study of itself: - Screw over your day-job if you have one - Invent a "good-enough" product to entice buyers but "shit-enough" so you can make it cheaply - Sell it to unwitting shmucks Is this net-positive for society? Nope.
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    > Screw over your day-job if you have one The example I remember from the book is Ferriss would make sales calls in the morning and the late afternoon, because those were the times when people would actually be willing to make deals, and the calls the rest of the day were a waste. And (according to him) he made more sales than most of the sales team. Too many jobs are managed as "ass time in seat" vs any real measure of productivity.
    • dvh1990 5y ago
      That's one example in a very specific niche (sales), but this approach really underplays the value of being an active and present team member. But yeah, if your job is shit and you're just doing it for whatever money you are getting, then you may indeed be prone to find loopholes that enable you to do the minimum amount of work required.
• sidlls 5y ago
  I stopped reading at “more fragile white Princeton….” The author was making decent points, and I’ve seen plenty of non-whites going all-in on the various Feriss-style minimal work/maximal outsourcing cults that exist. There was no need for that dig. It’s quite literally irrelevant to the article.
  • ajmadesc 5y ago
    > I stopped reading at “more fragile white Princeton….” That seems quite a fragile thing to do
    • sidlls 5y ago
      Ah, yes, that old catch-22. You aren't as clever as you think you are.
• strken 5y ago
  Since the 50s productivity has supposedly gone up by around an order of magnitude[0] in much of the world, so why isn't a four hour work week possible? Or more to the point, how come two people working 40 hours a week with only one receiving pay was replaced by two working 70 hours a week at full pay, at a time when productivity supposedly dectupled? Say what you want about Tim Ferris and his devotees, but at least 4 is greater than 0, which is the number of hours you work if you've got an intergenerational fund of wealth slowly but surely extracting rents from the rest of the world through mortgages and dividends. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?time=earliest..2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    We want more. We own more cars than before. We own more house than before. We eat out more than before. We take more trips than before.
    • SyzygistSix 5y ago
      Most, not all, people want more. And some people want more only as long as others are not abused or taken advantage of to get it. Others want more regardless of the circumstances.
• whack 5y ago
  Wow. I was expecting a critique on how a 4-hour week causes harm to your colleagues through your laziness. Instead, the article only tangentially mentions this, with no supporting evidence or arguments. And 90% of the article consists of absolutely nothing more than ad-hominem attacks on Tim. > The 4-Hour Work Week enshrines entitlement, providing an instruction manual for wannabe digital nomads: If earning a million dollars is too hard, you can just jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism) How on earth do you get angry at someone for suggesting living in a low COL location? Developing countries around the world are extremely eager to attract tourists/nomads who can inject money into their economy. And yet, the author would prefer that we shun developing countries entirely. Because colonialism. > See, a global economy can’t support millions upon millions of people jetting around the world and running businesses online. There will always be a sub-class of people working constantly behind the scenes, in sweatshops and kitchens, in order to sustain this dream lifestyle for a tiny few. The inequality is baked in. That’s where the private, selfish audience of one becomes so dangerous. We read books like The 4-Hour Work Week as if they were made just for us, because that’s how they’re written. Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. We’re rendered invisible. That’s what should anger us. It’s not that Tim Ferris found a new way to live and then wrote about it. It’s that now millions of “enlightened” bros all worship him and aspire to be like him, as if this is what our planet needs — more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet. Offering people advise on how they can better their lives, is now an evil thing to do? Not everyone in the world can work in a white-collar job, and therefore, it is evil to help people pursue it? The author of this article genuinely scares me. There is no discussion of content here, no discussion about the consequences of certain actions, no consistent logical argument put forward. It is simply endless ad-hominem attacks, based almost entirely on Tim's demographics and career success. The fact that this is trending on multiple social media, instead of dying in a tabloid rag, makes me far more worried about the future of our society.
  • whitepaint 5y ago
    You are observing the inevitable effect of high and rising Gini coefficient.
  • deleted 5y ago
• mc32 5y ago
  The article has some merit (4-hour work week is hyperbola for most), but then has many problems of its own: it presents people dying from overwork as if it’s an epidemic and attributes COLA differences with colonialism? So Shanghai with high COL vs a village in southwest China with very low CoL is due to colonialism? Accusations without any supporting links. Yes, critique Ferris, but please avoid his same pitfalls .
• Grustaf 5y ago
  > If you really want to work four hours a week, you have to outsource the rest of your labor to other people, who wind up working way longer and way harder. You have to be okay with exploiting people, and you can’t really think about it. I don't love Tim Ferris and the criticism of the book is pretty spot on, but come on, you are not "exploiting" people if you pay them to handle your support calls, be your virtual secretary or whatever.
  • ganzuul 5y ago
    I have not seen handling of support calls without exploitation. It's integral to handling support calls, but somehow market forces turn it into exploitation. The worst I have seen was Dell, which produced sub-par products in order to sell an outsourced support service for net profit.
    • Grustaf 5y ago
      The context here is a one-man internet company that hires someone on Upwork to help him or her with some administrative task. That doesn't fit any definition of "exploitation". You could say that the entire global capitalist system is exploitative in nature, or something like that, but an individual entrepreneur posting on Upwork is not "exploiting" anyone.
• mcguire 5y ago
  Kant's Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." What happens if everyone wants a 4-hour work week, from a beach in Thailand?
  • regularfry 5y ago
    Then that beach becomes rather full.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  Specialization, hierarchy and privilege have the same roots. And this is difficult to avoid because of the inherent benefits of specialization.
• ArtDev 5y ago
  Tim is advocating "lifestyle design" over hoarding wealth. This is much better for society as a whole. Also, digital nomads are very very good for local economies. Many countries are starting to realize this and are trying to attract them. Additionally, the "4 hour work weak" is not literally 4 hours. It's a viral headline he talks about. It just "feels" like 4 hours because of lifestyle design. This a trash article.
• hosh 5y ago
  The author has some points I have considered (after wading through the noise). However, her solutions are rather banal and conventional. Capping the work week hours and having universal basic income seems like a nice idea… but I have come to realize they are imperfect substitutes for having the natural abundance of the land become metered. Inequality is inherent to the capitalist system, and socialist systems don’t really address it either. Instead, I have been working my way through Carol Sanford’s Regenerative Life and learning what that was about. It had taken me a year to realize what “regenerative” was even about: a world view and paradigm of living systems. It is when people are allowed to be alive, participating in living system, that they can tap into regeneration. It then is no longer about how to equitably distribute resources, but rather, each person and each living system can tap into the regenerative powers of life. You still have to work, but you are no longer treated like a cog in a machine getting the life extracted out from you. How I am going to exactly implement that in my own life, I don’t know yet. I have a lucrative career writing software for someone else, but with agism, it won’t endure.
• ciconia 5y ago
  > Someone’s gotta run the hotels and restaurants and laundromats that serve our beloved digital nomads. Someone’s gotta run the coffee shops where they hang out. Someone’s gotta pick up their trash, and grow their food. Someone’s gotta build those mansions and pools. Yep, this is how capitalism works. It's just a gigantic pyramid scheme, and the object of the game is to climb to the top, even if that means stepping all over other people.
• ppod 5y ago
  I'd have more time for the substance of the article if the author wasn't being a complete dick about it.
• cpncrunch 5y ago
  A lot of great points here. I'm in the position of having a 4-hour workweek, as I run an online business that generates a pretty good income with very little work due to everything being automated. I don't employ anyone else or outsource anything for the most part (except occasionally farming off entire projects to other people if I don't want them). A lot of the argument seems to be that you are using other employees working 40-80 hour weeks for the things you enjoy in your daily life. But I think the main point of Tim's book is that most processes can be automated or at least optimised. Consider the examples of "Someone’s gotta run" in the article: it's certainly possible for coffee shops, trash collection, food production and Amazon delivery to be mostly automated. Amazon has already automated most parts of their operation except for the flights and drivers delivering the parcels, but even that could be automated one day.
• jacksonkmarley 5y ago
  The author seems to have thought about some of the issues around how we approach our working lives, that's not a bad topic to write about in itself. However the tone was a bit ranty and negative, and the Tim Ferris hating got a bit monotonous. This article could have been more interesting if the author started with a bit of the 4 Hour Work Week, then left it and Ferriss behind for more fruitful content.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  I mis-read the title, I thought it was saying the "4-day work week", which is relevant to many people including myself.
• serjester 5y ago
  I’m confused. It seems like she read a book that didn’t fit into her preconceived notion of what the world should look like. It’s true, Tim Ferris does not focus on broad macro strategies to free everyone from wage slavery. Instead he chooses to focus on small micro adjustments that are within many people’s power. I’d argue the latter approach is far more likely to increase your personal well being.
• TearsInTheRain 5y ago
  > If earning a million dollars is too hard, you can just jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism) while running businesses online. This is just fundamentally wrong and reeks of blind socialist griping at the whichever current societal structure exists
• jl2718 5y ago
  Except all the world’s work that actually needs to be done can probably be done in less than four hours per person per week. People were perfectly happy, maybe more so, when 90% of humans were farming, and now it’s less than 1%. N.B. This is not any sort of endorsement for your pet political theory.
• xtat 5y ago
  Usually I am sympathetic to this kind of thing but I felt so much bad faith reading this I couldn't finish it.
• erezsh 5y ago
  > Someone’s gotta run the hotels and restaurants and laundromats that serve our beloved digital nomads. Someone’s gotta run the coffee shops where they hang out. Someone’s gotta pick up their trash, and grow their food. Someone’s gotta build those mansions and pools. Someone’s gotta run the internet they use. Exactly, and if those digital nomads weren't there, these people would be out of a job. If you don't like the inequality in the world, try and fix it. I don't bear any responsibility as an individual to fix these wrongs that happened before I was even born. But if I wanted to do it, going there to spend my money is an excellent way to help.
• tmaly 5y ago
  I think there are some positives in the book. Cutting out the news is one of them. Learning to automate processes so you don't have to spend mindless hours answering the same questions over and over is another. If you want to see negatives outlined in the post, just go on TikTok. Every other video is about making thousands of dollars via affiliate marketing. It is one get rich quick scheme after another.
• Mikho 5y ago
  The book was initially titled "Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit". There is really no need to attack the "4 hour" notion since it's not even close to the essence of the book. The book is a collection of tactics, tools and case studies for people who want to design their ideal lifestyles. It's just has a clickbait title. In one of the interviews Tim Ferris described that the "4 hour" title was chosen just via A/B test to be a clickbait. It's a spin on the classic "# ways to do something" clickbait extensively used by Buzzfeed and other low-quality media.