5 ms·

Why do we work so damn much?

• amarshall 5y ago
  Posted as text but should be a link post.
• refurb 5y ago
  Because we want stuff.
  • theonemind 5y ago
    Not so. In the US, your health insurance is often tied to your employment. You often don't get health insurance unless you work full time. Full time is always 40 hours or more. That isn't a whole lot more productive than 32 hours, but employers benefit by having fewer employees work more rather than more employees working less, because of costs like health insurance. I think it's quite a bit more complicated than "because we want stuff"--I'd say it's because we're serfs for the ultra wealthy.
    • dsauerbrun 5y ago
      you can pay for health insurance if you don't have a job. I've done that many times in between jobs; it's totally feasible for single people. I was paying between $250-$320 per month as a healthy 30 year old. most jobs I've had only cover 50% of the healthcare premiums so big whoop... I'm saving $150/mo by getting health care through my job... the money isn't worth needing a job. this may not be the experience for people not in tech/high salaries, with medical conditions, or families but I sometimes get tired of the blanket statement that you need a job to get healthcare in the states.
      • cbozeman 5y ago
        Everything you just wrote, right down to the dollar amounts, exemplifies just how privileged you are, and 'privilege' is a word I hate and almost never use, but it is the correct and appropriate word here. The majority - as in > 50% - of Americans can't afford to be "between jobs" for months, or even a single month at a time. And they certainly can't afford rates that are 2-4 times $250 - $320 jobs. The majority of Americans can't even afford a $500 emergency.
    • refurb 5y ago
      The article is “working so much”, not “why are people working”? All the middle class folks I know work crazy hours because they want a new car, or to buy a bigger house or save for their kids private education. Not needs, wants. They could take a job that pay a bit less, has health insurance and gives them back 20 hrs a week, but they aren’t willing to make that trade off.
• jordhy 5y ago
  Inflation, cost of living. Families, social comparison. America life is built like a never ending hamster wheel.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    This. Follow the money (follow the white rabbit). We don’t know how to unplug from the financial/social Matrix. Morpheus: What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• tehjoker 5y ago
  The power of the capitalist class, the lack of social supports, the weakness of organized labor, etc.
• baggy_trough 5y ago
  "hunter-gatherer societies like the Ju/’hoansi spent only about 15 hours a week meeting their material needs despite being deeply impoverished by modern standards." I don't understand the "despite" in the above sentence. The more they would work to meet their material needs, the less impoverished they would become, no?
  • prawn 5y ago
    I think it's suggesting that they don't work more hours despite having an easy/obvious incentive (to our eyes) to improve their lot. There are a lot of mid/upper-class people in a typical, modern, urban society who have shelter, food, safety and more but pour in 70 hours a week, maybe paying off a big house or trying to get a fancier car or more expensive clothes.
  • asdswe 5y ago
    I guess the point is that they're content with what they have, even if it's just the bare minimum.
    • username90 5y ago
      Most people prefer working fulltime and sleeping in a home over not working and sleeping in a tent like the hunter gatherers did. The hunter gatherers just didn't have an option to work harder and get a stable home, since the nature of hunter gathering requires you to move around. Then as people settled down and became farmers they also gained the opportunity to improve their lives by working hard, and at that point they started working way more hours. It makes sense.
  • bruce511 5y ago
    "despite them having time resources to raise their standard of living, they chose not to spend time on more work." Clearly they do not feel impoverished, and, dare I say it, do not feel that "modern standards" are worth working for. While some standards are obviously good, like medicine, water, sanitation - some others like 2 cars, or a dishwasher may be less inspirational.
• likecarter 5y ago
  Well, it’s easy to see the result. There are plenty of countries with high unemployment (especially among youth). Take Greece for example. Their economy isn’t doing so great relative to a country with high employment - Canada, USA, Germany, France, UK. Work hard if you want to have the highest standard of living.
  • asdswe 5y ago
    Highest material standard of living perhaps, not so sure about quality of life in general. I think working hard only makes sense if you're adequately compensated and have prospects of career growth. Otherwise doing the bare minimum is the rational thing to do.
  • dragonsky67 5y ago
    More toys. Everybody must have more toys. Work hard and have more toys, even if you won't have enough time to play with them.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The Greeks work the longest hours in the EU. A lot of it is back breaking agricultural work.
• trixie_ 5y ago
  Why do many millionaires and billionaires continue to work super hard? People on TV, people in power, they are set for life financially and yet they still work. It's because just like the rest of us - it's what we do. We don't know how not to work without feeling like we should be doing something 'productive'. It's more cultural than anything else.
  • _delirium 5y ago
    Do they? When I think of very rich people, I mostly think of people who don't work. Sam Walton (who died in 1992) did real work to build his business empire, but his half-dozen multi-billionaire heirs don't work at anything that could be considered a real job.
    • nine_k 5y ago
      It only applies to people who made themselves very rich, not were born rich. The same impulse that pushed them to the Everest of wealth keeps on pushing them. Nothing can be said about heirs of large inheritances; some may care much enough to achieve something, but most would likely not, like most people.
  • nine_k 5y ago
    Some of them can be enjoying it — like playing sports is hard and exhausting, but you play anyway because of the excitement and the feeling of accomplishment is produces. These people who made themselves stars or billionaires achieved that much because they love the process. If they wanted to just pleasantly slack out, they won't need to go that far in securing their income, they would stop much, much earlier, maybe even at the welfare level.
  • seibelj 5y ago
    At a macro-level it’s the answer to why we have enormous buildings, cities, and went to the moon. Why people keep doing anything rather than nothing. Why we have complex societies rather than hunter gatherer lives. As a species we don’t want to do nothing. There is a recent EconTalk podcast on the concept on “freedom” which may be very interesting to people who have read this far in my comment. It touches on how we got to this point in human evolution https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?i=1000527103027 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?i...
• oars 5y ago
  Plenty of other software engineers in my company don't have much else to do outside of work. For many of us, working provides our lives with structure, and a purpose that we're able to pursue. I don't know what I'd do with all the additional spare time I have without my job. My kids wouldn't be at home because they're at school. I already have enough time for my hobbies on weekends and when my kids go to sleep.
• cirrus3 5y ago
  This is mostly a rant on the style of article title and intro. The content may be interesting, but I seriously doubt it. It starts off with: > Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we? Uh, well, for starters, 15 hours is apparently what it took to survive and live a comparatively successful lifestyle back then, a lifestyle that really only involved SURVIVING to see the next day. Dial that up to what it takes to live a comparatively successful lifestyle now and you know the reasons, article done. The whole "15 hours" thing is misleading considering that in the modern world where we're not all on the same playing field anymore (for a lot of disturbing underlying reasons) and just fighting for survival is no longer the common experience or goal, and again, lots of easy reasons. I did not read this whole thing but the premise and title seems to ignore so many obvious reasons out of the gate that it didn't seem worth it. Maybe they got down stating some obvious reasons, but I may never know... starting off with a click-bait title and intro lost my interest asap. If you want to comment "but hey, you never said what those easy reasons are!! provide links!!" then you are probably part of the problem.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    It's pretty easy to survive - even if you're homeless - anywhere in the advanced world - sure, I'll give you that. But in the hunter gatherer days - people learned skills to make this much easier to survive than it would be for some random person to do today. But I think there was more to life, even in hunter gatherer days, than surviving. Surely, they also put some effort into not being miserable. I'm not convinced that 15 hours of unskilled labor per week is enough to be not-miserable in most places where people actually live in the US. It's not like homeless people have the skills to go forage in the forests and enjoy the natural beauty of life. We don't learn those skills anymore. And even if we did, you'd have a hard time convincing anyone to leave civilization and join you - and we all have social needs... I think I'd much rather camp in the peace and quiet in a tight knit community in a decent shelter with fresh food than on the streets or in a crappy old car basically only able to afford to eat processed variations of corn - which is what you'd be doing on 15 hours per week.
    • cirrus3 5y ago
• Blackstone4 5y ago
  I meet plenty of professionals who despite having made millions and could retire, still work. Why? I believe a large part of their identity and self-worth is tied up in their work and net worth… they get respect and power… their roles give them a position in society. For many, they get used to the amount of money they’ve made but it’s never enough. The type of personality that drove them to work hard and become rich will not allow themselves to take it easy and hit the beach. These are perpetual high achievers.
  • barnaclejive 5y ago
    Imagine reading this and extracting out a perspective focusing on why millionaires keep working. Hard cringe.
    • MrStonedOne 5y ago
      Millionaires don't need to work, yet still do, so looking at them provides a unique view into the human condition.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • barnaclejive 5y ago
      > Millionaires don't need to work, yet still do, so looking at them provides a unique view into the human condition. Does it tho?, "lets look harder at why the millionaires work.. that seems like a good starting point." /s
      • barnaclejive 5y ago
        OP seems to like his downvote privilege more than owning up to his ignorance.
  • howaboutnope 5y ago
    > a large part of their identity and self-worth is tied up in their work and net worth… they get respect and power… their roles give them a position in society. For many, they get used to the amount of money they’ve made but it’s never enough For me that just sounds like a lack, a wound that won't heal no matter how many extrinsic things are thrown at it.
• cirrus3 5y ago
  The article seems to answer the question right up front. > as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition. > You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.
  • themodelplumber 5y ago
    > our current system is designed Do people really believe this language is accurate or likely to be helpful? What are we going to do, locate the designer and thwart their evil plan? Or attempt to locate the blueprint? It seems to me that this kind of wording gives way too much credit to human consciousness.
    • tolbish 5y ago
      Would "built" have sufficed?
      • themodelplumber 5y ago
        Was it built Ford tough? Who built it, why, how? Do we even think we have satisfactory answers to these questions (especially in the broader scope)? Do we want tomorrow's "thing we built" to be better?
    • Mandelmus 5y ago
      It's a collective design that's been arrived at iteratively over many generations but it's still designed insofar that it's composed of countless consciously created and refined incentive structures, cultural norms, legal constructs, and institutions that in concert further our current system.
      • 5y ago
• prawn 5y ago
  Anxiety about future savings? Not sure what to do with the time otherwise? Lack of purpose and hobbies. Sense of calling? Avoiding home life or other duties?
• nobody0 5y ago
  Idleness is difficult to deal with for many people in an easily influenced and constantly distraction luring society. When you finally stop, you are about to admit maybe painstakingly your own exsistence.
  • breakyerself 5y ago
    Theres a lot of things you can be doing besides working. Movies, video games, sports, hiking, traveling, volunteering, etc. We work too much because our imaginations have been stunted by capitalist media. The 40 hour work week should have been shortened years ago. Especially as more and more households have become dual income.
• iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
  I don't think we really have to. If you can get away with it then try working a little less and see what happens. My life is so much better now that I work an intensely focused 4-hour day. When I am working, I turn on a timer. When the timer is on, I try very hard to not get distracted. When I do get distracted, I turn the timer off. When that timer reaches 4 hours, I'm done for the day. I don't count meetings in the 4 hours, but I am blessed to not have very many of them. I also work from home, so no one knows what hours I'm actually on. I've picked up new hobbies, I'm more devoted to my family, I cook more and my career continues flourishing. I wish everyone could work like this. Maybe I'm taking advantage, but I seem to be providing at least as much product as I was before plus avoiding burnout and taking pride in the fact that my real salary is nearly twice what it is on paper.
• chaps 5y ago
  Years ago I worked at a company where I was passionate about the work I was doing. Did a lot of hours, worked in the evening... that sort of thing. The job was basically doing doing the work in lieu of a system to install software on bunches and bunches of hosts, being developed by a team of about 5-10 developers. When changes were pushed, we'd be asked to test if the installations would work -- but 9/10 times it never did. And because the devs were opinionated about ~ephemerality~, there were no logs for us to figure out what happened. So we would have to manually ssh into hosts and do the install. My team just gave up on the tool at some point -- nothing we ever said to the devs or management worked to prioritize making the damn thing work. Mind you, the linux-side installer itself was given to us by the vendor and packaged as .rpms and .debs and the devs were working on this for probably a year at that point. Part of my job there was to add tests into ansible to make sure that the devs' installer could do what it was designed to do. But.. every time I tried to push anything, I would be given absolutely nonsense reasons for why my code wasn't acceptable. The worst instance was an ansible config getting rejected by a dev because I used bash in the ansible deploy code and that "not all clients' hosts will have bash" (in spite of a contractual requirement for bash to be installed). He insisted that I call /usr/bin/python instead. It was infuriating. I ended up writing my own automation that would install on an arbitrary set of hosts using the company's existing automation infrastructure just so that I wouldn't have to manually ssh into hosts or deal with the devs' nonsense. It worked well! Anywho, the point. With the devs being asininely critical of my code, my boss eventually had a talk with me, saying that my performance wasn't great and that I wasn't pushing any code. I disagreed, but gave up, said fuck it, wrote four lines of "passable" ansible configs, then watched youtube for the rest of the week. At the end of the week, my boss told me that my performance was much, much better and that I should keep it up. So until I quit, I did as little work as I could. Seriously.. sometimes it just really doesn't make sense to go above and beyond. (Soon after, a major client complained that our packages weren't running on any of their hosts, right before a major event of theirs. The devs' automation just didn't work for AWS hosts, despite a large percent of our clients using it. So I wrote my own automation that just used selenium, which worked well enough to get things installed before the event. Afterwards, I was told that I had too much access, and that if I ever went to the press about the issues we had, that all of my coworkers would be fired once the client sued. Good times.)