5 ms·

In before the other comments to this effect: - You are weak - Your grandparents had it worse - Think of the people working for minimum wage - Some of us act

by nzmsv 5y ago

In before the other comments to this effect: - You are weak - Your grandparents had it worse - Think of the people working for minimum wage - Some of us actually love programming so much we will happily sacrifice our health; this choice is morally superior because we say so - I haven't had a vacation in 20 years and neither should you /sarcasm off

n8cpdx 5y ago
I really like society as it is. I, as rare as it is, identify as a neoliberal and I generally am invested in how things are. I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself, and aside from wanting a larger safety net, largely value the idea of a competitive market for labor. Those ideas, I suspect much more prevalent on HN than other sites, lead to defensiveness when antiwork or work-critical ideas are shared. Arguments about grandparents and weakness are generally missing the point or intellectually dishonest, and I know because I’ve made those arguments/comments many times. Looking past that defensiveness, I have a hard time arguing that everything above isn’t right; modern work is taxing and when you’re trying to work 8+ (I naturally tend towards 10+) hours a day, stay healthy, and also pursue hobbies and personal development, it is no surprise that people are breaking down. I want to see more serious engagement with efforts to make work more sustainable for people, ideally without limiting burnout. Maybe the right answer is to just do less, but I want to have my cake and eat it too.
- _moof 5y ago
  > I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself Yeah, see, this right here is the problem. There's this belief that people objecting to current norms and standards around work constitutes "not working hard," which is a non sequitur. In my experience most people want to work. They just don’t want to do it on the terms currently laid out for them--terms that employers like to pretend are inviolable laws of nature, not choices they make and are responsible for.
- myself248 5y ago
  I'm not anti-work, I'm anti-toil. The industrial revolution was supposed to free humankind from backbreaking labor and usher in an era of comfortable enlightenment. Instead, we got rampant inequality, environmental devastation, sociological manipulation, and the internet of shit. (Whose true effects we won't see until Cranky Bear decides to show us all at once.) And huge numbers of people still toil 50+ hours a week to keep their head barely above water. Work is fine, but the systems surrounding work have robbed us.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Before the industrial revolution, inequality was far worse and so was the amount of back breaking labor humans and animals performed. It's true we have a larger negative environmental impact now. Part of that is the huge increase in population made possible by the industrial revolution. Some environmental things like pollution inside cities and rivers has gotten better over time in industrialized countries. The internet is a mixed blessing. It offers a lot in addition to the shit. The problem is the expectation that it would usher in a digital utopia instead of just reflecting society as everyone started to move online. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to manual labor, no electricity or indoor plumbing, lack of refrigeration, much more limited options for travel, news and entertainment, and the lack of modern medicine.
- courtf 5y ago
  Appreciate this comment, thank you. For many years I had a sort of ruthless determination to get ahead and work hard. It mostly helped me back then, as many obstacles then were the sort that could be brute-forced, and it was addictive in a way as well. I could feel myself improving, could see the progress happening etc. I made lots of money for a while, got myself and my husband ahead in life etc. A few things happened that sort of scuttled my motivation. The intrinsic rewards for the hard work I was doing stopped arriving. In order to keep progressing personally, I would need to engage in ever more competitive search for fun/challenging work. The competitive aspect might have excited me in the past, but I had by then been shafted one time too many by petty politics and discrimination to feel much interest in engaging with that aspect of the industry. I could keep doing senior engineer work, mobile/backend whatever, and occasionally find some new topic to excite me, but often spend most of the time rehashing similar ideas, or cleaning up other people's messes. So I burned out, took some time to address my depression and have gotten myself back together mentally, for the most part (some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto). But even now, when I look at new programming things I could work on, I can't help but see them all as simply paths back into a world that has lost its luster, full of people and situations that waste my time and energy. I can still work hard and build good software, but I just don't see why I should when it will inevitably lead me back to a place that almost destroyed me. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I should be better about forgetting the past and not presuming what my new experiences will look like. I'd love to be that foolish again someday, but I just can't afford to take that kind of risk anymore. My temporary solution has been to work on stuff that isn't programming, to become like a beginner again in some other field. Philosophy, political science, history, anthropology, classic literature and others have been great to explore on my own and I've grown from these explorations. So now I'm getting my rewards from new sources. I still have the urge to make money, like a survival instinct, but I'm fortunate to have a decently stable life raft that I can float on for the time being.
  - thecoppinger 5y ago
    This really resonated with me, thank you. "Some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto" I think I would like this as my epitaph.
  - ffhhj 5y ago
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >I like to see people working hard That's the problem I have with neoliberals, they want to impose their ideology on the rest of us.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  My own view is this: money is a metric that our society uses as a measure of usefulness of a certain individual for others in the collective. Like any metric, it is imperfect and doesn't capture nuance very well. When you optimize for any metric, be it lines of code or bank account balance, you generally get suboptimal results. Doesn't mean the metric is useless. It's just not the only source of truth.

by nzmsv 5y ago

n8cpdx 5y ago

I really like society as it is. I, as rare as it is, identify as a neoliberal and I generally am invested in how things are. I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself, and aside from wanting a larger safety net, largely value the idea of a competitive market for labor. Those ideas, I suspect much more prevalent on HN than other sites, lead to defensiveness when antiwork or work-critical ideas are shared. Arguments about grandparents and weakness are generally missing the point or intellectually dishonest, and I know because I’ve made those arguments/comments many times. Looking past that defensiveness, I have a hard time arguing that everything above isn’t right; modern work is taxing and when you’re trying to work 8+ (I naturally tend towards 10+) hours a day, stay healthy, and also pursue hobbies and personal development, it is no surprise that people are breaking down. I want to see more serious engagement with efforts to make work more sustainable for people, ideally without limiting burnout. Maybe the right answer is to just do less, but I want to have my cake and eat it too.

_moof 5y ago
> I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself Yeah, see, this right here is the problem. There's this belief that people objecting to current norms and standards around work constitutes "not working hard," which is a non sequitur. In my experience most people want to work. They just don’t want to do it on the terms currently laid out for them--terms that employers like to pretend are inviolable laws of nature, not choices they make and are responsible for.
myself248 5y ago
I'm not anti-work, I'm anti-toil. The industrial revolution was supposed to free humankind from backbreaking labor and usher in an era of comfortable enlightenment. Instead, we got rampant inequality, environmental devastation, sociological manipulation, and the internet of shit. (Whose true effects we won't see until Cranky Bear decides to show us all at once.) And huge numbers of people still toil 50+ hours a week to keep their head barely above water. Work is fine, but the systems surrounding work have robbed us.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Before the industrial revolution, inequality was far worse and so was the amount of back breaking labor humans and animals performed. It's true we have a larger negative environmental impact now. Part of that is the huge increase in population made possible by the industrial revolution. Some environmental things like pollution inside cities and rivers has gotten better over time in industrialized countries. The internet is a mixed blessing. It offers a lot in addition to the shit. The problem is the expectation that it would usher in a digital utopia instead of just reflecting society as everyone started to move online. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to manual labor, no electricity or indoor plumbing, lack of refrigeration, much more limited options for travel, news and entertainment, and the lack of modern medicine.
courtf 5y ago
Appreciate this comment, thank you. For many years I had a sort of ruthless determination to get ahead and work hard. It mostly helped me back then, as many obstacles then were the sort that could be brute-forced, and it was addictive in a way as well. I could feel myself improving, could see the progress happening etc. I made lots of money for a while, got myself and my husband ahead in life etc. A few things happened that sort of scuttled my motivation. The intrinsic rewards for the hard work I was doing stopped arriving. In order to keep progressing personally, I would need to engage in ever more competitive search for fun/challenging work. The competitive aspect might have excited me in the past, but I had by then been shafted one time too many by petty politics and discrimination to feel much interest in engaging with that aspect of the industry. I could keep doing senior engineer work, mobile/backend whatever, and occasionally find some new topic to excite me, but often spend most of the time rehashing similar ideas, or cleaning up other people's messes. So I burned out, took some time to address my depression and have gotten myself back together mentally, for the most part (some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto). But even now, when I look at new programming things I could work on, I can't help but see them all as simply paths back into a world that has lost its luster, full of people and situations that waste my time and energy. I can still work hard and build good software, but I just don't see why I should when it will inevitably lead me back to a place that almost destroyed me. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I should be better about forgetting the past and not presuming what my new experiences will look like. I'd love to be that foolish again someday, but I just can't afford to take that kind of risk anymore. My temporary solution has been to work on stuff that isn't programming, to become like a beginner again in some other field. Philosophy, political science, history, anthropology, classic literature and others have been great to explore on my own and I've grown from these explorations. So now I'm getting my rewards from new sources. I still have the urge to make money, like a survival instinct, but I'm fortunate to have a decently stable life raft that I can float on for the time being.
- thecoppinger 5y ago
  This really resonated with me, thank you. "Some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto" I think I would like this as my epitaph.
- ffhhj 5y ago
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I like to see people working hard That's the problem I have with neoliberals, they want to impose their ideology on the rest of us.
nzmsv 5y ago
My own view is this: money is a metric that our society uses as a measure of usefulness of a certain individual for others in the collective. Like any metric, it is imperfect and doesn't capture nuance very well. When you optimize for any metric, be it lines of code or bank account balance, you generally get suboptimal results. Doesn't mean the metric is useless. It's just not the only source of truth.