16 ms·

Work/life balance should be difficult

102 points by KentBeck 5y ago

llIIllIIllIIl 5y ago
Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.
- shard 5y ago
  This might be true in this case since the father was a Silicon Valley engineer. Stepping back, however, and I hate to be that guy, but your statement is "dripping with privilege", as the kids say nowadays. I can tell you that my parents would have not been able to say that, as they worked in manual labor jobs which damaged their bodies in order to provide me with the opportunity to study instead of work. As a second point, reincarnation is a common religious concept, and there could very well be another exciting life after this one (although you probably shouldn't peg any plans on that).
  - llIIllIIllIIl 5y ago
    You're right, that was coming from the statement that the father was a SV engineer. My parents didn't have any exciting projects either, in fact, children's lives depend on my mother who is a pediatric cardiologist in 3rd world country. Nevertheless, she came back from work and read the book with me before bed. I couldn't ask for more. But when people pull long shifts to get the next version of the browser that makes marginal improvements instead of spending time with friends/family/doing a hobby (essentially living, not working) and take it as a medal of honor, they are missing a lot in life. People working late hours to put the food on the table and people deliberately working late and then using it as an excuse are different. If they're the latter, please don't tell that they're having hard time balancing work/life.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    well privileged or not death is inevitable. From the person panhandling on the street to the Elon Musks of the word, you have about 75-80 years on average then lights out. I think you can consider and contemplate that no matter your privilege.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Work/life balance should never be difficult. Significant research has gone into evaluation actual productivity. Sure people tend to go into the office for 40 hours but the amount of time where they actually work is more like 15 hours or less. If we drop to say 30 hour weeks. How's that work/life balance going? Easy peasy.
dainiusse 5y ago
Thank you. That gives a chance to think from another perspective about all that grinding.
slg 5y ago
The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
- elliotec 5y ago
  Maybe you should! Sometimes that's still a lot of work though. And sometimes for some people, the lines between life and work are pretty blurry.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  "Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?" I agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life. This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
- ravitation 5y ago
  I don't know if it really feels incomplete, instead the article seems to make a more compelling case for the opposite of the headline actually being true. If we assume the following premise from the article is true... > The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame. The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.
- d23 5y ago
dvt 5y ago
> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  It’s not even pure productivity, much of it is just wasted time. Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Advocating for a 4 day workweek (or rather, the ongoing ratcheting down of the workweek) gets us to what you describe: flushing out the busy bodies and preventing the savagery of work theater. If work fills the time you allocate for it (Parkinson’s Law [1]), there is no governor on useless tasks or meetings, and countless hours of person life are needlessly wasted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- slibhb 5y ago
  Aren't you contradicting yourself? Work has to do with family/community if you use your salary to support your family/community. Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
- MathYouF 5y ago
  I wonder how these companies we all work for manage to pay our salaries by selling anything if nothing we build contributes to the needs of peoples families. After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
The sum total of your life at any period of time should be fulfilling and each part of your life should be rewarding. If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.
- mfer 5y ago
  Our society needs people to haul garbage away. I would bet many of them don’t do it because it’s rewarding. It just gives them money to pay for things they care about. Should all those people leave hauling our garbage?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    Hauling away garbage is a thankless but virtuous task that benefits society. I would bet that a fair number of workers in that space actually do find satisfaction in it. Likewise, my usual UPS delivery driver seems to take pride in his work and I've noticed and appreciate it. The longer I work in tech, the more I get the itch to quit and work as a handyman or something for a few years.
    - convolvatron 5y ago
      you will be amazed at the satisfaction you get from doing something to better the world a tiny bit and help your fellow man. and how much skill and creativity some of those other people express every day.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    There are actually people who have retired from their IT jobs to drive garbage trucks. If the garbage hauling job doesn't itch a scratch that you have, then find something else or raise the pay until someone is happy to haul your trash.
    - 5y ago
jonahrd 5y ago
This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy. But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs. It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech. [1] https://davidgraeber.org/articles/ https://davidgraeber.org/articles/
- ravitation 5y ago
  > But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech. Not only that, but it's probably true even less often when looking at the totality of jobs everywhere.
lordnacho 5y ago
The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow. Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future. However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old. It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.
- taylodl 5y ago
  Life is what happens when you're making other plans. People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
  - ngc248 5y ago
    “And the future never comes. What comes is always here now.” -Osho
- digianarchist 5y ago
  Do you think this is why the FIRE movement has become more popular in recent years?
  - nradov 5y ago
    Has it become more popular, or just more visible on social media?
    - digianarchist 5y ago
goldcountry 5y ago
This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
- amw-zero 5y ago
  Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
  - roberto 5y ago
    Right, because those are our only options...
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, doing a lot of reading, and teaching people about saving seeds, farming, house building, community building, in exchange for hand-me-down clothes and so on. He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited. It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored. If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.
skywal_l 5y ago
I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs: 1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing. 2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc. 3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc. If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain. Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important. His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen
amw-zero 5y ago
I'm not sure that it _should_ be hard, but I am sure that it always will be hard. This is just the nature of life, your attention is zero-sum. More time here means less time there. Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money. So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kelseyfrog 5y ago
> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
- systemsignal 5y ago
  It’s not a social fact, it’s a fact of thermodynamics. Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work. At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Most people don't consider e.g. worms etc. to be working.
- amw-zero 5y ago
  Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    Filling out TPS reports is not a survival skill
    - emaginniss 5y ago
      This is a function of specialization. You fill out TPS reports to generate value for a company which allows you to purchase food created by people who specialize in food generation.
zepto 5y ago
“He had a deadline.” He also had two young children to provide for on his own. That seems to be omitted from this story.
alistairSH 5y ago
I'm not sure how "Dad sold his soul to work, regretted it forever, but couldn't change his ways" leads to the conclusion that "work/life balance should be difficult." It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.
- musicale 5y ago
  > It's not really that hard, especially in STEM Most tech companies I'm familiar with (and probably companies in other fields as well) seem to think they own you, body and soul, and take issue with any indications otherwise.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    It's because they are not penalized by that mindset. Employeees don't push back. Heck, some people will gladly sell their time for "passion" or "ambition". It's always about incentives.
willcipriano 5y ago
> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline. This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister. You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.
- shard 5y ago
  I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view to something that seems alien. It might have been just as difficult for the author's father to become an affectionate and involved parent, which you see as something he should be able to achieve, as it would be for a typical modern man to accept that plants have the same rights as people, which some future version of humanity might consider to be an obvious given. Second, people grieve in different ways. Some might engage in self-destructive behavior. Others might fall into a deep depression and have trouble getting out of bed. The father might have found comfort with the routine of work where he could pretend everything was fine. He was at least aware enough to make sure his children were care for, by passing them to the grandmother. He might find seeing his wife or child too much to bear, as they remind him too much of his daughter. There is a reason why couples often separate if a child dies. He might not have the skills to deal with his grief, might not have had help, might not know where to get help, might not have even know he needed help. Third, there are several different ways of parenting. One of which is what you mentioned, making sure the family has modest needs so that they can live within those means, reducing the burden on the parents to have to constantly strive for ever increasing wages. There are also parents who want to provide as much as possible for their children, the healthiest foods, the best medical care, exposure to many ideas and activities and cultures, which necessitates a tradeoff between effort put into work and direct time with family. It might be easy to agree that the extremes of the spectrum are poor choices, but harder to say where along the middle of the spectrum is the optimum. Which is the main point of the article, whether you agree or not.
20211215throw 5y ago
The first 10-15 years I worked my ass off. The last 10 I've taken it easy so I'm behind on all the new tech. The problem is now I want to work hard again but my skills are out of date. Despite the "unbelievably Strong" job market I'm finding it hard to get roles.
- taterbase 5y ago
  How would you characterize the differences between your years working your ass off and your years taking it easy? What did daily work look like during these eras?
TheGigaChad 5y ago
The author is a RETARD.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
He says "Work" and uses it as a synonym for "Career". I'm not sure about anyone else (though having read enough posts on this site, I know I speak for many), there are many kinds of work. I get log off from my job, these days, and play with my son and while he's being put to bed (no mean feat for my wife these days... I'd help if he'd allow it), I crack open the personal Linux box and start in on Rust code with the Bevy engine, for no reason other than self fulfillment. It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice. I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in. I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
I found this article to be lacking. It felt like introduction to the content... that abruptly endedn
micromacrofoot 5y ago
It sounds like the author's father never recovered from extreme trauma, which is a fate many face. I'm not sure that says anything about a job/life balance.
sdze 5y ago
Improve your expenditures and work less.
x0hm 5y ago
"Work" and "jobs" are two very different things. We need action towards results. We do not need 16 hour workdays.
civilized 5y ago
What a silly headline. What's wrong with doing a good job at your 9-5 and coming home with a clear mind to be with your family? To be honest I work too hard, but I'm not deluded that I'm somehow an especially good person for doing so. The world is full of awesome people whose energy mostly goes to things outside their jobs, and who make more meaningful contributions because of this.
bidivia 5y ago
This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members. Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss. If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life. When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life. It is not worth it but people do it again an again. People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence. Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.
avgcorrection 5y ago
That you need work is kind of tautological: work is some kind of struggle that you have to go through in order to achieve some end. When work becomes either a non-struggle or optional is also when it stops being work. But it’s quite the claim to say that work is a psychological need. Think what work is for most people. Work for most people consists of providing surplus value to the owners of whatever organization that they work for. That is what work is in economic terms. Where is your Maslow now? But people like this author—although perhaps not him in particular—have to give some lip service to show fealty to the concept of Loving Work in case some potential employer or whatever other person-with-networking-potential stumbles upon his blog. (We have careers to maintain…)
Buttons840 5y ago
> We need work. Yes, but the place you get a paycheck from doesn't have to be this kind of work, the work we need. I need a paycheck. I need work. They can come from different places. Give me my paycheck and let me spend time with family and on my true work, if not, in this market, I'll find another job that pays more.
paulstovell 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it. I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions. So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right. The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other. I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it. PS: Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  I feel like you’re the only commenter so far to understand Kent’s point. I agree with you: if the balance isn’t hard it means you’re doing some things you don’t love. Correcting that will likely lead to more happiness, even if it makes the balancing harder.
golemiprague 5y ago
I don't understand what this guy wants, his dad had to bring money to the table, was probably depressed for loosing a wife and a daughter which is more depressing to the father than to the child. Give him a bit of slack, the fact that he was still functioning at work is good enough, loosing a kid put a a hole in a father heart, to expect him to be normal is just clueless
a45a33s 5y ago
this is a pretty bizarre article and im not even sure what to take away from it guy who works all the time loses some of his family, feels bad, continues to neglect the remaining family, and the son chastises him for not climbing the corporate ladder high enough. in conclusion work is a Very Important Thing
honkycat 5y ago
This reminds me of one of the founders of blizzard posting on twitter a while ago "If you don't code in your free time, you are not a programmer." This dude, who graduated from the USC during a huge economic boom, landed a dream job at a small video game company that was about to blow up, then never had a different job since gets to decide who is a programmer or not? You were born during an economic boom, graduated from a prestigious university with the perfect degree at EXACTLY the right time. You started out on 3rd base, why would anyone take career advice from you. If you were to re-enter the workforce today you would be down here with the rest of us, instead of lording over us with your fancy title. Have some humility. ---- Nothing against Kent Beck, I rather like him and he is not being a jerk in this post, unlike the blizzard dude. But it is kind-of the same situation. A lot of us did not get in on the ground floor of the software engineering gold rush and got to become rich and (semi? kinda?)famous with our own Wikipedia article before the industry got crowded. I'll speak for myself: I am extremely career oriented. I want to do good work and I have done well for myself. But I don't have a wikipedia article. I don't have the fancy degree to get my foot in the door. I don't have the 50 year long career that make people jump to attention when my resume slides across the desk. I don't have the mental stability to burn out my starry dynamo every night trying to make my boss more money. Nobody cares about keeping me happy. I don't get the interesting work at my company. I take what I can get and I am a commodity level developer like 99% of everyone else on this website. I think I do high quality work but it ends there for me. --- Another aside: My parents were both workaholics. They weren't really around that much growing up, and I was always forced into band/sports/daycare/etc. because it was basically free baby-sitting and they didn't want to have to leave work to pick me up. They have even acknowledged this to me. As my mom once said: "Building your business was more fun than raising your kids." I'm not complaining, they are nice people and did their best. Honestly, this is pretty normal and I don't think it is that big of a deal. What IS a big deal is the lack of hobbies and interest my parents have outside of work. My dad is retiring, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He plays a lot of video poker. It is frustrating, I want him to thrive and not hang out at bars all day, but he hasn't developed any relationships and hobbies outside of his work. ( Living in a tiny town doesn't help either. )
didibus 5y ago
I really don't think work is on Maslow's hierarchy. Work can sometimes provide you with Esteem, Belonging and Self-actualization, but often it's a poor and unreliable mechanism to fill those. Working on interesting things with other people you like and feeling accomplished and useful and respected in that way is great, but you can do that without it being a Job. If I had an infinite stream of money, I'd still be working on interesting things when I need too, and it be easy enough to find those. In my opinion the work as we've defined it today is accidental, a necessity to provide the lower things on the hierarchy like food and shelter, and in some cases can also be fulfilling and interesting, but rarely in a sustainable way and often it's not at all.
ordiel 5y ago
I work for a living, I don't live for work. Giving too much importance to work is stupid (IMHO) and its a highway to feeling your life was entire shit by the end of it whenever that is... I think this pandemic serves as the best example to how disposable you are to a company... Just one more replacable cog in the machine...
mitchbob 5y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/LLr4Q https://archive.ph/LLr4Q
rramadass 5y ago
There is nothing much to the article; a personal anecdote and a far-fetched inference which btw, is not quite correct. I am surprised that this generated so much discussion.
tomhunters 5y ago
If you're a busy person, it depends on what you're doing. If you love what you do, there's never a busy time in your life.
hpen 5y ago
People are different. Some of us do need work, some probably don't.

102 points by KentBeck 5y ago

Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.

shard 5y ago
This might be true in this case since the father was a Silicon Valley engineer. Stepping back, however, and I hate to be that guy, but your statement is "dripping with privilege", as the kids say nowadays. I can tell you that my parents would have not been able to say that, as they worked in manual labor jobs which damaged their bodies in order to provide me with the opportunity to study instead of work. As a second point, reincarnation is a common religious concept, and there could very well be another exciting life after this one (although you probably shouldn't peg any plans on that).
- llIIllIIllIIl 5y ago
  You're right, that was coming from the statement that the father was a SV engineer. My parents didn't have any exciting projects either, in fact, children's lives depend on my mother who is a pediatric cardiologist in 3rd world country. Nevertheless, she came back from work and read the book with me before bed. I couldn't ask for more. But when people pull long shifts to get the next version of the browser that makes marginal improvements instead of spending time with friends/family/doing a hobby (essentially living, not working) and take it as a medal of honor, they are missing a lot in life. People working late hours to put the food on the table and people deliberately working late and then using it as an excuse are different. If they're the latter, please don't tell that they're having hard time balancing work/life.
- chasd00 5y ago
  well privileged or not death is inevitable. From the person panhandling on the street to the Elon Musks of the word, you have about 75-80 years on average then lights out. I think you can consider and contemplate that no matter your privilege.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Work/life balance should never be difficult. Significant research has gone into evaluation actual productivity. Sure people tend to go into the office for 40 hours but the amount of time where they actually work is more like 15 hours or less. If we drop to say 30 hour weeks. How's that work/life balance going? Easy peasy.

dainiusse 5y ago

Thank you. That gives a chance to think from another perspective about all that grinding.

slg 5y ago

The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?

elliotec 5y ago
Maybe you should! Sometimes that's still a lot of work though. And sometimes for some people, the lines between life and work are pretty blurry.
lostcolony 5y ago
"Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?" I agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life. This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
ravitation 5y ago
I don't know if it really feels incomplete, instead the article seems to make a more compelling case for the opposite of the headline actually being true. If we assume the following premise from the article is true... > The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame. The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.
d23 5y ago

dvt 5y ago

> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.

colechristensen 5y ago
It’s not even pure productivity, much of it is just wasted time. Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Advocating for a 4 day workweek (or rather, the ongoing ratcheting down of the workweek) gets us to what you describe: flushing out the busy bodies and preventing the savagery of work theater. If work fills the time you allocate for it (Parkinson’s Law [1]), there is no governor on useless tasks or meetings, and countless hours of person life are needlessly wasted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
slibhb 5y ago
Aren't you contradicting yourself? Work has to do with family/community if you use your salary to support your family/community. Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
MathYouF 5y ago
I wonder how these companies we all work for manage to pay our salaries by selling anything if nothing we build contributes to the needs of peoples families. After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

The sum total of your life at any period of time should be fulfilling and each part of your life should be rewarding. If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.

mfer 5y ago
Our society needs people to haul garbage away. I would bet many of them don’t do it because it’s rewarding. It just gives them money to pay for things they care about. Should all those people leave hauling our garbage?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  Hauling away garbage is a thankless but virtuous task that benefits society. I would bet that a fair number of workers in that space actually do find satisfaction in it. Likewise, my usual UPS delivery driver seems to take pride in his work and I've noticed and appreciate it. The longer I work in tech, the more I get the itch to quit and work as a handyman or something for a few years.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    you will be amazed at the satisfaction you get from doing something to better the world a tiny bit and help your fellow man. and how much skill and creativity some of those other people express every day.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  There are actually people who have retired from their IT jobs to drive garbage trucks. If the garbage hauling job doesn't itch a scratch that you have, then find something else or raise the pay until someone is happy to haul your trash.
  - 5y ago

jonahrd 5y ago

This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy. But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs. It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech. [1] https://davidgraeber.org/articles/ https://davidgraeber.org/articles/

ravitation 5y ago
> But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech. Not only that, but it's probably true even less often when looking at the totality of jobs everywhere.

lordnacho 5y ago

The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow. Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future. However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old. It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.

taylodl 5y ago
Life is what happens when you're making other plans. People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
- ngc248 5y ago
  “And the future never comes. What comes is always here now.” -Osho
digianarchist 5y ago
Do you think this is why the FIRE movement has become more popular in recent years?
- nradov 5y ago
  Has it become more popular, or just more visible on social media?
  - digianarchist 5y ago

goldcountry 5y ago

This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.

amw-zero 5y ago
Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
- roberto 5y ago
  Right, because those are our only options...
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, doing a lot of reading, and teaching people about saving seeds, farming, house building, community building, in exchange for hand-me-down clothes and so on. He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited. It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored. If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.

skywal_l 5y ago

I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs: 1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing. 2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc. 3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc. If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain. Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important. His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen

amw-zero 5y ago

I'm not sure that it _should_ be hard, but I am sure that it always will be hard. This is just the nature of life, your attention is zero-sum. More time here means less time there. Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money. So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kelseyfrog 5y ago

> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.

systemsignal 5y ago
It’s not a social fact, it’s a fact of thermodynamics. Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work. At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Most people don't consider e.g. worms etc. to be working.
amw-zero 5y ago
Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?
- ehutch79 5y ago
  Filling out TPS reports is not a survival skill
  - emaginniss 5y ago
    This is a function of specialization. You fill out TPS reports to generate value for a company which allows you to purchase food created by people who specialize in food generation.

zepto 5y ago

“He had a deadline.” He also had two young children to provide for on his own. That seems to be omitted from this story.

alistairSH 5y ago

I'm not sure how "Dad sold his soul to work, regretted it forever, but couldn't change his ways" leads to the conclusion that "work/life balance should be difficult." It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.

musicale 5y ago
> It's not really that hard, especially in STEM Most tech companies I'm familiar with (and probably companies in other fields as well) seem to think they own you, body and soul, and take issue with any indications otherwise.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  It's because they are not penalized by that mindset. Employeees don't push back. Heck, some people will gladly sell their time for "passion" or "ambition". It's always about incentives.

willcipriano 5y ago

> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline. This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister. You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.

shard 5y ago
I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view to something that seems alien. It might have been just as difficult for the author's father to become an affectionate and involved parent, which you see as something he should be able to achieve, as it would be for a typical modern man to accept that plants have the same rights as people, which some future version of humanity might consider to be an obvious given. Second, people grieve in different ways. Some might engage in self-destructive behavior. Others might fall into a deep depression and have trouble getting out of bed. The father might have found comfort with the routine of work where he could pretend everything was fine. He was at least aware enough to make sure his children were care for, by passing them to the grandmother. He might find seeing his wife or child too much to bear, as they remind him too much of his daughter. There is a reason why couples often separate if a child dies. He might not have the skills to deal with his grief, might not have had help, might not know where to get help, might not have even know he needed help. Third, there are several different ways of parenting. One of which is what you mentioned, making sure the family has modest needs so that they can live within those means, reducing the burden on the parents to have to constantly strive for ever increasing wages. There are also parents who want to provide as much as possible for their children, the healthiest foods, the best medical care, exposure to many ideas and activities and cultures, which necessitates a tradeoff between effort put into work and direct time with family. It might be easy to agree that the extremes of the spectrum are poor choices, but harder to say where along the middle of the spectrum is the optimum. Which is the main point of the article, whether you agree or not.

20211215throw 5y ago

The first 10-15 years I worked my ass off. The last 10 I've taken it easy so I'm behind on all the new tech. The problem is now I want to work hard again but my skills are out of date. Despite the "unbelievably Strong" job market I'm finding it hard to get roles.

taterbase 5y ago
How would you characterize the differences between your years working your ass off and your years taking it easy? What did daily work look like during these eras?

TheGigaChad 5y ago

The author is a RETARD.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

He says "Work" and uses it as a synonym for "Career". I'm not sure about anyone else (though having read enough posts on this site, I know I speak for many), there are many kinds of work. I get log off from my job, these days, and play with my son and while he's being put to bed (no mean feat for my wife these days... I'd help if he'd allow it), I crack open the personal Linux box and start in on Rust code with the Bevy engine, for no reason other than self fulfillment. It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice. I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in. I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

I found this article to be lacking. It felt like introduction to the content... that abruptly endedn

micromacrofoot 5y ago

It sounds like the author's father never recovered from extreme trauma, which is a fate many face. I'm not sure that says anything about a job/life balance.

sdze 5y ago

Improve your expenditures and work less.

x0hm 5y ago

"Work" and "jobs" are two very different things. We need action towards results. We do not need 16 hour workdays.

civilized 5y ago

What a silly headline. What's wrong with doing a good job at your 9-5 and coming home with a clear mind to be with your family? To be honest I work too hard, but I'm not deluded that I'm somehow an especially good person for doing so. The world is full of awesome people whose energy mostly goes to things outside their jobs, and who make more meaningful contributions because of this.

bidivia 5y ago

This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members. Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss. If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life. When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life. It is not worth it but people do it again an again. People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence. Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.

avgcorrection 5y ago

That you need work is kind of tautological: work is some kind of struggle that you have to go through in order to achieve some end. When work becomes either a non-struggle or optional is also when it stops being work. But it’s quite the claim to say that work is a psychological need. Think what work is for most people. Work for most people consists of providing surplus value to the owners of whatever organization that they work for. That is what work is in economic terms. Where is your Maslow now? But people like this author—although perhaps not him in particular—have to give some lip service to show fealty to the concept of Loving Work in case some potential employer or whatever other person-with-networking-potential stumbles upon his blog. (We have careers to maintain…)

Buttons840 5y ago

> We need work. Yes, but the place you get a paycheck from doesn't have to be this kind of work, the work we need. I need a paycheck. I need work. They can come from different places. Give me my paycheck and let me spend time with family and on my true work, if not, in this market, I'll find another job that pays more.

paulstovell 5y ago

Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it. I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions. So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right. The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other. I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it. PS: Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.

sonofhans 5y ago
I feel like you’re the only commenter so far to understand Kent’s point. I agree with you: if the balance isn’t hard it means you’re doing some things you don’t love. Correcting that will likely lead to more happiness, even if it makes the balancing harder.

golemiprague 5y ago

I don't understand what this guy wants, his dad had to bring money to the table, was probably depressed for loosing a wife and a daughter which is more depressing to the father than to the child. Give him a bit of slack, the fact that he was still functioning at work is good enough, loosing a kid put a a hole in a father heart, to expect him to be normal is just clueless

a45a33s 5y ago

this is a pretty bizarre article and im not even sure what to take away from it guy who works all the time loses some of his family, feels bad, continues to neglect the remaining family, and the son chastises him for not climbing the corporate ladder high enough. in conclusion work is a Very Important Thing

honkycat 5y ago

This reminds me of one of the founders of blizzard posting on twitter a while ago "If you don't code in your free time, you are not a programmer." This dude, who graduated from the USC during a huge economic boom, landed a dream job at a small video game company that was about to blow up, then never had a different job since gets to decide who is a programmer or not? You were born during an economic boom, graduated from a prestigious university with the perfect degree at EXACTLY the right time. You started out on 3rd base, why would anyone take career advice from you. If you were to re-enter the workforce today you would be down here with the rest of us, instead of lording over us with your fancy title. Have some humility. ---- Nothing against Kent Beck, I rather like him and he is not being a jerk in this post, unlike the blizzard dude. But it is kind-of the same situation. A lot of us did not get in on the ground floor of the software engineering gold rush and got to become rich and (semi? kinda?)famous with our own Wikipedia article before the industry got crowded. I'll speak for myself: I am extremely career oriented. I want to do good work and I have done well for myself. But I don't have a wikipedia article. I don't have the fancy degree to get my foot in the door. I don't have the 50 year long career that make people jump to attention when my resume slides across the desk. I don't have the mental stability to burn out my starry dynamo every night trying to make my boss more money. Nobody cares about keeping me happy. I don't get the interesting work at my company. I take what I can get and I am a commodity level developer like 99% of everyone else on this website. I think I do high quality work but it ends there for me. --- Another aside: My parents were both workaholics. They weren't really around that much growing up, and I was always forced into band/sports/daycare/etc. because it was basically free baby-sitting and they didn't want to have to leave work to pick me up. They have even acknowledged this to me. As my mom once said: "Building your business was more fun than raising your kids." I'm not complaining, they are nice people and did their best. Honestly, this is pretty normal and I don't think it is that big of a deal. What IS a big deal is the lack of hobbies and interest my parents have outside of work. My dad is retiring, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He plays a lot of video poker. It is frustrating, I want him to thrive and not hang out at bars all day, but he hasn't developed any relationships and hobbies outside of his work. ( Living in a tiny town doesn't help either. )

didibus 5y ago

I really don't think work is on Maslow's hierarchy. Work can sometimes provide you with Esteem, Belonging and Self-actualization, but often it's a poor and unreliable mechanism to fill those. Working on interesting things with other people you like and feeling accomplished and useful and respected in that way is great, but you can do that without it being a Job. If I had an infinite stream of money, I'd still be working on interesting things when I need too, and it be easy enough to find those. In my opinion the work as we've defined it today is accidental, a necessity to provide the lower things on the hierarchy like food and shelter, and in some cases can also be fulfilling and interesting, but rarely in a sustainable way and often it's not at all.

ordiel 5y ago

I work for a living, I don't live for work. Giving too much importance to work is stupid (IMHO) and its a highway to feeling your life was entire shit by the end of it whenever that is... I think this pandemic serves as the best example to how disposable you are to a company... Just one more replacable cog in the machine...

mitchbob 5y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/LLr4Q https://archive.ph/LLr4Q

rramadass 5y ago

There is nothing much to the article; a personal anecdote and a far-fetched inference which btw, is not quite correct. I am surprised that this generated so much discussion.

tomhunters 5y ago

If you're a busy person, it depends on what you're doing. If you love what you do, there's never a busy time in your life.

hpen 5y ago

People are different. Some of us do need work, some probably don't.