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> 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

by 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?
amw-zero 5y ago
But say that we didn't have business or currency, and you had to go and get food for your family. Wouldn't you have to make sacrifices even then? There might be an emotional situation going on at home, but if the food supply was dwindling that is also an immediate problem. If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
- black6 5y ago
  > If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Realistically, if I wanted a similar family quality of life as hunter-gatherer societies, I could reach it in far less work time in modern society. Cutting out the expenses of larger/modern housing, advanced healthcare, higher education, and a lot of expensive leisure activities, living a simple family life would be very cheap and affordable on less than a 40 hour work week. I could even have a better lifestyle in many regards for the same amount of work time.
CountDrewku 5y ago
Yeah I think the problem here is that modern "work" is too separated from survival. This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.
golemotron 5y ago
Some people aren't family oriented. They find more meaning in work and, despite the all of the attempts to devalue work in the blog and this response, it's ok. We don't have to judge people who make that choice because we prefer another.
- chasd00 5y ago
  i made some other replies that would imply otherwise but you do make a fair point. I think it's not fair to ask your partner/children to pay your ticket if you want to put work first however. If that's who you are (and that's perfectly acceptable) then don't have a family and ask them to foot your bill emotionally.

by dvt 5y ago

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?

amw-zero 5y ago

But say that we didn't have business or currency, and you had to go and get food for your family. Wouldn't you have to make sacrifices even then? There might be an emotional situation going on at home, but if the food supply was dwindling that is also an immediate problem. If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.

black6 5y ago
> If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Realistically, if I wanted a similar family quality of life as hunter-gatherer societies, I could reach it in far less work time in modern society. Cutting out the expenses of larger/modern housing, advanced healthcare, higher education, and a lot of expensive leisure activities, living a simple family life would be very cheap and affordable on less than a 40 hour work week. I could even have a better lifestyle in many regards for the same amount of work time.

CountDrewku 5y ago

Yeah I think the problem here is that modern "work" is too separated from survival. This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.

golemotron 5y ago

Some people aren't family oriented. They find more meaning in work and, despite the all of the attempts to devalue work in the blog and this response, it's ok. We don't have to judge people who make that choice because we prefer another.

chasd00 5y ago
i made some other replies that would imply otherwise but you do make a fair point. I think it's not fair to ask your partner/children to pay your ticket if you want to put work first however. If that's who you are (and that's perfectly acceptable) then don't have a family and ask them to foot your bill emotionally.