10 ms·

I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here. If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour?

I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here. If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like! I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. (If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem)

Broken_Hippo 4y ago
Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all. The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.
mrtksn 4y ago
> If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like! It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society. You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before. In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up. So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.
- neonsunset 4y ago
  Unsure why the post is downvoted, this point of view is really interesting. Could you link some reference materials to explore this more?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    I think the topic is quite nebulous but I recall some articles on these issues here on HN that reached the front page. I recall something about historical ratio of the non-working elites being about the same and societies crumbling over that threshold.
    - GoldenRacer 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
  - joaonmatos 4y ago
    I guess you can read “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” by V.I. Lenin to explore the topic more
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    I am downvoting because the comment acts as if it's a mystery where all the wealth gains in productivity have gone. It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.) It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population. [0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      And no one cares about your diatribe or outrage. The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best. Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.
arvinsim 4y ago
I would even say that you need leisure and slacking off to discover what you actually want to do.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Then you might discover that you like doing something that doesn't involve paying for it!
watwut 4y ago
> If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it. My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.
- mordae 4y ago
  For sure. Ever tried to go to bed immediately after sending the last email, your mind still preoccupied by work? It's impossible to get a good sleep like that. At least for me. A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential. Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Yeah but that's not even contended. In a hypothetical scenario where you didn't have to work to earn a certain quality of life (since, lets be honest, none of us have to "work to live"), would it be ideal to spend all of that time on passive, consumptive activities? Notwithstanding issues with life balance that are not endemic, I think work is good for people in most of its capacity. Coordinating with others and producing something of your labors, particularly that which others value, is validating and meaningful. You could quibble that some of that could be done at leisure, but things we take for granted won't. There's a lot of well compensated hard work out there that no one does for fun. Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.
  - watwut 4y ago
    In that hypothetical scenario, it is likely that I would not ended up spending all of that time on passive, consumptive activities. Assuming that there would be options for me to be more active and it would be socially acceptable for me to do things. (If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)
cs137 4y ago
The corporate work week was never going to go below 35-40 hours per week. Bosses know they only get 15 good hours out of most people, if that, and it doesn't bother them as much as you'd think it would, because they get enough. It's not about productivity; it's about control. The workweek has to comprise at least 50.1% of a typical person's otherwise discretionary time, because otherwise people could have two jobs and the employer's power would be reduced. This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.
- imgabe 4y ago
  Who are these bosses? Managers? You realize they’re just employees too right?
  - cs137 4y ago
    I do realize that, at least if we're talking about middle managers. It'd be a stretch to say that executives are "labor" or are "employees" except in a strict legal fashion. Executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The reasons for this are sociological rather than economic--in short, so long as executives uphold the interests of the upper class, the other rich people who control the company (important shareholders) will look the other way on their self-dealing. The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Good luck with that.
    - captainredbeard 4y ago
Forgeties79 4y ago
As I’ve gotten older, I have been vocalizing a question to my friends and family: why is it so unreasonable of me to not want to work a job I don’t like, and instead spend my time producing documentaries and teaching audio production to kids? These are two things I’ve found I love doing. They provide value to society. Yet a sustained income from them is basically unattainable except in very specific, lucky cases, not to mention the income is minimal. People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it. All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving. Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.
- CodeSgt 4y ago
  Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be? I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not. We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.
slothtrop 4y ago
I program for work, and not leisure. As prospective careers go, it probably ranks top among similar labor. All the same I could not be arsed to develop "for its own sake". Work offers coordinating with others towards a common goal and finding validation from the product, and the value it brings - but it also, it offers incentive. If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".
swayvil 4y ago
>I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here. There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable. The alternative is depression.
InCityDreams 4y ago
Its like the joke of the businessman who sees a fisherman doing nothing on the beach. Why dont you go fish some more? Why would i? Then you can make more money, buy another boat and make even more money. But why? Then you can build a fleet and with even more money you can control the factories where your fish is processed. And then? Well then with your empire you can spend two weeks of the year on the beach, like me. /short version.
causality0 4y ago
Just do whatever you like! Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?
- Retric 4y ago
  Looking at the people I know there is a huge overlap between free time and happiness. Unemployment is stressful, but looking at the extremes comfortable retirement easily beats constant overwork. And voluntarily working part time beats a full time job as long as their income is sufficient. It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  > Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy. I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.
- soraki_soladead 4y ago
  That assumes that people left to their own free will and time would end up in a dismal state as the default. I’m not sure. I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something. It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Security against adversity, delayed gratification for better future reward, leaving a legacy or your kids, or philanthropy... there are lots of reasons not to live by our animal instincts of the bare minimum of how much work is enough for "survival".
andsoitis 4y ago
One emergent process of the technological age is the drive to optimize ourselves (humans) as if we are machines for increased productivity. Think of all the ways we measure aspects of our behavior, goals, accomplishments.
mch82 4y ago
Two contributing factors are religion and social identity. The “Protestant work ethic” has played a role in shaping American social views about work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-job.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  I think it's also very easy to just look around at all the problems and mysteries in the world/universe and feel compelled to do something. Even in the absence of any kind of "religious work ethic".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write. As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do. Or as Bukowski wrote: "if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire." In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all. The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.

mrtksn 4y ago

> If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like! It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society. You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before. In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up. So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.

neonsunset 4y ago
Unsure why the post is downvoted, this point of view is really interesting. Could you link some reference materials to explore this more?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I think the topic is quite nebulous but I recall some articles on these issues here on HN that reached the front page. I recall something about historical ratio of the non-working elites being about the same and societies crumbling over that threshold.
  - GoldenRacer 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
- joaonmatos 4y ago
  I guess you can read “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” by V.I. Lenin to explore the topic more
- mandmandam 4y ago
  I am downvoting because the comment acts as if it's a mystery where all the wealth gains in productivity have gone. It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.) It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population. [0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    And no one cares about your diatribe or outrage. The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best. Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.

arvinsim 4y ago

I would even say that you need leisure and slacking off to discover what you actually want to do.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
Then you might discover that you like doing something that doesn't involve paying for it!

watwut 4y ago

> If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it. My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.

mordae 4y ago
For sure. Ever tried to go to bed immediately after sending the last email, your mind still preoccupied by work? It's impossible to get a good sleep like that. At least for me. A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential. Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.
slothtrop 4y ago
Yeah but that's not even contended. In a hypothetical scenario where you didn't have to work to earn a certain quality of life (since, lets be honest, none of us have to "work to live"), would it be ideal to spend all of that time on passive, consumptive activities? Notwithstanding issues with life balance that are not endemic, I think work is good for people in most of its capacity. Coordinating with others and producing something of your labors, particularly that which others value, is validating and meaningful. You could quibble that some of that could be done at leisure, but things we take for granted won't. There's a lot of well compensated hard work out there that no one does for fun. Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.
- watwut 4y ago
  In that hypothetical scenario, it is likely that I would not ended up spending all of that time on passive, consumptive activities. Assuming that there would be options for me to be more active and it would be socially acceptable for me to do things. (If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)

cs137 4y ago

The corporate work week was never going to go below 35-40 hours per week. Bosses know they only get 15 good hours out of most people, if that, and it doesn't bother them as much as you'd think it would, because they get enough. It's not about productivity; it's about control. The workweek has to comprise at least 50.1% of a typical person's otherwise discretionary time, because otherwise people could have two jobs and the employer's power would be reduced. This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.

imgabe 4y ago
Who are these bosses? Managers? You realize they’re just employees too right?
- cs137 4y ago
  I do realize that, at least if we're talking about middle managers. It'd be a stretch to say that executives are "labor" or are "employees" except in a strict legal fashion. Executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The reasons for this are sociological rather than economic--in short, so long as executives uphold the interests of the upper class, the other rich people who control the company (important shareholders) will look the other way on their self-dealing. The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    Good luck with that.
  - captainredbeard 4y ago

Forgeties79 4y ago

As I’ve gotten older, I have been vocalizing a question to my friends and family: why is it so unreasonable of me to not want to work a job I don’t like, and instead spend my time producing documentaries and teaching audio production to kids? These are two things I’ve found I love doing. They provide value to society. Yet a sustained income from them is basically unattainable except in very specific, lucky cases, not to mention the income is minimal. People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it. All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving. Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.

CodeSgt 4y ago
Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be? I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not. We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.

slothtrop 4y ago

I program for work, and not leisure. As prospective careers go, it probably ranks top among similar labor. All the same I could not be arsed to develop "for its own sake". Work offers coordinating with others towards a common goal and finding validation from the product, and the value it brings - but it also, it offers incentive. If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".

swayvil 4y ago

>I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here. There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable. The alternative is depression.

InCityDreams 4y ago

Its like the joke of the businessman who sees a fisherman doing nothing on the beach. Why dont you go fish some more? Why would i? Then you can make more money, buy another boat and make even more money. But why? Then you can build a fleet and with even more money you can control the factories where your fish is processed. And then? Well then with your empire you can spend two weeks of the year on the beach, like me. /short version.

causality0 4y ago

Just do whatever you like! Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?

Retric 4y ago
Looking at the people I know there is a huge overlap between free time and happiness. Unemployment is stressful, but looking at the extremes comfortable retirement easily beats constant overwork. And voluntarily working part time beats a full time job as long as their income is sufficient. It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.
actionablefiber 4y ago
> Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy. I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.
soraki_soladead 4y ago
That assumes that people left to their own free will and time would end up in a dismal state as the default. I’m not sure. I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something. It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Security against adversity, delayed gratification for better future reward, leaving a legacy or your kids, or philanthropy... there are lots of reasons not to live by our animal instincts of the bare minimum of how much work is enough for "survival".

andsoitis 4y ago

One emergent process of the technological age is the drive to optimize ourselves (humans) as if we are machines for increased productivity. Think of all the ways we measure aspects of our behavior, goals, accomplishments.

mch82 4y ago

Two contributing factors are religion and social identity. The “Protestant work ethic” has played a role in shaping American social views about work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-job.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...

TaupeRanger 4y ago
I think it's also very easy to just look around at all the problems and mysteries in the world/universe and feel compelled to do something. Even in the absence of any kind of "religious work ethic".

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rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write. As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do. Or as Bukowski wrote: "if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire." In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.