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The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO. The notion of tracking if time spent on anything helps “prevent burnout” sp

The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO. The notion of tracking if time spent on anything helps “prevent burnout” speaks volumes to how we view ourselves as consumables. The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me.

fwipsy 9mo ago
I agree, but hard work is nothing new. Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. I'm uncertain how to think about burnout in this context. Did they have burnout and were forced to work through it? Were they better at pacing themselves? Maybe the type of work (mental rather than physical labor) or circumstances (working for a corporation) today are more conducive to burnout?
- jetrink 9mo ago
  > Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
  - dugidugout 9mo ago
    Can you provide the specific research you are referring to?
    - Aurornis 9mo ago
      I don’t know what research they saw, but the claim was mainstreamed by the popular book “Sapiens”. The author romanticized past life and made claims that life was leisurely until agriculture came along and made us all miserable as we toiled working the soil. Before that we supposedly relaxed all day as our food was easy to catch and we didn’t have to build anything because we were always on the move. There are some very obvious problems with that statement that will be easily spotted by anyone who has ever done any hunting or camping.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    > Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc) Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
  - acheron 9mo ago
    This is ridiculous of course. Read Bret Deveraux’s recent series about peasant life.
  - watwut 9mo ago
    Average person took long time off work to travel to visit far away friends? Call me sceptical, because this is provably untrue for pretty much any period and place we have actual resources about.
- EGG_CREAM 9mo ago
  I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  > Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? Unambiguously yes. This is well documented and impossible to ignore. Marshal Sahlins described it best in Stone Age Economics but reading Graeber will get you there or Levi Strauss if you’re into the whole structural anthropology thing
- tracker1 9mo ago
  I'm not sure how environmental factors play into this either. As a Gen-Xer, it often feels like the current late teens and early 20-somethings all have a crippling level of "anxiety" over what should be relatively simple human interaction, and this started well before COVID solidified this influence. Does this in general have an outsized effect on burnout? I've felt true burnout twice in my life, the first time was after several years without any vacation time taken and about 3 months of 60-80 hour weeks. I literally hit a wall and couldn't even open a project in front of the computer, I was in a haze and not safe to even do anything. My brain was like, "nope!" More recently, a couple years ago it's been a larger state of dissolution about my career without a clear alternative so much as something that I would consider a disablement.
- anal_reactor 9mo ago
  It's not about leisure time. It's about the meaning of work. In the past, effects of your work were very direct - carry shitload of stone from one place to another together with your cousin, build a house for you and your family. Nowadays it's all very abstract - have a useless Teams meeting with people you don't care about so that you can do press buttons that maybe change some metrics you don't even understand. What was the last time you felt "I'm happy I built this"?
- lbrito 9mo ago
  >Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? Yes. In the middle ages (and presumably in any agrarian society) people would work intensely for a few weeks and have the most of the year free.
  - watwut 9mo ago
    Except that is bullshit. They did worked the other parts of the year too, just not doing the exact same agricultural work as those few weeks. That thing simply ignores everything it takes to keep animals alive year round, keep kids alive year round, create and repair tools, keep house warm, create fabric, sew cloth, actually cook without modern tools and so on and so forth. Just because there is a rush time does not mean workers do nothing the rest od the time.
soared 9mo ago
A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.
- Insanity 9mo ago
  My girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended. It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
  - bombcar 9mo ago
    Brutal comment because I’m a random Internet AI: You can adjust what “real meal” means for you so that cooking at home is possible. The hardest part is finding time together if schedules don’t line up. For two weeks write down what you do with your time, and then evaluate it afterwards and decide if it was the best use.
    - Insanity 9mo ago
      Lol, fair enough, but I think this is a workaround rather than a solution.
      - bombcar 9mo ago
        Don’t think of it as a workaround, think of it as a startup or MVP as you work toward developing a full product.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    > We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended. Do you have extra long hours and/or an extreme long (1 hour) commute? It’s common in my social circles for parents to work 8-5 or 9-6 and still cook weekday meals that are healthy. With some meal and grocery planning it’s not that hard, unless you of course have on of those 90+ minute commutes and a job that keeps you in office until 8PM. Unless your definition of “real meal” is something more than I’m thinking of, like something that requires hours of prep. > It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious… There are a lot of healthy meal planning (ahead of time prep) or quick and easy recipes out there. It’s pretty easy to prepare a healthy meal with steamed vegetables and a warmed protein in 10 minutes. We can even make an entire healthy meal in 30 minutes start to finish after doing it for years.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO. I agree, but for different reasons: The paper is an example of someone sending out surveys to collect self-reports and then writing a paper title as if they had performed a study. They did not. They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant. It appears to have worked, though, as I’ve seen it shared across the internet by assuming it’s a robust proof of something. This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught. To be honest this feels like an undergraduate level assignment where students are asking to give a survey and do some statistical analyses. The students usually pick a topic close to their own life (like Super Mario Games) and then come up with some result by playing with their survey numbers until they find something.
- LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
  > They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant. Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    From the paper: > Methods: > We used a mixed methods approach. First, qualitative data were collected through 41 exploratory, in-depth interviews (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: n=11, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey… So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey. Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right. If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem EDIT: Yes, I know the n=11 was supposed to be an n=1. Having a glaring and easily caught error in the abstract is not a good signal for the quality of a paper. This is on the level of an undergraduate paper-writing exercise, not a scientific study as people are assuming.
andai 9mo ago
Especially since we're about to give birth to an entire species which is better suited to the task!
darepublic 9mo ago
This is the problem of evil right. Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them.
- andrewflnr 9mo ago
  I'm only a casual follower of ancient human evolution and anthropology, but this doesn't mesh with my impression. Lots of human groups have been able to relax in relatively hospitable environments, over long spans of time.
  - mothballed 9mo ago
    They were overwhelmingly overpowered by those who took advantage of the fact they didn't have black powder, rifles, or western ships. A few who managed to evade this past WWII took advantage of the fact everyone was desperate to freeze things in place to avoid nuclear war, those are the fortunate few who are locked into place for the indefinite future. Of course there's also the heart of Africa, with no great navigable waterways or geography to trade to europe, north america, or asia, no one gives much a shit what they do. ------------- re due to throttling ------- >I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed. Not a necessary precondition, it can happen through cultural pressure (also something passed down by the generations in tribes). I don't recall previous poster requiring it happen through gene expression.
    - andrewflnr 9mo ago
      I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed. Certainly that's not clear from the evidence. The human genotype was pretty well set by the time all that was happening, which means whatever evolutionary basis exists for "the problem of evil" had already acted, including on all the people living easy (or at least manageable) subsistence lifestyles for centuries previously.
    - Aurornis 9mo ago
jMyles 9mo ago
...I don't view myself as a consumable. I enjoy accomplishing. I do not enjoy burnout. I'm interested in ways to prevent it. It's really that simple. I don't particularly find this survey compelling, but I also don't want to be judged as some vampiric capitalist just because I'd like to have more work bandwidth.
eru 9mo ago
> The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me. Have you considered getting a job you like better? You can also take sabbaticals. Or retire early.
- lbrito 9mo ago
  Unrealistic for most working people with families.
  - eru 9mo ago
    Maybe, but then that calls into question the whole premise: > The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me. If you value your family so much, you are effectively working for them, not for the little rest at the end of your life.

fwipsy 9mo ago

I agree, but hard work is nothing new. Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. I'm uncertain how to think about burnout in this context. Did they have burnout and were forced to work through it? Were they better at pacing themselves? Maybe the type of work (mental rather than physical labor) or circumstances (working for a corporation) today are more conducive to burnout?

jetrink 9mo ago
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
- dugidugout 9mo ago
  Can you provide the specific research you are referring to?
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    I don’t know what research they saw, but the claim was mainstreamed by the popular book “Sapiens”. The author romanticized past life and made claims that life was leisurely until agriculture came along and made us all miserable as we toiled working the soil. Before that we supposedly relaxed all day as our food was easy to catch and we didn’t have to build anything because we were always on the move. There are some very obvious problems with that statement that will be easily spotted by anyone who has ever done any hunting or camping.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  > Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc) Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
- acheron 9mo ago
  This is ridiculous of course. Read Bret Deveraux’s recent series about peasant life.
- watwut 9mo ago
  Average person took long time off work to travel to visit far away friends? Call me sceptical, because this is provably untrue for pretty much any period and place we have actual resources about.
EGG_CREAM 9mo ago
I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? Unambiguously yes. This is well documented and impossible to ignore. Marshal Sahlins described it best in Stone Age Economics but reading Graeber will get you there or Levi Strauss if you’re into the whole structural anthropology thing
tracker1 9mo ago
I'm not sure how environmental factors play into this either. As a Gen-Xer, it often feels like the current late teens and early 20-somethings all have a crippling level of "anxiety" over what should be relatively simple human interaction, and this started well before COVID solidified this influence. Does this in general have an outsized effect on burnout? I've felt true burnout twice in my life, the first time was after several years without any vacation time taken and about 3 months of 60-80 hour weeks. I literally hit a wall and couldn't even open a project in front of the computer, I was in a haze and not safe to even do anything. My brain was like, "nope!" More recently, a couple years ago it's been a larger state of dissolution about my career without a clear alternative so much as something that I would consider a disablement.
anal_reactor 9mo ago
It's not about leisure time. It's about the meaning of work. In the past, effects of your work were very direct - carry shitload of stone from one place to another together with your cousin, build a house for you and your family. Nowadays it's all very abstract - have a useless Teams meeting with people you don't care about so that you can do press buttons that maybe change some metrics you don't even understand. What was the last time you felt "I'm happy I built this"?
lbrito 9mo ago
>Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? Yes. In the middle ages (and presumably in any agrarian society) people would work intensely for a few weeks and have the most of the year free.
- watwut 9mo ago
  Except that is bullshit. They did worked the other parts of the year too, just not doing the exact same agricultural work as those few weeks. That thing simply ignores everything it takes to keep animals alive year round, keep kids alive year round, create and repair tools, keep house warm, create fabric, sew cloth, actually cook without modern tools and so on and so forth. Just because there is a rush time does not mean workers do nothing the rest od the time.

soared 9mo ago

A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.

Insanity 9mo ago
My girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended. It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
- bombcar 9mo ago
  Brutal comment because I’m a random Internet AI: You can adjust what “real meal” means for you so that cooking at home is possible. The hardest part is finding time together if schedules don’t line up. For two weeks write down what you do with your time, and then evaluate it afterwards and decide if it was the best use.
  - Insanity 9mo ago
    Lol, fair enough, but I think this is a workaround rather than a solution.
    - bombcar 9mo ago
      Don’t think of it as a workaround, think of it as a startup or MVP as you work toward developing a full product.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  > We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended. Do you have extra long hours and/or an extreme long (1 hour) commute? It’s common in my social circles for parents to work 8-5 or 9-6 and still cook weekday meals that are healthy. With some meal and grocery planning it’s not that hard, unless you of course have on of those 90+ minute commutes and a job that keeps you in office until 8PM. Unless your definition of “real meal” is something more than I’m thinking of, like something that requires hours of prep. > It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious… There are a lot of healthy meal planning (ahead of time prep) or quick and easy recipes out there. It’s pretty easy to prepare a healthy meal with steamed vegetables and a warmed protein in 10 minutes. We can even make an entire healthy meal in 30 minutes start to finish after doing it for years.

Aurornis 9mo ago

> The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO. I agree, but for different reasons: The paper is an example of someone sending out surveys to collect self-reports and then writing a paper title as if they had performed a study. They did not. They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant. It appears to have worked, though, as I’ve seen it shared across the internet by assuming it’s a robust proof of something. This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught. To be honest this feels like an undergraduate level assignment where students are asking to give a survey and do some statistical analyses. The students usually pick a topic close to their own life (like Super Mario Games) and then come up with some result by playing with their survey numbers until they find something.

LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
> They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant. Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  From the paper: > Methods: > We used a mixed methods approach. First, qualitative data were collected through 41 exploratory, in-depth interviews (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: n=11, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey… So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey. Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right. If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem EDIT: Yes, I know the n=11 was supposed to be an n=1. Having a glaring and easily caught error in the abstract is not a good signal for the quality of a paper. This is on the level of an undergraduate paper-writing exercise, not a scientific study as people are assuming.

andai 9mo ago

Especially since we're about to give birth to an entire species which is better suited to the task!

darepublic 9mo ago

This is the problem of evil right. Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them.

andrewflnr 9mo ago
I'm only a casual follower of ancient human evolution and anthropology, but this doesn't mesh with my impression. Lots of human groups have been able to relax in relatively hospitable environments, over long spans of time.
- mothballed 9mo ago
  They were overwhelmingly overpowered by those who took advantage of the fact they didn't have black powder, rifles, or western ships. A few who managed to evade this past WWII took advantage of the fact everyone was desperate to freeze things in place to avoid nuclear war, those are the fortunate few who are locked into place for the indefinite future. Of course there's also the heart of Africa, with no great navigable waterways or geography to trade to europe, north america, or asia, no one gives much a shit what they do. ------------- re due to throttling ------- >I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed. Not a necessary precondition, it can happen through cultural pressure (also something passed down by the generations in tribes). I don't recall previous poster requiring it happen through gene expression.
  - andrewflnr 9mo ago
    I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed. Certainly that's not clear from the evidence. The human genotype was pretty well set by the time all that was happening, which means whatever evolutionary basis exists for "the problem of evil" had already acted, including on all the people living easy (or at least manageable) subsistence lifestyles for centuries previously.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago

jMyles 9mo ago

...I don't view myself as a consumable. I enjoy accomplishing. I do not enjoy burnout. I'm interested in ways to prevent it. It's really that simple. I don't particularly find this survey compelling, but I also don't want to be judged as some vampiric capitalist just because I'd like to have more work bandwidth.

eru 9mo ago

> The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me. Have you considered getting a job you like better? You can also take sabbaticals. Or retire early.

lbrito 9mo ago
Unrealistic for most working people with families.
- eru 9mo ago
  Maybe, but then that calls into question the whole premise: > The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me. If you value your family so much, you are effectively working for them, not for the little rest at the end of your life.