4 ms·

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

by soared 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
    Lol, fair enough, but I think this is a workaround rather than a solution.
    - bombcar 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - Insanity 10mo ago
    More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch (or I’m just incredibly slow). Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As a sibling comment mentioned, it’s more that when I finally get home (6:30 -7pm), I rarely have the energy to put in that kind of time. So I end up making a quick pasta or other such dish that is ready in 30 minutes.
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      > More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch I was responding to the part of your comment about not being able to eat healthy. Cooking traditional French cuisine on weeknights is not the only way to have a healthy meal. Eating homemade French cuisine every weeknight would be a luxury for working class standards just about anywhere.
- RyanOD 10mo ago
  How many hours does your job and commute require? I'd genuinely like to understand a job that is so time consuming that a person wouldn't be able to cook dinner. That doesn't seem ok to me.
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    Not op, the job is so soul and mentally draining that you “can’t afford” cooking.
    - Insanity 10mo ago
      I should have clarified it, but you hit the nail on the head. I arrive home with little energy after a day in the office. By the time I’m home it’s at least 6:30pm, usually a bit later. If I would work until 6:30 but from home instead of the office, I’d probably still be up for cooking. Although you also need to get gym time in, family time, chores and other stuff…
      - lentil_soup 10mo ago
        I have the same, my commute is a 10min walk, I have no dependants and make a good salary and I find it impossible to cook, I'm just depleted after work. If I add exercise and some social interaction then my time is spent recovering energy... It's probably a sign of burn out or of a bad job
        eru 10mo ago
        Have you considered cooking before work?
  - hnthrowaway121 10mo ago
    Super normal. Let’s say at the simplest, you take 30 mins to get ready to leave from waking up, 30 mins from front door to sitting at your desk, 30 mins to get to bed and sleep that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours. Work plus breaks at work is probably 8-10 at the best. So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise? All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.
jebarker 10mo ago
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. What times/places are you thinking of when you write this?
Saline9515 10mo ago
At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).
Aurornis 10mo ago
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year. What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?
- eru 10mo ago
  > It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year. Well, not all parts of the world have winters.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    Every time this topic of historical leisure time comes up and people start bringing up problems with the theory, the goalposts start moving as fast as the conversation. Are we now only talking about people who didn’t live in areas with winters? Because those areas have different sets of problems including entirely different sets of insects, diseases, and predators that aren’t controlled by annual winters, among other things.
citizenpaul 10mo ago
I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time. We have much more non-survival leisure time now.
RobRivera 10mo ago
The WHOLE US!?

by soared 10mo ago

Insanity 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
  Lol, fair enough, but I think this is a workaround rather than a solution.
  - bombcar 10mo 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 10mo 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.
- Insanity 10mo ago
  More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch (or I’m just incredibly slow). Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As a sibling comment mentioned, it’s more that when I finally get home (6:30 -7pm), I rarely have the energy to put in that kind of time. So I end up making a quick pasta or other such dish that is ready in 30 minutes.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    > More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch I was responding to the part of your comment about not being able to eat healthy. Cooking traditional French cuisine on weeknights is not the only way to have a healthy meal. Eating homemade French cuisine every weeknight would be a luxury for working class standards just about anywhere.
RyanOD 10mo ago
How many hours does your job and commute require? I'd genuinely like to understand a job that is so time consuming that a person wouldn't be able to cook dinner. That doesn't seem ok to me.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  Not op, the job is so soul and mentally draining that you “can’t afford” cooking.
  - Insanity 10mo ago
    I should have clarified it, but you hit the nail on the head. I arrive home with little energy after a day in the office. By the time I’m home it’s at least 6:30pm, usually a bit later. If I would work until 6:30 but from home instead of the office, I’d probably still be up for cooking. Although you also need to get gym time in, family time, chores and other stuff…
    - lentil_soup 10mo ago
      I have the same, my commute is a 10min walk, I have no dependants and make a good salary and I find it impossible to cook, I'm just depleted after work. If I add exercise and some social interaction then my time is spent recovering energy... It's probably a sign of burn out or of a bad job
      - eru 10mo ago
        Have you considered cooking before work?
- hnthrowaway121 10mo ago
  Super normal. Let’s say at the simplest, you take 30 mins to get ready to leave from waking up, 30 mins from front door to sitting at your desk, 30 mins to get to bed and sleep that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours. Work plus breaks at work is probably 8-10 at the best. So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise? All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.

jebarker 10mo ago

> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. What times/places are you thinking of when you write this?

Saline9515 10mo ago

At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).

Aurornis 10mo ago

> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year. What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?

eru 10mo ago
> It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year. Well, not all parts of the world have winters.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Every time this topic of historical leisure time comes up and people start bringing up problems with the theory, the goalposts start moving as fast as the conversation. Are we now only talking about people who didn’t live in areas with winters? Because those areas have different sets of problems including entirely different sets of insects, diseases, and predators that aren’t controlled by annual winters, among other things.

citizenpaul 10mo ago

I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time. We have much more non-survival leisure time now.

RobRivera 10mo ago

The WHOLE US!?