5 ms·

> Everyone wants more Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be mu

> Everyone wants more Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.

Waterluvian 4mo ago
Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too. For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
- oersted 4mo ago
  An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly. It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear. Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent. This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
  - kakacik 4mo ago
    I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary. There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids. People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short. Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
    - oersted 4mo ago
      Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis. I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice. I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
      - nmcfarl 4mo ago
        I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something. I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
        oersted 4mo ago
        Never heard of that role, good to learn. I suppose the closest analogue I am aware of is substitute teachers.
chongli 4mo ago
That's still wanting more: more free time. You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
- nextaccountic 4mo ago
  > That's still wanting more: more free time. But this is working less to have more free time. > You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc. Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want. The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
  - chongli 4mo ago
    Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
    - peepee1982 4mo ago
      I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
    - lan321 4mo ago
      Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
      - alchemism 4mo ago
        You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.
jameslk 4mo ago
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
- AngryData 4mo ago
  Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
  - jameslk 4mo ago
    I’m talking about how many people lived in the past OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
  - defrost 4mo ago
    Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade. African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls. Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/ https://www.africathatch.co.za/ Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
  - Maxatar 4mo ago
    >Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
blks 4mo ago
Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
- toasty228 4mo ago
  50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
crazylogger 4mo ago
This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth
- nkrisc 4mo ago
  Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.
bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat What about never working for 2billion% more?
KptMarchewa 4mo ago
It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE. It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
georgeecollins 4mo ago
> Everyone wants more John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do. Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive. It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved. It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    You can opt out by having roommates.
    - Windchaser 4mo ago
      You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom). I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.
    - chadgpt3 4mo ago
      That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.
- throw0101c 4mo ago
  > John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
voxic11 4mo ago
I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.

Waterluvian 4mo ago

Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too. For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.

oersted 4mo ago
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly. It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear. Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent. This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
- kakacik 4mo ago
  I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary. There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids. People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short. Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
  - oersted 4mo ago
    Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis. I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice. I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
    - nmcfarl 4mo ago
      I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something. I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
      - oersted 4mo ago
        Never heard of that role, good to learn. I suppose the closest analogue I am aware of is substitute teachers.

chongli 4mo ago

That's still wanting more: more free time. You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.

nextaccountic 4mo ago
> That's still wanting more: more free time. But this is working less to have more free time. > You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc. Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want. The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
- chongli 4mo ago
  Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
  - peepee1982 4mo ago
    I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
  - lan321 4mo ago
    Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
    - alchemism 4mo ago
      You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.

jameslk 4mo ago

> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

AngryData 4mo ago
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
- jameslk 4mo ago
  I’m talking about how many people lived in the past OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
- defrost 4mo ago
  Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade. African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls. Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/ https://www.africathatch.co.za/ Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
- Maxatar 4mo ago
  >Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.

blks 4mo ago

Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?

toasty228 4mo ago
50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...

crazylogger 4mo ago

This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.

jrflowers 4mo ago
It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth
nkrisc 4mo ago
Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.

bcjdjsndon 4mo ago

> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat What about never working for 2billion% more?

KptMarchewa 4mo ago

It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE. It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.

georgeecollins 4mo ago

> Everyone wants more John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do. Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive. It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved. It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.

chadgpt3 4mo ago
The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  You can opt out by having roommates.
  - Windchaser 4mo ago
    You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom). I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.
throw0101c 4mo ago
> John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

voxic11 4mo ago

I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.