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We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children
by claudius 13y ago
We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago.
Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? :\
- Torkild 13y agoI average 100 hours per week. I think you sound sickly sheltered.
- beachstartup 13y agoi work about 60. 100 is excessive. that's not impressive, just stupid.
- Torkild 13y agoI do only what is necessary to survive. You sound like most of your bills are still paid by mommy and daddy.
- iyulaev 13y agoHow do you have time to post on HN?
- pearjuice 13y agoMind me asking what exactly your living standards are and which position you fullfill that you need 100 hours of work to survive?
- sliverstorm 13y agoPerson works 60 hours a week, and is thus clearly still freeloading on their parents? Are you attempting to be comical?
- beachstartup 13y agodid you catch the part where i said i work? happens every week, in fact.
- claudius 13y agoHow many of said 100 hours do you spend in coal mines or heavy engineering factories?
- rdouble 13y agoI agree. I'm 13 and spend over 120 hours per week in the oil mines of North Dakota. I puked when I read the first comment and slammed my laptop shut because I was shaking with disgust.
- sliverstorm 13y agoYou get to leave the oil mines? Talk about preferential treatment, you have it easy!
- rdouble 13y agoWe are allowed 45 minutes for cigarettes and internet before Sunday prayers and lights-out.
- freehunter 13y agoAfter too long of averaging 100 hours a week, I think you're just going to be sickly, not sickly sheltered. No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. The fact that you choose to do so isn't saying much about you.
- saraid216 13y ago> No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. Assuming this is talking about Americans, that's sort of an entertaining claim, since most of the modern policy discussions have been about deciding whether or not you are allowed to survive if you don't work enough.
- icebraining 13y agoI'm not American, but surely "enough" is still less than two full time jobs plus a part time one?
- Noughmad 13y agoI don't know where you live, but I'll assume US. In other countries, the wages are different (usually lower), but the salary/cost of living ratio tends to be similar. The minimum wage over there is $7.25. Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive?
- croisillon 13y agoNorway apparently
- icebraining 13y agoProbably not, considering Torkild got a cellphone under an US federal benefit program.
- sliverstorm 13y agoAre you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive? Maybe we need to take him more literally. Maybe what he means is he owes the mob a lot of money, and if he doesn't pay them $2.5k/month they will kill him?
- saraid216 13y ago> Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? No, it wouldn't.
- cgag 13y agoYeah, what the hell kind of a question is that. What are we doing building all this technology if not trying to work less?
- sliverstorm 13y agoTrying to achieve more, perhaps? Work x Leverage = Achievement
- danenania 13y agoBut trying to achieve more for what purpose, ultimately?
- sliverstorm 13y agoWho knows what the future holds? FTL travel? Space colonization? Cold fusion? Yes, we could stop where we are, decide things are good enough, and operate the world at subsistence levels. But who's to say we aren't twenty years from doubling the efficiency of agriculture? A hundred years ago we could have said, trains are pretty awesome, let's stop here. But then we never would have had flight. Five hundred years ago we could have said, horse and buggy is so much better than walking, how can I get any better than this, let's stop here. But then we wouldn't have had trains. Technological advancement has a long track record of being very good for quality of life for everyone, and it certainly hasn't stopped, so why should we stop?
- saraid216 13y agoI realize you're just replying to cgag and danenania, but I want to point out that this thread is running the risk of a bad conflation: Work != technological advancement. More to the point, while good things come out of work, so do a lot of bad things. The more selective we can be about how we work, the more capable we are of filtering out the bad effects while retaining the good ones.
- Daishiman 13y agoAnd before that, many societies would work 4-hour days, or work during part of daylight and have the rest of the day off. I really don't see why people affix any sort of value to the amount of work they take when they should be concentrating on their results and how work aligns to their life. I work less than 20 hours a week to finish my studies and generally speaking I do what I want, which includes reading technical literature (out of a personal desire to do so), cooking, and taking a 3 or 4-day weekend off every month to visit people and travel. I leave the stress to the difficult stuff (the studying bit) and live within my means, and the lack of anxiety or rush means my work is actually solid without spending excessive time to concentrate or get results. I consider this my ideal lifestyle, not because I work little, but because I have a choice on how I live my life and how much effort I get to focus towards the things that I want.
- shubb 13y agoChildren spend ~ 35 hours a week, essentially preparing to be efficient workers. That is, if you ask them, usually what they will tell you they are at school to do. They will phrase it 'score high in exams, in order to get a good job'. The fact is that they have to be there. They have to do as they are told. If they do not, the punishment lasts a lifetime. There are other schooling systems, such as Stiener schools, which focus more on personal development. They form children who want to explore, then allow them to self direct what they explore. (That particular system also has many, many faults). This is rather like 'work'. Your grandfather had to be in a factory many hours a day. You have to be in an office. Society says so. If you are the sort of person who is bad at knowledge work, you may well wish society told you to do something more physical. But the point is that you lack freedom. The demographic of this message board is people working on, or thinking about, startups. Essentially, when you do a startup, you choose what you are spending your time doing. You trade in your job security for freedom. I have known people 'drop out' of society, go on the dole, and work 14 hour days developing computer games that later sold for good money. Less admirably, I've known them to go on the dole, and spend all day playing computer games. They trade their place in society for freedom. This shows that in truth, modern society does give us the freedom. (in my country). So why do people work? Or more pressingly, why do people work in jobs that do not meet their psychological needs for respect, autonomy, and purpose, and pay badly? Because they do, regardless of what you read in the papers, keep working at those jobs. My local supermarket is full of people who derive little identity from their work - I was one of them as a child and I know how the adult staff there think. The answer, I think, is fear of what other people would think of them for scrounging. People like the post I am replying to. I think most people think like him. He should, rationally, hate startup founders consuming someone elses money to mess about on a project that probably won't make a dime. And that contradiction is the problem. Societies attitude to work is not rational, and it forces people to keep doing jobs they don't want to that could be automated, instead of being free. Eventually, economics will destroy those jobs. A new role will be created that didn't exist before, adding even less value than the last (but the labour is there so why not use it). Those workers desperately take the work to avoid seeing themselves as scroungers, as the enemy. And their children will grow up desperate not to be free.
- aidenn0 13y ago
- azakai 13y ago> We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago. Yes, two centuries ago, but only very briefly. In human history, overall we work today far more than most humans that ever lived used to work. Farmers and hunter-gatherers for example had and have far more leisure time than "modern" people do (see for example "The World Until Yesterday").
- claudius 13y agoI would believe you can still lead the life of a farmer and hunter-gatherer if you absolutely insist on doing so. But be prepared for every other of your children dying before their fifth birthday, be prepared to bury your parents at the age of twenty or forty when some perfectly-treatable disease strikes and be prepared to give up half your village’s population if it doesn’t rain as much one year. I very much prefer working 40 to 50 hours/week than the above (though, case in point, I'll likely only start my first ‘real’ job this fall after 22 years of education…).