7 ms·

How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays

64 points by up_and_up 12y ago

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Hanging out at Hacker News.
- seren 12y ago
  Would that count as Education or Leisure ?
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    Addiction. It is readily apparent to me that Hacker News has been a serious problem for me for several weeks now. There are so very many fascinating articles and essays, you see. The result is that I experience persistent headaches, no amount of sleep makes me feel rested, and I haven't been submitting any resumes. I love HN, I really do, but if I keep hanging out here, if I don't actually have a brain hemorrhage I'm going to starve to death in the cold. I'm not kidding about this. I have lots of real life experience with people who were addicted to cocaine, crack, alcohol even heroin. My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs.
    - eat 12y ago
      > My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs. Except the fact that you can just stop doing it at any time with literally zero physical side-effects.
      - nothrabannosir 12y ago
        Don't understand why you're being downvoted; that's exactly right. This is not like cocaine, heroin, or crystal. If anything, it's more like weed. The psychological craving may be similar, sure. It's habit forming, not physically addictive.
        vertex-four 12y ago
        Habit-forming things can definitely be harmful to one's life, and can be extremely hard to stop for some people without external aid. Just because it doesn't outright physically hurt you ("only" psychologically for a while) doesn't mean it is not an issue that requires attention.
        MichaelCrawford 12y ago
        HN, along with soylent news, kuro5hin, some mailing lists, reddit from time to time, all together are quite definitely physically hurting me. It's not so much that I don't get enough sleep as that it is so irregular, and that I don't find sleep to be restful. Also I get persistent headaches; analgesics don't help, I just blew through a whole bottle.
        nothrabannosir 12y ago
        My friend, if you seriously feel this way, try asking people in your direct surroundings for help. If you have family or close friends, you can let them know you need ("would like", "could use", "wanna try", "see if maybe it would work", ...) their help getting rid of an addiction. No shame, especially not with a drug as light as this one. "What is it?" - "Internet forums, they take up all my time and I can't stop, " + the real life problems you're experiencing. If you can't think of someone right now, feel free to shoot me an e-mail (in profile). I won't be able to make you do stuff, but we can talk.
        tbirdz 12y ago
        I don't mean to make light of your personal issues, but I don't think the Hacker News comment section for this article is the appropriate place to be discussing them. I wish you luck in dealing with your affliction, and suggest that speaking to a mental health professional would be a better outlet for you. If you really needed to talk to people here about it, then I'd recommend making a new thread, perhaps linking to blog post or something of that matter you wrote describing your addiction, rather than hijacking the comments section here, which I think is being a bit disrespectful to the rest of the HN userbase.
      - OvidNaso 12y ago
        There is a reason those who work in addiction medicine (and addicts themselves) call the 3-10 days of physical withdrawal the easy part. We can probably achieve 100% success with it. A few days of pain and discomfort and you're done with the physical part...forever. Real addiction, neurological addiction, is a totally different story. It's totally understandable that many people have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, because addiction is a bizarre brain disorder...like Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran case study bizarre. All your intuitive notions on the brain are forced to go out the window if you honestly investigate it acedemically. Please though, blow your mind by reading about it...not experiencing it.
        tunap 12y ago
        Immediately after college I quit drinking coffee. For fourteen years afterward I always had a feeling of incompleteness, something felt missing whenever I was in a relaxed state, like there was something I was missing/needed to do, but could not put my finger on the cause. I often considered the source of this phantom yearning and speculated whether I was exposed to crack in one of the roach apartments I afforded in college; perhaps my mom was more of a hippy while I was gestating than has been shared; perhaps I was a junky in a former life... All of these thoughts were immediately vanquished when I was visiting Hawaii and somebody convinced me I had to try their delicious Kona coffee. Within a few seconds of the first sip I felt like I had been waiting for that sip my entire life. It felt as if an unfulfillable hole in my soul had been filled. T^hank god it's legal, I guess. Don't even get me started on the 24 hours of absolute misery after giving up sugar AND caffeine on that fateful day in 1994...
    - joshuahedlund 12y ago
      Have you tried turning on "noprocrast" in your user settings? (and possibly fiddling with the related values below it) Works for me.
      - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
        I never noticed that. Thanks, I'll go turn it on.
    - _neil 12y ago
      127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reddit.com etc.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Or maybe even socialising? Or, if you're employed, "working"!
seren 12y ago
I̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶t̶o̶n̶i̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶5̶0̶%̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶l̶e̶e̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶3̶ ̶A̶M̶.̶ ̶B̶u̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶r̶e̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶p̶o̶p̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶?̶ Edit : this was actually a rendering issue on my browser as pointed out by desdiv.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  It's 5:18 AM here on the Left Coast. I haven't slept yet, despite that I have two telephone interviews this afternoon.
  - Camillo 12y ago
    Do you, perhaps subconsciously, prefer the night hours to the day? Can you hypothesize why?
    - VLM 12y ago
      When you have kids, you'll understand. I do my best engineering after bedtime, not exactly voluntarily. (edited to add, and after they are old enough for school) I suppose for people who aren't "into" computers, they'll do whatever floats their boat after kids bedtime.
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      Have a look at http://www.circadiandisorders.org/ http://www.circadiandisorders.org/ I do indeed prefer the night hours, however I am often up during the day. I enjoy the mornings, but only when I've been up all night. I don't enjoy the morning if I've slept then gotten up early. I'm pretty sure I have quite an advanced case of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. DSPS is an endocrine condition that has to do with when the pineal gland secretes melatonin, or does not. Melatonin production is cyclic, with the cycle being mostly but not all the way synchronized by exposure to light. In my case my sleeping and waking hours are so irregular that I may actually have "free-running non-24-hour delayed sleep phase syndrome". However that particular kind is thought to occur only among those who are profoundly blind. Most blind people can sense the presence or absence of light, but a very few have no perception of it at all. My preference for the night, I expect, has mostly to do with it being the time that I have the most peace of mind. There is something about daylight that makes me anxious. I can't really explain why.
dkopi 12y ago
Hacker News -> Reddit -> Stack Overflow -> Repeat
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Don't forget Kuro5hin! I had the idea I'd be able to attract some consulting clients if I answered lots of questions at StackOverflow. I expect that would work well were I to keep it up, but after just one day of devoted overflowing, I came to the conclusion that my brain would explode were I to persist.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Does this work for anyone other than the top few posters? I have quietly accumulated 13k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I don't think it's much use to me.
    - rebelde 12y ago
      Stackoverflow makes it difficult to hire people. (I've tried and given up.) There is no way to send somebody a private message saying "You obviously know what you are doing here. Can I pay you a lot of money to do that for me?"
      - debacle 12y ago
        Isn't that the point of careers.stackexchange.com?
    - stingraycharles 12y ago
      I have been contacted by several (!) recruiters of Google after answering some very specific questions about a distributed consensus protocol (Paxos). I can imagine they rather search for specific topics / keywords than reputation, using the logic "if he can get the accepted answer on these topics, he might be worth checking out".
      - 12y ago
hyunwoona 12y ago
What chart API is it used in the article? Highcharts?
- 1wheel 12y ago
  http://d3js.org/ http://d3js.org/
bglazer 12y ago
Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's pretty troubling to me that 27% of the surveyed men were watching TV at 2 in the afternoon. I'm intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and especially the effect that it could have on allowing people to pursue risky or creative projects. I'm very much not intrigued by a quarter of the population watching daytime TV.
- ep103 12y ago
  1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not have a primary activity of looking for a new job. 2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.
  - desdiv 12y ago
    >U6 Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post. There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work. There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history). Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work. I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.aspx http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
I apologize for hijacking the thread, that was very, very off-topic of me. After I take a phone call I'm expecting, I'm going to head home, catch some ZZZs, as well as call my shrink. I'm not sure if I'll call her before I sleep, or tomorrow.

64 points by up_and_up 12y ago

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

Hanging out at Hacker News.

seren 12y ago
Would that count as Education or Leisure ?
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Addiction. It is readily apparent to me that Hacker News has been a serious problem for me for several weeks now. There are so very many fascinating articles and essays, you see. The result is that I experience persistent headaches, no amount of sleep makes me feel rested, and I haven't been submitting any resumes. I love HN, I really do, but if I keep hanging out here, if I don't actually have a brain hemorrhage I'm going to starve to death in the cold. I'm not kidding about this. I have lots of real life experience with people who were addicted to cocaine, crack, alcohol even heroin. My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs.
  - eat 12y ago
    > My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs. Except the fact that you can just stop doing it at any time with literally zero physical side-effects.
    - nothrabannosir 12y ago
      Don't understand why you're being downvoted; that's exactly right. This is not like cocaine, heroin, or crystal. If anything, it's more like weed. The psychological craving may be similar, sure. It's habit forming, not physically addictive.
      - vertex-four 12y ago
        Habit-forming things can definitely be harmful to one's life, and can be extremely hard to stop for some people without external aid. Just because it doesn't outright physically hurt you ("only" psychologically for a while) doesn't mean it is not an issue that requires attention.
        MichaelCrawford 12y ago
        HN, along with soylent news, kuro5hin, some mailing lists, reddit from time to time, all together are quite definitely physically hurting me. It's not so much that I don't get enough sleep as that it is so irregular, and that I don't find sleep to be restful. Also I get persistent headaches; analgesics don't help, I just blew through a whole bottle.
        nothrabannosir 12y ago
        My friend, if you seriously feel this way, try asking people in your direct surroundings for help. If you have family or close friends, you can let them know you need ("would like", "could use", "wanna try", "see if maybe it would work", ...) their help getting rid of an addiction. No shame, especially not with a drug as light as this one. "What is it?" - "Internet forums, they take up all my time and I can't stop, " + the real life problems you're experiencing. If you can't think of someone right now, feel free to shoot me an e-mail (in profile). I won't be able to make you do stuff, but we can talk.
        tbirdz 12y ago
        I don't mean to make light of your personal issues, but I don't think the Hacker News comment section for this article is the appropriate place to be discussing them. I wish you luck in dealing with your affliction, and suggest that speaking to a mental health professional would be a better outlet for you. If you really needed to talk to people here about it, then I'd recommend making a new thread, perhaps linking to blog post or something of that matter you wrote describing your addiction, rather than hijacking the comments section here, which I think is being a bit disrespectful to the rest of the HN userbase.
    - OvidNaso 12y ago
      There is a reason those who work in addiction medicine (and addicts themselves) call the 3-10 days of physical withdrawal the easy part. We can probably achieve 100% success with it. A few days of pain and discomfort and you're done with the physical part...forever. Real addiction, neurological addiction, is a totally different story. It's totally understandable that many people have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, because addiction is a bizarre brain disorder...like Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran case study bizarre. All your intuitive notions on the brain are forced to go out the window if you honestly investigate it acedemically. Please though, blow your mind by reading about it...not experiencing it.
      - tunap 12y ago
        Immediately after college I quit drinking coffee. For fourteen years afterward I always had a feeling of incompleteness, something felt missing whenever I was in a relaxed state, like there was something I was missing/needed to do, but could not put my finger on the cause. I often considered the source of this phantom yearning and speculated whether I was exposed to crack in one of the roach apartments I afforded in college; perhaps my mom was more of a hippy while I was gestating than has been shared; perhaps I was a junky in a former life... All of these thoughts were immediately vanquished when I was visiting Hawaii and somebody convinced me I had to try their delicious Kona coffee. Within a few seconds of the first sip I felt like I had been waiting for that sip my entire life. It felt as if an unfulfillable hole in my soul had been filled. T^hank god it's legal, I guess. Don't even get me started on the 24 hours of absolute misery after giving up sugar AND caffeine on that fateful day in 1994...
  - joshuahedlund 12y ago
    Have you tried turning on "noprocrast" in your user settings? (and possibly fiddling with the related values below it) Works for me.
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      I never noticed that. Thanks, I'll go turn it on.
  - _neil 12y ago
    127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reddit.com etc.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Or maybe even socialising? Or, if you're employed, "working"!

seren 12y ago

I̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶t̶o̶n̶i̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶5̶0̶%̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶l̶e̶e̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶3̶ ̶A̶M̶.̶ ̶B̶u̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶r̶e̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶p̶o̶p̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶?̶ Edit : this was actually a rendering issue on my browser as pointed out by desdiv.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
It's 5:18 AM here on the Left Coast. I haven't slept yet, despite that I have two telephone interviews this afternoon.
- Camillo 12y ago
  Do you, perhaps subconsciously, prefer the night hours to the day? Can you hypothesize why?
  - VLM 12y ago
    When you have kids, you'll understand. I do my best engineering after bedtime, not exactly voluntarily. (edited to add, and after they are old enough for school) I suppose for people who aren't "into" computers, they'll do whatever floats their boat after kids bedtime.
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    Have a look at http://www.circadiandisorders.org/ http://www.circadiandisorders.org/ I do indeed prefer the night hours, however I am often up during the day. I enjoy the mornings, but only when I've been up all night. I don't enjoy the morning if I've slept then gotten up early. I'm pretty sure I have quite an advanced case of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. DSPS is an endocrine condition that has to do with when the pineal gland secretes melatonin, or does not. Melatonin production is cyclic, with the cycle being mostly but not all the way synchronized by exposure to light. In my case my sleeping and waking hours are so irregular that I may actually have "free-running non-24-hour delayed sleep phase syndrome". However that particular kind is thought to occur only among those who are profoundly blind. Most blind people can sense the presence or absence of light, but a very few have no perception of it at all. My preference for the night, I expect, has mostly to do with it being the time that I have the most peace of mind. There is something about daylight that makes me anxious. I can't really explain why.

dkopi 12y ago

Hacker News -> Reddit -> Stack Overflow -> Repeat

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Don't forget Kuro5hin! I had the idea I'd be able to attract some consulting clients if I answered lots of questions at StackOverflow. I expect that would work well were I to keep it up, but after just one day of devoted overflowing, I came to the conclusion that my brain would explode were I to persist.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Does this work for anyone other than the top few posters? I have quietly accumulated 13k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I don't think it's much use to me.
  - rebelde 12y ago
    Stackoverflow makes it difficult to hire people. (I've tried and given up.) There is no way to send somebody a private message saying "You obviously know what you are doing here. Can I pay you a lot of money to do that for me?"
    - debacle 12y ago
      Isn't that the point of careers.stackexchange.com?
  - stingraycharles 12y ago
    I have been contacted by several (!) recruiters of Google after answering some very specific questions about a distributed consensus protocol (Paxos). I can imagine they rather search for specific topics / keywords than reputation, using the logic "if he can get the accepted answer on these topics, he might be worth checking out".
    - 12y ago

hyunwoona 12y ago

What chart API is it used in the article? Highcharts?

1wheel 12y ago
http://d3js.org/ http://d3js.org/

bglazer 12y ago

Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's pretty troubling to me that 27% of the surveyed men were watching TV at 2 in the afternoon. I'm intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and especially the effect that it could have on allowing people to pursue risky or creative projects. I'm very much not intrigued by a quarter of the population watching daytime TV.

ep103 12y ago
1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not have a primary activity of looking for a new job. 2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.
- desdiv 12y ago
  >U6 Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
- DanBC 12y ago
  > 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post. There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work. There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history). Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work. I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.aspx http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

I apologize for hijacking the thread, that was very, very off-topic of me. After I take a phone call I'm expecting, I'm going to head home, catch some ZZZs, as well as call my shrink. I'm not sure if I'll call her before I sleep, or tomorrow.