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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

I think much of the choice of work hours must be down to human nature. We are awake about 112 hours a week and choose to work between a half (56 hours) and a quarter (28 hours) typically. People are seldom very happy unemployed. If money was the only reason people worked, the likes of Paul Graham would put their feet up when they cashed in for millions from Yahoo but they almost never do.

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I really doubt that. Choose to work 40 hrs?

There are a few people who are lucky enough whose work is their hobby, and who feel happy doing it, but mostly, work is draining and stressful. And I don't mean physically draining.

I'm convinced the 'Fall from Eden' story was inspired by the invention of agriculture. Suddenly, people had to work a lot more (hunter-gatherers typically work 4-5 hours a day). Only the aristocracy inherited the privilege of having a lot of leisure time and being able to hunt(barring the US, hunting is extremely restricted).

Nutrition got worse, it took millenia of improvement till skeletons of farmers started to look as well-fed as those of hunter gatherers.

And of course proximity to farm animals and greater population introduced all those nice pathogens: tuberculosis, smallpox, flu...

The evolution of light skin and ability to digest cow milk also happened due to the nutritional deficiencies of the agricultural lifestyle. Still, the benefit of being able to build a permanent home must have been strong for people to make the switch.

That's a remarkable explanation for the myth.

I find it convincing too. Check out the 'Big History' lecture series. Particularly the lecture on the transition to agriculture. I was inclined to think that humans transitioned to agriculture as soon as it was 'invented'. But the lecture suggests that humans knew perfectly well how to farm long before, but didn't because it seemed like too much hard work. We didn't transition until forced to by climatic conditions.

In my current job I've been working six hours a day, between one and three days a week. My favourite has been two days - enough to feel like I'm contributing to a collectively-held goal and have some workplace socializing, but short enough that I feel like my "real" life is away from work.

Having said that, I spend nearly all the rest of my days industriously grinding away at my own projects. But that doesn't feel like work.

That sort of fits with both my and RogtamBar's points that you spend most of your time working if you include your own stuff but not so much on formal employment. Maybe what we need is for employment to be more fun rather than less of it.

Your experience makes sense. I've read articles analyzing happiness at work and there is a very strong correlation with job autonomy. (And that explains why executives often love work - studies find that executives control their time and choose their work. That is also why bosses are so often surprised when their subordinates aren't equally enthusiastic about the work they are assigned.) Really, it takes somebody very disconnected from the reality of working people to think that everyone wants to work at jobs as they are currently constructed in our society.

I'm not aware of any empirical or historical justification for the range 28-56. People are indeed seldom happy unemployed, but I haven't seen any evidence that people would be unhappy on e.g. 14 hours/week (of course it's very hard to control for status aspects).

The kind of person who can cash in for millions is an outlier in many ways - the working habits of such people say very little about those of the general population.

People are seldom happy when doing nothing; they like to be recognized as worthy and valuable members of their group/community. Work is the most frequent way to partly achieve that, but it is not the only one, depending on how you define 'work' (generally involving exchange of money or service).

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