Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer
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Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years.
How much of the entire economy is predicated on grey money? How much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan?
The more I think about it, the more i want to opt out of the entire fucking thing.
I feel the same way, like you're being stomped in the face every day by an invisible boot except nobody knows who's wearing it, but we all feel it.
We are collectively losing our identities and blending into one due to how hyper connected we are and how available cheap forms of entertainment are.
It's all quite eerie. I still haven't really found a way to articulate it but I'd love to chat with someone more in depth about it.
This invisible boot is an illusion. I once read an article on privilege. The idea is that if you were a slave owner, you could "promote" some of your slaves to be "head slaves". This privilege creates a kind of vacuum. Instead of wanting to be free, slaves compete to become "head slave". If you randomly promote some every once in a while, it erases the idea that slaves should want to be free.
Even without some tinfoil hat inspired cabal, you can probably imagine how we have managed to enslave ourselves. If you make or have a lot of money, you can use it for privilege. People compete for this privilege instead of considering if they would rather be free. A small proportion of people become rich -- through hard work, or luck (it doesn't actually matter), keeping the system going.
I don't recommend quitting society altogether :-) You don't need to indulge in some self-sufficiency, neck beard fantasy, but I recommend making something entirely from scratch. See if you can borrow some land for a season and grow a garden, or make beer, or sew something... whatever. The closer to scratch you can do it, the better, but don't stress about it. Then, once you have something nice, wander over to your neighbours and give it to them. Keep doing that. It helps to get good at only one thing so that you don't get overwhelmed.
Next, look at how much money you spend. Try to challenge yourself to see how little money you could spend and still be happy. We're trying to break the weird "obvious" rules that everybody else lives by, so try not to accumulate too much money. The more you can shrink the amount you need, the easier it will be to be happy with the amount that you have.
At the same time, stop reading the newspaper and watching TV news programs. Instead, challenge yourself to think about, "What is actually important to me. Do I care that North Korea is creating missiles. Even if I do, is there anything I want to do about it?". Keep trying to shrink the amount of useless drama in your life. Find ways to be alerted to the things that you care about and that you want to act on. It's best that the number of those kinds of things are very small because otherwise you will wear yourself out. Try your best to actually do something positive about those very small number of things.
After that, I think you will find that you are no longer being stomped in the face every day. At worst, some clueless people are tripping over you every once in a while. It hurts sometimes, but it's not something that has to trouble you too much. Yes, you have to pay taxes and yes, evil people are spending that tax money on things you don't like. But, unless this is the one thing that you want to fix in your life, it's just useless drama. Give them the damn money -- you don't need it anyway. Yes, you have to obey laws, even the ones you don't agree with. Fight the bad ones that you need to fight and save your strength wrt to ones you don't need to fight. Yes, there are jerks everywhere you look -- even your neighbours. But the more you get to know your neighbours, the easier it will be to create a mini society where everyone is reasonably friendly and occasionally people drop by to give you home made jam.
In other words, just step off the escalator to weird-ville. It doesn't have to be eerie.
Yeah, all of that is all well and good, for you. What you wrote has no effect on me as I've already made the same realizations way way back. They weren't even conscious realizations worthy of merit. I've just always lived this way.
I don't care about anything in my life except my hobbies. Day job -> piano. I hang out with a couple of people a couple times a year.
Currently saving for a remote cottage way out north so I can isolate myself and work on my music. That's all I want to do.
And that's what I mean about the invisible boot. Just to have a modest dream like that here where I live, I need 250k minimum for the land+cottage and all things included in that.
Even the tiniest dreams are straight impossible. Owning any semblance of a property that is close to the downtown core if you're not a multi millionaire? Hahahahahaha good luck. 0% of my friends will be buying property in their life times, which means they will move further and further away.
The invisible boot is the stagnation of wages and the exploding cost of every day things, combined to shatter any and all dreams.
There's nothing to actually live for, and I don't mean folks like me who are in the unique position of being in a highly paid job without any "life strings". But my friends? It's over, working their entire lives just to maybe afford necessities for that month.
Your experience of life must just be different than mine!
I had continuous allergy problems without knowing it for a large part of my life. Among the effects were a minor depression.
When I got rid of the allergies I had a bit of an identity conflict, I wasn't the one I thought. My humour and world view weren't as dark, I liked people more. It is a strange to adjust your self image so much after 40.
I only ask because a great deal of recent research suggests our behaviour is strongly affected by our gut bacteria which are in turn affected by our overall diet.
Why would we be pessimistic?
Yup. Feeling pessimist now.
The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, an industrial-age machine.
Without the use of computing machines our ancestors had to arrange themselves in crude structures that formalized decision-making.
Now are merely developing a decision-making system that does not involve organic beings.
If you're talking about taxes, I'm right there with you!
You spelled misogyny weird.
TRP is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
In this context, I thought it was obvious that I was talking about this red pill.
One is the hand, the other the wallet.
The GP was referencing the latter.
That's why an assembly worker building a $20K Ford makes about the same as one building a $100K SUV.
My point is that the value created by a worker doesn't define the salary (although it creates a cap, you can pay more than value created).
A great example are lawyers. With the glut of lawyers out there, a lot of lawyers are getting paid less than $50K/yr. I would argue the work they do is worth more than that, but since there are so many lawyers chasing so many jobs, salaries fall.
"can't", presumably.
Maybe you'd like to ask a sensible question?
FYI even just at the federal level things are effed up. 33.9% of taxes collected are payroll taxes, but social security caps at ~120k. Hint it's just a tax, you can receive benifits without ever working and millions on disability are simply pulled off welfare rolls.
Also, the percentage of income as basis for tax doesn't make any sense. I don't pay a percentage of income for broadband or Netflix or insurance, why should payment for government services be different?
What would you consider a "fair" share of the top 1%'s wealth?
So my question still stands, what would be a fair breakdown of tax burden? Top 1% pay 100% of all income taxes? 90%?
I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm asking an honest question.
Unless we know what "fair" looks like, we don't know what needs to change.
[1]http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/07/in-2015-45-percent-of-amer...
The intuition I take out of this, is that letting people be billionaires is a complete waste of resources, because plenty of people would still aspire to wealth even if the richest person in the world had a fraction of that.
A better start (for me) is to ask what % of tax the people with the (for example) top 50% of income, or top 50% of wealth, should pay.
If the top 1% has (for example) 90% of the income, then only paying 50% of the tax might be considered unfair.
The only number I could find is that the top 1% earns 22% of all AGI (adjusted gross income). This is income after all deductions, etc; the amount of income the tax rate is applied to.[1]
I'd be interested to see how much of all income is earned by the top 1%.
[1]http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-inco...
EX: Calculate bill gates lifetime wealth and lifetime AGI. Hint, that 30 billion he donated never counted as AGI.
It's not like it's some super secret formula that no one knows how to calculate.
Sure, you can pretend it's meaningful number, but ex: charitable donations are not deductible from payroll taxes so they are clearly not going to reduce income. Or for a more obvious example, donate 1 million in appreciated and you get to deduct the full 1 million from income. (see if you can spot the problem with that.)
PS: Hypothetically, if they said AGI was income - 95% of income over 10 million per year would you still use it? After all that's just an adjustment.
This might be more interesting...
In 2011, households in the top, middle, and bottom quintiles received 52, 14, and 5 percent of the nation's before-tax income, respectively; the shares of federal taxes paid by those households were 69, 9, and 1 percent.[1]
So the top quintile earns 52% of the before-tax income and payers 69% of all taxes. The bottom quintile earns 5% of all before-tax income and pays 1% of the taxes.
Market income consists of labor income, business income, capital gains (profits realized from the sale of assets), capital income excluding capita l gains, income received in retirement for past services, and other sources of income.
That 30 billion Gates donated would could for 0 on that scale making it BS. Use of a company jet for 1 year, 0.
PS: Of course it's also pretending the top 0.01% is the same as the top 1%.
Reality is they are not paying 50% of income tax as social security is a federal tax on income. There are also plenty of regressive taxes. Pay for lunch that's taxed, pay for an accountant free. Guess who spends more on accountants?
But we can see it in the big picture, statistically half the money in the country goes to the 0.01% or something along those lines. All the gains from productivity went to the super-rich.
It doesn't make a lot of sense for you to keep your eyes fixed on taxes and welfare when there is a lot more money at stake. But it makes a lot of sense for the super-rich to ensure that you keep doing it.
Special laws, ie you're now mandated to purchase healthcare, special barriers to entry, copyright give aways etc etc, the rich get super rich through government corruption.
If you want full value (which might be zero or negative at times) for your labor, you should start your own thing and keep 100% of the value you create.
If my employer wasn't making at least 3x (and ideally more like 5x) the total cost they were spending on me, I'd start worrying about the stability and longevity of that relationship. (So far, very happily employed there almost 13 years and no end in sight.)
A workers' cooperative can do the same job. What justifies the privatization of the cooperative's profits to a single individual?
If they want to exchange some ownership for some cash, they can sell all or part of their ownership stake. If they want to exchange some ownership for labor or other services, they can create a stock or option grant program, typically with vesting. There doesn't seem to be anything unnatural to me about someone putting capital at risk to form a business owning the resulting business. No different than putting my capital at risk/committed to buy a house or a car. I pay for them and I own them.
If you want to avoid that situation that you find exploitive, you are free to start your own (individually or as a collective) and keep/share as you judge best.
Then the workers should go ahead and form such a cooperative.
Do you not believe in the sanctity of property rights?
Well of course not. Property is theft, and all that[1].
I'm not aware of countries where your choice is "do this one specific job for this one specific employer or else starve".
Starting your own venture may be possible but is dependent on aptitude, access to capital and the state of the economy (it's unlikely that we could all start our own businesses for example; the market wouldn't support it).
The recent rise in economic migrants suggest that it many cases it really is easier to switch countries than switch jobs in one's own country.
Keep competition, but play for the same team. The losers are losers because they didn't create the best solution, but the losers are winners because they get to enjoy the spoils, since they're on the same team. Isn't status everything, after a point? Why can't the United States actually be united?
Develop universal human code, highly vetted, secure, and performant code; employable by everyone to satisfy the tedious data management and automation of everyday needs that arise as a consequence of our biology and community structure, like health care, administration, maker technology, infrastructure, education, and the creation of art. The amount of mediocre code getting created, and relied upon, is atrocious, and often the highest quality, most valuable software is completely inaccessible except for by some very small subset of the global population! It's some kind of collective insanity.
> bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years.
I would say the worst of the present are written deeply into the structure of our societies, iterative processes spanning a very, very long time. These non-friendly, non-cooperative entities are very self-protective. It is only recently that it has been able to reap such unimaginable power.
How much harder does it become to create a better form of government, the longer this goes on? Our existing governments clearly can't handle current problems in any kind of respectable schedule, much less the ones that will result from the increasing acceleration of technological change. Perhaps whatever comes after human is already here, and it's eating us.
Yes, and imagine they were doing fundamental physics or medicine, instead of social media apps...
I would guess that a majority of the people who create the technology that enables the latter would greatly prefer the former.
If goods aren't scarce, they have no opportunity cost -- anyone in such a society could get as much, e.g., filet mignon as they want without sacrificing their ability to get quality healthcare, education, or consumer electronics.
Greater overall and per capita productivity isn't, and doesn't even approximate, post-scarcity conditions.
If we lived in a post-scarcity economy, "You Need A Budget" would fail, because you wouldn't.
We're close.
We certainly don't need to live in a world where millions die for lack of will, or failing that, where trillions of dollars of value are siphoned off of the working class in an upwards waterfall.
I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate that we are not living in a utopia. But my comment was lazy as it says exactly that, without further qualification, so i deserve the pedantry.
Because misery is empirically shown to be driven largely by relative, not absolute, deprivation -- both compared to one's own past and one's visible surroundings -- greater productively doesn't even approximate post-scarcity (indeed when it was involves greater or more visible inequality, it makes the impact of scarcity more palpable.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
As to how relatively miserable we are as a function of how miserable we were... I'm really much more concerned with the idea that as a socioeconomic entity, the global economy generates enough capital that we could solve hunger, base poverty, eradicate solved diseases and even wage slavery. Today. That we haven't and won't is all the indictment I require.
I'm inclined to believe we are experiencing scarcity. Sure, I can buy just about anything I desire and can afford. Any food item, cheap clothing, cheap travel. But I think that's an illusion.
Let's say I'm prepared to pay £50-£100 for an item of clothing. Shoes, jacket, whatever. It's likely to be made by impoverished people on the other side of the world who are paid peanuts.
I could even pay £5 for a pair of jeans if I wanted. God knows how that's even possible.
But it's a sliding tile puzzle. If I experience cheap apparently-plentiful goods, it's only because someone else is suffering.
I'm not prepared to pay £300 for a long-lasting item of clothing. The thought barely crosses my mind because I never see that stuff in the windows of high-street shops. Instead, I typically buy "cheap", "plentiful" goods that fall apart after a year or two -- or go out of fashion -- then replace them.
Ethically I dislike this, and try to shop "ethically" and donate old clothing to charity. This requires high levels of vigilance, and is not convenient.
All the above apply to food. I can buy apparently any item I want. Or can I? In actuality, I can buy whatever trendy item the supermarkets can buy in bulk for best profit. Great, I'll have some kale and coconut water and acai berries. Is that "plenty"? What about locally produced fruit and veg? Why do I have to invest in a comparatively-expensive box delivery scheme if I want apples that were grown in my country?
If I want to eat locally reared meat I have to pay a premium, because provenance has become a valuable attribute. Instead I could buy mechanically recovered pressed meat, which is unbelievably cheap and widely available. Even if I believe it's healthy to eat that stuff, and even though both products are undeniably "meat", they're not the same.
Perhaps meat being expensive is actually normal. That's certainly been the case for most of history. In which case, the cheapness of the lower quality meat products is the illusory factor.
So I think "plenty" is an illusion, and scarcity is far, far closer than we conspire to believe.
Edit: I forgot the most obvious and familiar example. Ad-funded content/services vs paid-for content/services.
My great-great-great-great-great grandfather might have had something to do with colonialism. But if we start judging sons by their fathers, we get nowhere. And at the same time people remain poor in Africa.
Buying only domestic goods would help to ensure that they remain poor.
The one instance that really has incentive to keep people poor are the foreign development organizations. They don't need people "poor enough to be willing to work" they need people "starving, so we get good footage".
An efficient entry-level post-scarcity world is not going to overproduce pairs of jeans or transport coconut water across the world. That world would make just enough clothing to cover the populace and provide a cup of water on request. That world would want to stay just above scarcity, no want to waste, no need to introduce artificial market driven scarcities.
Yup, I'm pointing out that my well-shod, well-fed, well-clothed society is an illusion, and that scarcity is just under the surface.
> An efficient entry-level post-scarcity world is not going to overproduce pairs of jeans
I don't disagree.
Or, what happens more often, is that my productivity suffers and I end up staying late till everyone has gone away so I can actually not be interrupted.
Also, I really don't like shared open office spaces, and as a vet with ptsd, I really don't like having my back turned to the door, but management wants to be able to see everyones screen as they walk by.
While we are talking about overworked, the other issue that bugs me is disparity in expected work vs pay. To me, employment is a contract of goods and services. You pay me money to get a job done at a certain level. If you want me to be superman, you better pay me more like it! Instead, I continually hear the guys who have worked at a place more than 15 years say "You have to put in the work and effort and then hope they give you that raise, perk, etc...".
I don't think the baby-boomer generation realizes that there is no such thing as company loyalty in the big scheme of things anymore, especially in an at-will state. I'm tired of employees bending over backwards because they bring no power to the negotiating table on just about anything. I have a personal life and identity that is completely separate from work and I intend to keep it that way. If you pay me enough I would reconsider my work life balance, but I'm not going to do it for free and hope for it, it needs to be a deal struck in agreement between both parties and in contract form.
If there is one thing I could encourage we teach IT workers, it's the power of learning how contract law works, and all the stuff that comes with that. (eg: no you don't have to sign that, yes you can amend it, no that TOS is bad and unenforceable, that falls under the UCC, etc)
As Jay-Z put it: You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
I very much doubt this is true. It was the baby boomers who bore the brunt of the new paradigm in the '70s and '80s. By the time gen-X entered the workforce you had to be a bit delusional to think your employer saw you as anything other than an expense to be minimized.
Jesus! Are you serious? Do they have a good reason or is it literally to keep an eye on everyone to make sure they are working?
If it's the latter, I'd suggest looking for a new job.
Whenever I take a "brain rest" at work, I'm surfing the net and often it's Hacker News. My boss (and her boss) have often walked in, looked at the screen and asked me if I'm reading something interesting.
My company's culture is basically "get your work done, otherwise I don't care how you spend you time".
This is just disgusting. The oppressed defending the unfair system that enslaves them while hoping, one day, to be rewarded and turned into one of the oppressors.
Most of the demands for long hours in the software business come down to the fact that no one wants to be the one to _organize_ things.
Instead of planning our work so the team knows what they are building, we go in two weeks sprints to build half baked solutions to ill posed problems.
Then we fight fires in production at all hours and feel like big heroes for cleaning up messes that could have been avoided.
I've got a better idea. Keep the vacation and cut work hours down to 40.
Pff, more like we should go to 35hrs with mandatory _paid_ overtime and also _increase_ vacation to 6 weeks.
And also demand reparations for all the stolen time. (Real pay hasn't increased since 1970.)
After that we can talk about taking it further.
It has, it's just been pretty shallow growth. That flatlined in the late 90's. And then fell to 1970's levels in 2008/2009
Not work long hours? This is what unions are for (now, if we could just have one without dues/political contributions).
Abuse of said political contributions are another (but important) matter.
Funding is important, as we've seen with the Sanders' campaign, but grassroots efforts equally (if not more) so.
I think funding is the smaller of the problem: unions, labor, regular people need better tools to organize and hold their representatives (either government or union) accountable.
EDIT: If you're looking for a problem to solve, help build these better tools. Help people be represented!
Unions are very differently organized depending on the country, their political leaning (or lack of thereof), their industry... For instance, it looks like that in the US, the Organizing Model[1] is prevalent, which means that a large workforce has to be employed by the union
From the media, it seems to me that unions in the US are generally less politically organized than in Europe. For instance in France, unions are almost always politicaly leaning in one way or another, from CNT ("anarchist" union), CGT (historically linked to the french Communist Party) and CFTC or FO (historically split from CGT by anti-communist organisations) and going sometimes to the right end of the political spectrum such as Alliance/CFE-CGC (french readers please forgive my broad simplification, I do know that it's much more complicated than my summary...). My limited knowledge of trade unions in Belgium and Spain comes to a similar analysis
However, from how they are portrayed in the media, it seems to me that unions in the US are rather 'trade based', for instance "the" teachers union, or the truckers unions, etc. In contrast in France a teacher could be affiliated to CGT Education or FO Education (depending on their personnal preferences/political leaning), which are in turn members of a larger "confederation" such as the CGT. In my (very simplified) example, the "teachers CGT" and the "truckers CGT" can and do band together and strike/picket together when an issue impact both teachers and truckers. In my simplified example, CGT Truckers also strike in support to teachers during large movements.
Is this also a thing in the US? It seems to me that it's not the case?
Yes, there are some systems which work by emergent properties alone without central organisation, but the very fact that they're limited to specific areas, and are prominantly missing in others, suggests limitations to their effectiveness and scope.
Abuses aside, you don't get the positive - that is someone fighting for your rights - for free, and without playing in the field of politics.
> Hey all, management's been asking us for too much unpaid overtime. Strike?
You're gonna need legal. Professional negotiators would be good.
On the subject of dues being required to pay for full-time guild leaders as brought up in the sibling comments, that makes sense. But could it be supplemented by crowdfunding and alternate pay models, instead of mandating a set price? Tiered membership? Freemium guilds? Free 2 Protest?
On a less semi-satirical level about startups, hackers already voluntarily contribute willingly to non-profit endeavors, namely open source projects, and sometimes causes such as Wikipedia/Wikimedia, the Internet Archive, even tech-related lobbying like the EFF, etc. Surely some could put that same spirit of voluntarism towards supporting their labor class.
It just seems that more startup engineering teams should engage in collective action, because in many cases, if the entire team left, the company would be crippled.
Like say in a company, you work with your direct coworkers (as opposed to members of a national or even regional union) to adhere to that protocol of bargaining when disputes with management happen?
Has anyone explored trying it with a private membership app?
I work as an R&D manager/software architect and I simply don't work more than 40hrs per week. It just takes some self discipline and efficiency. My CEO doesn't argue with me about it because I do my job and I do it well.
However, if your employer expects you to work more hours than you get paid for, find a different employer who actually respects your time.
"The eight-hour day was won during this decade primarily through labor market tightness (wage increases, manufacturing employment expansion, and curtailment of immigration)."
Consumers demand their new toys on a regular cycle. If one company doesn't keep up, another will. Too long not in the news and people forget about you.
The only way to stay relevant in a world with a thousand distractions is to keep making enough noise that customers pay attention.
If a product can be done properly in 16 months and ignored, or done in 12 months of way too many hours, and be a hit on the market, well the only damn choice is work 12 hour days.
Is this some Orwellian nightmare? Rather than have the workers do less work through holidays, let's have deal with the stress during their off hours. Don't take a 2-week holiday, just exercise more every day. Sitting at a desk all day isn't making you fat, it's that you're spending the hour between work and sleep with your kids rather than at the gym.
Some things matter more than productivity. Give your people the time off they need. Or how about just allowing employees to exercise and de-stress on company time.
Like the much ballyhooed open office plan, or the typical "we don't track vacation time" policy in modern startups, the real bottom line, so to speak, is always the bottom line.
It may very well be that employees who don't take vacations are more productive, overall than those who do. But by placing the burden of self-repair entirely on the employee, on their personal time and dime, the employer effectively washes its hands of the matter. If we take this article to its logical conclusion, burnout is your own fault, even in the face of pathological organizational structures, workloads, etc. That's an outward radiation of risk and responsibility par for the course in the new economy.
That's the key to the obesity epidemic right there. Have an onsite gym, and let employees take up to an hour off their normal 8 hours a day to exercise (or perhaps at a nearby gym, with some sort of oversight).
If you just give people that hour off, they'll be lazy and use it for other things, but if it's set aside specifically for exercise (or at the very least sitting their butts in the gym), it'll get done over time.
But it has to be unstructured and unforced. They can do it any time throughout the day, for as little as they want, but it will be no questions asked if they're in the gym (or out taking a walk or something).
And then group health premiums will drop, employee energy when they are working will increase, and they'll get just as much work done as they would have otherwise.
As a society we went from having mostly active jobs to mostly sedentary jobs. These sedentary jobs are slowly killing their employees. It should be the company's moral imperative to allow for exercise breaks during company time.
* At home have a sense of separation (psychological detachment) from work:
* avoid work emails at home
* incorporate a ritual like changing out of work clothes
* get fully immersed (no negative work thoughts) in a sport, exercise, volunteering, musical instrument, or other creative pursuit
* At work reduce nagging thoughts of "unfinished business"
* plan and organize your work day / develop a clear picture of what you can realistically get done during the day
* do not start a new task right before leaving
* take rest breaks, and seek out natural environments if possible,
* do not do errands on a breakMaybe you can't stop reading email or have time to go biking after work, but ten minute breaks to go outside scattered around the day? Creating a ritual to help your brain to switch from hard core work mode to resting mode?
It can literally just be a cup of tea when you get home. It doesn't have to be hours of time and energy, but the point that not doing so will cause you to become sick is certainly accurate.
But I think the point of the article was how to cope with overwork and reduce your stress, not to actually reduce your work load.
I'm also clearly talking about steady state, not emergencies--that's what I meant by "routinely." Yes, taking breaks helps and so do rituals but it doesn't make the work go away or let you get home any sooner. My point is that some jobs always have a backlog or glut or work to catch up on. Usually this is because the company purposely under-staffs the position/department. However, I don't see these systemic issues as something the individual can change. They can merely cope or find a new job--neither of which provide an 'answer' as they headline implies. Healthy work habits are great, but it's no solution to simply being overworked.
I definitely sleep so much better putting my phone into airplane mode about fifteen minutes before I want to go to bed though. That certainly seems fair all around, and means when I inevitably wake up in the middle of the night I don't see a pile of unread emails to deal with and get tempted to read them while I should be sleeping so I can be productive the next day!
I imagine that this kind of expedition planning could even be provisioned somehow as a service, so there might be a startup idea in there somewhere :)
I'm imagining a good way to ease into it might be first climbing the flatirons in Boulder or Stone Mountain in Atlanta.
What they do advise instead is working on the disease itself and try to manage your day-to-day better instead of ONLY relying on annual holidays. They aren't saying you shouldn't take holidays only that they won't cure all your stress permanently.
I think this is good advice. Not groundbreaking or new knowledge, but still - good advice!
Yes! If people only knew the type of escape that was possible, both mental and physical. American blackbelt Chris Haueter once recalled how he would eagerly drive hours to the gym in his shitty car, from his shitty job and shitty relationship, because he knew it would all roll off him when he hit the mat.