The Shut-In Economy (2015)
medium.com
medium.com
I seriously don't understand the mentality that working all the time is good for you. I find that I figure out solutions to problems I'm having not by banging my head against them all the time, but from relaxing, walking, running, biking, shopping, reading books, and all the other "non-productive" things that normal people do.
Is Silicon Valley really like this? It sounds more like a dystopia than a utopia.
i enjoy this also.
the problem with food delivery is a lot of the time they forget something, or are out of something, or don't give you enough of something, so you end up going to the store.
and delivered prepared food is always disappointing compared to cooking or going out. it also generates an absurd amount of waste.
the only thing i really get delivered are products i can't buy locally, or without sitting in traffic for an hour.
I just as much enjoy shopping at Aldi. There is a perverse glee in stuffing a shopping cart with enough food for two weeks and - like every time before - watching the bill fail to surpass $100. It's quite a kick in the pants to stay focused on budgeting.
Shopping for food that I put in my body also reminds me that I am alive.
Surely having to drag yourself out of a warm, comfy bed should remind you of that every day?
Exactly! This is why I prefer working remotely. If I'm stuck on a problem, I can do all of the above whenever I want. My version of zen is to go to the local basketball court and shoot jump shoots.
Since I started working from home, I work 15-20 hours less. I'm much more productive without all the distractions and I don't have an 8 hour commute gobbling up my time. I can't get into podcasts or audible.com when I'm stuck in traffic :(
At my first job, our manager would force the engineering team to go to the beach every Friday to get out of the office, as we were the office shut ins. We worked longer hours than any other department by far. This caused a major political situation as the head of Project Management voiced vocal opposition to our field trips due to optics, even though this most likely helped our productivity.
One other commitment I had difficulty meeting was seeing a therapist every week. I always had to come in super early or stay late, neither of which was ideal
No, I hate it. Supermarkets especially are a horrible place, they are way too crowded and I don't like being in situations like that. I will cycle to the grocery store and if I see there's a long line for checkout I'll reverse course and try at a later time in the hope there's less people.
I do my grocery shopping stormtrooper-style. I'll be in and out in as little time as possible (think 3-5 minutes for a typical shopping trip).
> What, exactly, are people doing that gives them so little free time that this is necessary?
Stuff in grocery stores costs money, you get money by having a job.
> I seriously don't understand the mentality that working all the time is good for you.
And yet you claim not to understand why people hate doing more work ?
I'm personally not like that (used to be, but with a lot of effort, got over it), but it's good to see someone else's perspective.
It's not just that I don't like it, it's super exhausting to me. I literally start feeling depressed and lose the will to live if I spend too much time around people. The less time I have to spend with people, the happier I feel.
This is really the key. Lifestyle articles romanticize anything they want for the sake of clicks, and if you take them at face value, you can end up feeling guilty for not getting deep satisfaction from shopping, cleaning, and every other kind of drudgery imaginable. Going to the grocery store is supposed to be an opportunity for social connection. Picking up your dry cleaning nurtures your ties to the community. And if you prefer to spend your time on a stimulating and challenging task that you actually chose and are good at, you are a joyless drone.
The MO of this kind of writing is to take really nice but unusual experiences -- like when you exchange a few words and a smile with the checkout clerk and it brightens your whole day -- and suggest that these are bread and butter experiences for other people. That other, better people don't often find the grocery store boring or stressful.
It ratchets up the insecurity by presenting idealized versions of every scenario. You aren't pushing a cart through a crowd at the middlebrow grocery store picking up stuff you wish you didn't have to buy and comparing prices because you haven't saved enough this year. You aren't fighting traffic in the parking lot trying to find a space, any space, because you had to leave work at the same time as hundreds of thousands of other people and _had_ to shop because you're out of twenty essential items. You're taking a nice healthy stroll or bike ride to get ingredients for dinner tonight. Everything fits nicely on your bike because you only got what you need right now and you don't have a family that has its own needs and its own timelines.
Of course it only contributes to the malaise and stress because it makes you feel like you should really be having peak experiences all the time because other people are and if you aren't there's something wrong with you. It hits you from both ends by creating anxiety that you aren't keeping up and hope that your life contains a vast untapped reservoir of potential happiness.
Honest social commentary never uses this sleazy self-help formula. That's my tl;dr if anybody wants one.
Finally, think about how sinister it is to equate the desire to occasionally be free from something with a spiritual inability to enjoy it. This is the kind of logic that oligarchs use to romanticize the lives of the people they exploit. You don't want to do this work? It's drudgery to you? It must be because there's something spiritually wrong with you. You don't appreciate how this work binds you into a greater spiritual whole with the rest of society.
Most of the delivery services to my area (not the heart of a city) have high minimums, and I have dietary restrictions, so those meals are about 20 dollars each. Given that, I drive to Chipotle just about every day, as that is one of the closest restaurants I can eat at. Even if I did go shopping, finding 30 minutes or an hour to deal with cooking is also inconvenient.
Even if not working, I'd rather save an hour and hang out with my girlfriend, watch a show, work on a side project, or pet my dogs. There are dozens of things I would rather be doing than going shopping or fetching lunch. I have 5 projects I would love to work on that I don't have time for. That is mostly due to grad school, but given that there are things I want to be doing, that are not being done, it makes everything I'm indifferent about look like a time sink.
Million dollar question.
Nope, not at all.
Any kind of shopping is pain in the ass to me. It takes time away from any of the many other things in my life I would rather be doing.
Food shopping as an example is a necessity as I need food to give me the energy to get back to doing those things I enjoy. It's a chore like doing doing the dishes, washing your clothes or cleaning your home.
Otherwise like I said above, it takes too much time out of my day I would rather spend programming, learning guitar, reading or hell, even playing games or movies from my backlog.
Young kids are a big part of it. Also, in my case: run own business, multiple side projects, partner does some work from home, plus freelances also, keeping on top of a shared co-working space we own, upkeep of the house, garden, etc. There is not much down time.
I enjoy talking with family and friends, but not really as interested in extended interactions with random people at the shop.
> Does anyone have ideas how to write a utopia that would fulfill people's need to be needed by each other, rather than just their material needs?
And got an amazing response from user "fubo":
> Cross OKCupid with TaskRabbit: the AI tells you what favors to do for people to get you to love each other.
I wish the internet would grow into something like that, instead of making people more isolated under the guise of "social", "sharing" etc.
I for one like this kind of "technomyopia", because it works off a framework that lets humans eventually figure things out.
No, to laugh at people who think that because they have a hammer, that every problem is a nail, and maybe also the people who believe that the analogy is really really true, so long as you're using the magic hammer of technology.
Starting from the assumption that every worthwhile problem must have a scientific or technical solution is exactly the hammer looking for nail that comments here are complaining about.
Maybe the OP was just meaning to criticize the app idea, but the way they wrote, it looks like a general criticism of technology as a problem solver - criticism I believe is naïve and unwarranted.
> most social change is neither scientific nor technological but word-driven and operating in the emotional domain
I disagree with that, but that's a longer discussion about technological determinism.
I think it's possible to believe in the efficacy of science and technology, while at the same time doubting that crossing OKCupid with TaskRabbit will usher in "a utopia that would fulfill people's need to be needed by each other" (which is the concept that started this whole subthread)
Not saying we should give up, but this is a social problem, better analyzed with more apt tools like social science. Relationships grow with time & investment in interacting with someone else - given that, no amount of "apps" or tech magic can make a fundamental difference.
It doesn't matter whether you're joining an 18th century gentleman's club or looking for a healthy relationship. Love and acceptance comes from understanding and meeting the other's emotional needs. If you think about what it takes to actually do that for another person, you'll find out why people watch rom-coms. Meeting someone else's needs feels like living under a dictator.
I think the solution to that is to have more group identities and subcultures, and better ways to discover them.
> I wish the internet would grow into something like that
That could be great, but how would it be paid for?
What if you don't have a need like that ? The only reason I wouldn't sign up for a one-way trip to Mars is because they would probably want to send other people too.
Also, services that delivery groceries, cooked meals, or laundry/drycleaning are not new -- they were just given a facelift for a different consumer base. An article like this failing to mention that is a pretty big oversight imho -- it even trends into "back in my day..." territory.
If anything, this new economy is correcting for the car-dependent "convenience economy" that was implemented over the past 30 years or so. The milkman was replaced by milk in every corner store. Diners and luncheonettes were replaced by take out and carry away. Catalogs were replaced by "big box" stores.
It reminds me of the comparison of "head stuck in a newspaper" to "head stuck to a smartphone." Some people try and argue the latter is more egregious, but why?
Previous discussion:
This existence sounds awful and I don't know how people not only manage to do it, but aspire to it.
Grass looks greener on the other side, I guess. I definitely wouldn't be fine spending shit ton of money for small apartments, but that's unrelated to being "shut in", which is something I find more and more appealing. I guess between spending most of my days in an open-office workplace and an active relationship, I'm just getting tired of other people. I find myself dreaming more and more often about a week away from human interruptions. Just me, pen, a notebook, stack of books and a laptop with good Internet connection. I have a lot of thoughts to sort through that I can't because there are other people around me, and I can't focus.
It sounds like paradise to me. Interacting with people is horrible, humans are unpredictable and interacting with them is like playing with a live hand grenade that can go off at any moment. It's just so super stressful to be around humans.
It's also super exhausting, after a day at the office I can do little more than sit in front of the TV like a zombie while I'm perfectly fine after a work-from-home day.
If this trend continues unabated, a large part of the population is likely to go full Wall-E, especially as the tech moves the services down-market. That seems like a far more interesting conundrum than a few rich and privileged folks trying to bring back Victorian era house-help with their mobile phones.
I'm not going to be easily convinced that chores are a blessed thing. I do think chores will eventually die out because their value is fairly low: they're mostly repetitive tasks that don't require much skill. Ask women from the time before the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine how they feel about the awesomeness of chores.
If you want to know why something happens, look at incentives. Real ones, not the ones that you think should be true. Too often people have an ideal person in their head, and they assume all must act and think that way, so anyone who disagrees cannot really voice their opinion. Then a new solution comes out and a bunch of people rush to it. Or a new president. That demand was always there, it just was not allowed to be heard. If you don't want to hear it, it will catch you off guard.
People work a lot. People are protective of their time. People don't want to socialize. People are forced to earn income through part time jobs. People don't like those other people over there. In my experience, rarely does anyone really care to know why, they just announce a judgment to make themselves feel better and move on.
I don't think this Shut-In Economy development drives inequality. Rather, it's a consequence of it, and one of the examples of why inequality is bad, no matter how "objectively" well the less well off are doing. For the shut-in class, and for the serving class... and for those below.
In a more fair society, elimination of chores would be driven by either shared work or automation, and it will benefit all, so we wouldn't be complaining about it and calling the beneficiaries entitled. But it would take a fundamental rejection of this style of economic affairs to get there.
It appears she didn't visit a co-working facility or even a coffeeshop as research. That would go against her narrative of the anti-social, nerdy shut-in. She also neglects to talk about the costs of commuting, namely that the longer the drive one has, the more likely they are to have higher levels of obesity, cholesterol, pain, fatigue and anxiety. For those with mid to low incomes, commutes can eat up 9% of one's income. They are also adding to gridlock and pollution.
The article only looks at a small cross-section of what appears to be anti She declines to write about the benefits of being a remote worker. The digital nomad movement is the diametric opposite of a shut-in. Parents of newborn children who work remote now get to be around their children instead of shuttling them off to daycare. These services sound awesome. I don't like doing dishes, washing my clothes, or cleaning my apartment. I don't see any virtue in doing mindless labor that I personally find annoying at best. If I want to do something repetitive that doesn't require higher cognitive abilities, I exercise. It has the benefit of clearing my head/bringing mindfulness. Isn't that the point of technology?
I, personally, have cut down drastically on driving. I am no longer adding to gridlock or spewing pollution into the air. I'm much healthier since I cook for myself more often and I exercise more. I love the flexibility it gives my life. I don't have to take a vacation day for mundane errands like going to the doctor, going to court, picking up a friend or relative from the airport, etc. I've more hobbies and explored more interests in one year of remote work than I did the previous 10 years. The greatest benefit is that it makes me MORE social. I get to see the people who are important to me in life the most and not spend most of my social time with people who I' am lukewarm about. I just didn't have any energy or motivation to do anything but veg out in front of the TV when I drove home through LA traffic from work.
The one downside I was that I found myself consuming more cable news/infotainment. This raised my level of righteous indignation and more and more of my conversations started to become intense debates with my positions formed by emotional responses. However, I fixed this by not watching as much Bloomberg and avoided media intended to cause outrage.
As a number of these services will be automated in the future, her conclusion that we are headed towards a stratified society with on-demand workers being reduced to servants in the Guilted Era is just flat out wrong. I am fearful of the future stratification of society, but that's due to people being displaced from work and not the issues