Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?
It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.
Sure, work is changing, and many people are lucky to be able to detach from such schedules with exciting and unknown results for the future workplace. But those of us fortunate enough to have had access to 9-to-5 jobs would be tone deaf to act like it's such a traumatic experience, when so many people in the world would be so grateful to have such an opportunity.
I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".
This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.
You can call it whatever you want, but its not adding up to a "better life."
As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this time period their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough. Not to mention many of these hunting trips often spanned multiple days from what I gather. I suppose militaries had a lot of cohesion, as long as you don't mind defining "loved ones" as "my squadmates". Family farms still generally would end up with the family cut in half between the women and men, assuming the men even stayed together. Etc.
I can't off the top of my head think of a time period where there wasn't a large portion of the population separated from at least half their family for long periods of time.
The current situation isn't perfect, but let's be precise about what we're comparing it to, and when exactly it supposedly existed and was widespread.
2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it.
Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies.
The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.
I often see this nostalgia about how much better things used to be, compared to how bad it is now, whether that time period is 5, 25, 100 or in your case, 10000 years ago. This usually glosses over the very real downsides of living in any of those time periods. In the case of hunter gatherer societies here are some problems that we no longer have to deal with once we moved to agricultural societies with central authority. In no particular order
1. Vagaries of food. You had to constantly find food, because storage wasn't easy. You could have a few months where you had plenty of food but a difficult week could see some friends and family die of starvation. This was a very real danger. Compare that with what a difficult week looks like today. This led to
2. Constantly moving. You could never stay in one place too long. You really like the area you're currently at? Too bad, move on before food sources dry up here. What if the new place is not as good and food is difficult to find? Too bad, keep moving. This led to
3. Leaving behind people. If a person could not walk at the pace of the group, they would be left behind to die. There was no quiet corner they could retire to, they had to walk or die. Not just old people. If a person broke their leg, and couldn't walk for a couple of months, they would be left behind to die.
4. Safety. If you lived in a large group with strong fighters this wasn't a problem. But if you didn't, or encountered a larger or more skilled group of fighters, you could see everyone in your group killed except for younger women. That's less of a problem in societies where a central entity has a monopoly on violence.
There is absolutely no doubt that all of these factors led to a high mortality rate. Once people moved to agricultural societies that were relatively safer and had relatively stable sources of food, the population exploded. The choice that people made was not forced upon them. Indeed it would have been difficult to do at a time when society had just started to change and central authority was still weak. Rather it was just people choosing the safe, stable option rather than the interesting one.
The interestingness of being a hunter gatherer is what modern societies find attractive - eating different things everyday, moving to a new place every couple of weeks, almost like a constant vacation. But it ignores the constant spectre of death that hangs over every such society.
My understanding of this topic is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I highly recommend it.
So a few points. First of all, you elide between comparing hunter gatherer societies to early sedentary societies and contemporary industrialized societies. They are very much not the same, and I prefer contemporary industrial societies over both. This was purely a statement of leisure time, which was higher in HG societies than contemporary ones.
The comparison between early sedentary and hunter gatherer societies is where hunter gatherer societies have a pretty attractive value proposition. Some points: the threat models between agricultural and hunter gatherer societies are different, and you can sustain a higher population per acre with agriculture, obviously. But people never wholeheartedly embraced sedentary, centralized societies. They germinated in particularly fertile areas where states could most effectively maintain themselves and extract excess value from highly productive land and labor.
But if being agricultural and sedentary were an obvious, natural course of events that everyone would choose, you'd see agriculture and sedentary states rapidly spreading to the boundaries of the geography that can support people via agriculture. That's not what you see: you see constantly fluctuating exteriors in a contested relation with borderlands. The people living in those areas constantly switched sides depending on convenience and what was best for them at a given time. For instance, sometimes, Han China would offer incentives for people to take up sedentary agriculture (no taxes!), and they did. But this wasn't stable, and people would be more than happy to switch back to other lifestyles depending on the state of the economy and the incentives they faced.
Over time, the total area of those borderlands shrunk as a result of technological progress and more capable states. But this took literally millenia.
[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed
Yes, they do, even now. Of course, they're so inconsequential on the world stage that you don't hear about them much, but yes, they exist.
Now, you have the problem that they probably won't accept you, and will probably eventually try to kill you if you seriously set up next to them and start truly doing the hunt-gather routine.
But then, that's the authentic hunter-gatherer experience too.
(I don't believe the garbage about how peaceful they supposedly were. It is logistically ludicrous.)
And no, they don't. Sure, you can find a random tribe in the barren wastelands of the Kalahari that's ostensibly "hunter gatherer," but they are much more integrated into the economy of South Africa than any hunter gatherer society would have been two thousand years ago. Most people born into those hunter gatherer-lite societies spend at least some time working in the capitalist economy.
Compare that to millenia ago, where hunter gatherers occupied some of the most economically productive regions of the world. It's an apples and oranges comparison.
I think you're overestimating how much you can have that if you wanted it. I realize many people would reject that life (or at a minimum want modern medicine alongside it), but basically no one actually has the choice.
Hunting-gathering became steadily less 'appealing' as it became impossible to do effectively. In America, start from the near-extinction of bison. Add the privatization of most land, mass agriculture destroying the great plains habitat completely, fenced cattle farming destroying western spaces. (That also destroyed the semi-hunter-gatherer vaquero lifestyle, which people were mourning mere decades ago.)
You can do this anywhere - urbanization of the American East, desertification of the Southwest, the list goes on. And if you want a less-nomadic version, since the open spaces for nomadism are gone, you run into more modern laws actively preventing it. I know people who grew up (not at all as hunter-gatherers) in houses out in the woods that are now completely illegal because electricity and running water have been mandated.
I'm on a soapbox here, yeah. But I know people who do want this lifestyle, people who've tried for this lifestyle, and the simple answer is that it's not actually available. For most people, that choice is gone. It can't coexist with modern civilization, and that might be a price worth paying but we ought to admit we paid it.
I'm not being snarky or theatrical, or judgmental; this is something that's cropping up all the time and I'm kind of wishing someone wise would tell me I shouldn't be as worried as I am about climate change fucking shit up on a level that dwarfs pretty much everything else.
And to be clear, I personally love spending time discussing the ins and outs of, say, The Lord Of The Rings, and I'll keep doing that to stave off depression. But for both good and bad I'm starting to wonder if I should go all-in on working toward solutions - if any - to playing a part in preserving humanity.
And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.
So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.
Regardless, I view speakers who make gestures like that with skepticism, since I associate the posture with grandiose self-interest.
The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept.
The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better.
Sadly, it's the status quo. Yes, calling it barbaric is hyperbolic - but the end is not to find out the specific philosophic understanding of the condition but to create propaganda and motivation to find something better.
To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done.
Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains.
UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.
The privileged few on HN (myself included 100%) who find their work rewarding, fulfilling, and extremely lucrative, are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what "work" is like in the real world.
I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale.
There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lots of the conventions our civilization has are tradition based and eminence based. They are not the pinnacle of human development.
Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.
Who are "we", though?
Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo. The people capable of making such decisions already enjoy a very high quality of life.
Generally, providing better wellbeing for employees is profitable. Or, that's at least what trendy management books tell us. I don't have a clue, I'm just a frontline coder. See for example Hamish "Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't"
We should have never left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. :)
Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say,
> It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag...
edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0].
[0]: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...
> Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is.
It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem.
But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make.
> awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic
Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.
It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era
As the other commenter mentioned, hyperbole like this only ever damages a cause.
I think there are probably better ways to do work and as we move towards the connected future I think many of them will increase in popularity, but that's due to an increase in options from our already very open ended lives, not some struggle against imagined barbarity.
Looking into the future and seeing 9-5 as "a step in the right direction, but far from the last step" is not inconceivable.
We look upon slave and child labor as barbaric, whereas not even 200 years ago it was the accepted norm. What prevents that from changing in the next 100-200 years?
"Barbaric." I wonder if he realizes how insulting and patronizing that is. I wish he could have met my grandfather, who worked his life in a coal mine literally scratching out a living six long days a week before dying of lung cancer in the 1950s.
A man who lived in a company house, was paid in script, money that could only be used at the company store to buy good at inflated prices. A man who was shot at with cannon and rifle by the us government for daring to challenge this status quo and try to form a union (see "WV mine wars" for details).
Vacations? Unthinkable. Benefits? no. A paycheck that was just enough to stay alive until the next one came along? yes.
The idea of fulfillment from one's work was probably not even a concept to daydream about. Leisure time didn't exist. It was called "resting" and it's what you did when not working.
He would have seen the cushy desk job of the average HN reader as paradise itself, the "stress" of meetings or deadlines as literally laughable compared to the very real stresses and dangers he "enjoyed" : mine collapse, poisoning by noxious gases, explosions, fire, or cancer.
Load of shit. That's the perfect description.
totally legitimate argument, im sure your grandfather fought hard for there to never be better working conditions for his grandchildren, and would hate that working conditions have gotten better and continue to improve.
have you ever complained that something tastes bad? dont forget theres starving children in africa, so you aren't allowed to complain about your food tasting bad, because someone has it worse, right?
Have you ever been thirsty and asked someone for water? that gall on you! people die everyday from dehydration, you being thirsty is just hipster self pity, you aren't going to die, so you aren't thirsty
see also:
>Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the initial argument.
[1] Grandparents as in comment hierarchy, not as in coal miners.
what our grandparents experienced is irrelevant to discussions on how working conditions should continue to improve.
Would you have told the men starting the UAW that they should stop because their grandparents had to work longer hours and that they have no right to complain? Thats idiotic, its fallacious, and its not even an opposing argument, its an attempt to stop a conversation.
Jobs with regular, stable work hours are not simply there by corporate decree. People actually like having that predictability in their lives. It makes it a lot easier to budget your time when you have that block of time carved out where you're making money.
Now, this guy would say hey, you could work half the time if you quit your job and started your own business. Well, that doesn't match up with the experience of any of the business owners I know (they regularly work 12-16 hour days), but even it was true...now I have to run and operate my own business. I can't just show up and do good work and take home a paycheck. I have to deal with insurance, I have to deal with payroll, or I have to pay someone to deal with all of that. If the only benefit I get from that is saying, "but at least I don't have a boss," it's not even close to worth it.
Where I live in Toronto, all the highways and subways get clogged as everyone needs to make it to the office for 9-5. Everyone then complains about poor infrastructure, but then all cities keep building for a short burst peak traffic. Infrastructure is overbuilt for other times.
I can understand a lot of it is due to having kids (schools let out around 4pm) so everyone tries to streamline dropping kids off and picking them up from work.
I really wish everyone can try for a staggered approach to deal with congestion. I don't have a hard sync like picking up kids or anything like that yet so I avoid the normal envelopes around 9-5.
Many initiatives like Smart Cities are being rolled out but yea... I'm not a huge fan of the common 9-5 pattern.
The problem becomes when you don't have that free time because of constant work issues. I can't say a future without 100% free time is such a great place.
How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
The work is soul destroying, I'd love to be doing something better.
However, I just don't think his idea will ever scale to the general populace, though. He says, "people with internet brains are capable of doing huge amounts of work, quickly and from anywhere. " Yeah, probably a few. I think his opinion might be biased because he's an artist who has commercial success (he's essentially made it as a business owner/entrepreneur, which we know not everyone is capable of).
Anecdotal evidence: I'm currently working in an office where there's no way people around here could function without the same daily routine, without micro-management, without hard deadlines, etc. Yet, the company still manages to exist and be profitable.
He does make some other good points, if you can look past the flamboyant/hyperbolic sound bites: * “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.” * More part-time jobs/partial employment
Once all jobs serve a visible, real purpose and those working said jobs can feel the satisfaction of being a part of the "cause", this problem will continue. 9-5 or not.
One example of this may be flipping burgers at McDonalds, versus stocking planes that ship food rations to war-torn nations. Funny how similar the jobs are, yet the purpose differs.
Employment does not exist to fulfill your personal sense of self worth. You're providing a service to someone who is paying for it. In fact, most of those jobs that do fulfill your personal sense of self worth often pay less due in part to that.
For example, I am a software engineer, and there is literally no reason whatsoever for me to go into an office everyday. None. I am more productive when I'm remote, and working where, how, and when works best for me. I also have no emotional need for social camaraderie in the workplace, which some people do. My family meets my emotional needs, so I don't need social constructs foisted upon me by my employer. Being social for the sake of being social drains the life out of me and makes me less productive. I've worked in offices and I've worked remotely for almost 30 years, and remote work, at least for me, has proven time and again to work best.
While "barbaric" may be a hyperbolic choice of words, when describing the 9-to-5 grind, I do have to say that the reasons typically given for forcing engineers to work in a modern, open-office environments (e.g. "We need to collaborate") are shallow at best. These environments have been proven to cause more problems than they solve, so in this case, I'll have to side with Coupland, in spite of his embellishments. The collaboration excuse is especially annoying when we still use Slack to communicate, even when we are sitting two feet from each other.
I enjoy my 9-5 career. I realize I'm lucky because I have a better experience than most, but I'm not singularly lucky or gifted to be in my position. I don't think I'm one of the few who doesn't consider it "barbaric."
I don't think it's necessarily universal to place a high value on "freeform scheduling" like he says and having structure to the day does have benefits.
> "Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing"
My work boils down to the difference between someone seeing one ad vs. another. I need money to live and this is what I'm good at. I don't pretend I'm making the world a better place but it's equally overdramatic to say the implications make the world worse. For better or worse or society is about the freedom to sell things and all the propserity and inequality that comes along with that. For all their flaws, a shift away from those fundamentals would take generations and people don't agree what they should be replaced with and there's no guarantee the replacement would be better.
The 3rd world countries have it worse argument is a fallacy, the existence of a worse condition does not negate the negatives of another and we should be smart enough to address issues with both and improve issues with both simultaneously.
Having said that, I'm not sure the structure he describes sounds any better to me. At this point, I just wonder why work is still at the center of our lives. It seems possible to me with today's technology to organize a society in a way where we finally redistribute back the gains of automation and optimisation made in the last 200 years. I would love a society where you're free to work as little or as much as you want. Or where everyone is a part time worker. You can get two jobs if you want to work more. I don't have the answer to how it would all work, but I'd love to see a discourse about the possibility.
That's a hell of a strange line.
As far as I can see, people in tech spend way more time looking at the implications of tech work than anyone else does. (Except, perhaps, people like Coupland who are make their money from doing so.) Tech workers are responsible for much of the endless conversation on web privacy and AI risk and automation and gamification and all the rest. Which is how it should be, presumably - I assume architects spend more time looking at the implications of building design than the rest of us.
The best justification I can see is that he's just restricting a general, Stugeon's Law observation (90% of everyone don't look at implications) to one specific field.
There ought to be a name for making a true observation, but singling out one instance of it for no particular reason. It happens damned often.
while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with it is horrible. It’s a deal with the devil. At least when they’re employed they don’t have to deal with the freefall; the nothingness of free time. (Sounds Heiddegerian - the dread that comes with freedom)
...This constant influx of news and data means we’ve come to perceive time differently. The future used to be a far-off thing, but now we experience it at the same time as the present, he contends...
Obvious: “The winners in this labour force will be the people who have an actual skill,” he says. “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.”
This advice from Coupland is the best part of the article, because it uncovers the intended audience: telephone sanitizers. [1]
> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.
This statement actually works for about every profession.
[1] If you don't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham
I was born 1980 so I straddle the web when it hit mass market adoption.
The differences are indeed marked, my father did the same job for 20 years, I can't imagine that now.
I worry that as advanced technology continues to unfurl evermore convenience into our lives, how spoiled will we become?
If there comes a moment when no single individual knows how to perform essential tasks, because automated sytems have been doing such tasks for us, and then those systems stop working, we'll notice serious problems emerging unexpectedly.
But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?
In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.