I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.
With your four display setup, now perched on your nose, moving between sitting desk, standing desk, and stretching on the floor, means moving a wireless keyboard. And for tasks where phone-like keyboards are good enough, no need for the desk, just wander.
Twitch a finger on a pad, twitch a hand and arm on mouse or controller or knee, or raise your arms and dance. You, not the task, determine your style.
Overlay work, while hanging with children. Or map remote kids, into your virtual world. Helicopter parents, meet drones.
Commuting? Well, I suppose some prefer the village well, to indoor plumbing - it's a chance to socialize, away from family oversight. And I suppose commuting will become more pleasant, as the roads clear out - have you seen video of 1950's highways? ;)
There's a meme, of people blithely living their lives, ignoring the future, not appreciating they will soon be stumbling through the smoking ruins of their city. Perhaps we need its complement. People blithely stumbling through smoking ruins, not appreciating they will soon be living in a city.
Children would also be naturally spaced because breastfeeding around the clock typically continued until the child was at least 18 months old, meaning that they would normally be 15-30 months apart (the amount of time that breastfeeding acts a contraceptive varies widely from woman to woman but typically breastfeeding on demand will halt a woman's reproductive activity for at least 6 months).
Automation and increased productivity has resulted in a lot of leisure. It’s not evenly distributed but hours worked per capita is not on an upward trend.
Keynes predicted we'd be down to 3 or 4 hours a day by now, but that never happened due (partly) to the ever-increasing competitive ability/imposition that technology allows managers and shareholders to impose on labor in an effort to maximize economic potential and productivity.
Even now, average working hours in developed nations are above the "legal norm".
Though the automation definitely helped to make it more feasible to work less, there is still a political fight to be had to push the hours down even more.
I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.
As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.
Where’s this magical place?
And I heard similar things about south and east of Asia
Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize.
Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot).
I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves.
Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car is often a simpler (if not the only) option available.
So 13+ hours each week.
As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.
Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.
First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit.
Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids.
A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses.
This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids.
Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
School is simply a horrific hellhole for the bottom 20% of kids. People just like to feel like it's not. And unfortunately "bottom 20%" can happen to anyone -- it's not merit-based. More like affluence-based.
Yes, that's exactly the sentiment.
Well, it's not like the problem can be solved, so I guess parents need something to convince themselves they're making a difference.
Sure they are. A bus is a different environment than school. For one, the only adult is actively concentrating the opposite direction of all the kids, who have large seat backs that block view of all but their heads. That leaves a lot more room for... activities.
I took the bus a few times when I was in junior high school almost two decades ago. I faced very minor bullying every trip. At school 7/8 of my classes were "advanced" in some way (honors, pre-AP, AP, orchestra, etc) so I didn't interact with the kids doing the bullying. I can count on one had the times I felt bullied at school during those years.
Now for me it's possible I would have been better served by just learning to handle small stuff like that, but I can certainly see how a bus ride could be hell for some kids and then they'd be mostly ok at school (maybe just some incidents at PE and lunch).
I think the bussing is avoided simply because it's a chicken/egg problem - if an significant number of parents don't opt-in, then they can't service the populace at large. In my kids current district they only bus between schools - if you live > 1mi from a school, you might as well walk/drive.
1.) too resource constrained. There are plenty of studies suggesting ties between drier climates with stricter societies. Maybe desertification is a deep enough issue to address actively.
2.) not enough actual mental aid - for one, counseling parents of bullies. I realize this would employ a ton of counselors and I see nothing wrong with that expense.
3.) Look for ways to address the "it's cool to be stupid" meme. Ways to do so could include devoting resources to things like the FIRST Robotics competition.
Not a parent but I wouldn't expect to drive children to protect them from bullies but child kidnappers or other random dangers. I'm pretty sure that's why my parents drove me too.
I never had any issues walking to the bus stop starting in kindergarten. Though granted I almost never walked alone. Usually with a friend or two.
I'm in a much more affluent place now. I see parents walking their kids to the corner of the street of our housing complex. Seems a bit extreme to say the least.
So, the net result is mostly just empty buses, and wasted gas.
OTOH though, we have elementary schools in urban/suburban areas where 1/2 of the population of the school falls within the 2 mile radius (great saves money on busing!). Combined with high speed traffic, questionable neighborhoods, bad weather, a tendency towards overprotective parenting, and most parents of early elementary school children are going to be driving them rather than letting them walk to school.
The crazy thing is that most elementary schools are going to be getting out at ~3PM, which is far to early for most parents to leave their jobs, which means they end up paying a few hundred dollars a month per child in after school fees. A real problem for people near the poverty line, so those are the 5 year olds you see walking home alone at 3PM...
The school isn't built like a sports arena, so traffic flow around it is fine throughout the rest of the day, but morning dropoff in particular is very congested because the volume of traffic spikes for a single 15 minute period each day.
Coupled with general morning rush hour traffic, this ripples out to long left-turn waits (no turning arrow), congestion, angry drivers trying to cut down residential streets, parking problems, and so on. Then depending on how far away you had to park, you have to walk that distance with young kids.
Pick up time is easier, especially with after school programs, because the spike is diffused out over a wider range of time.
I can only suggest this is the kind of thing that's generally fixable by a local community.
Things do seem to have changed now. Or it's just that I moved. Not sure.
The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away.
A map of US commute times: https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-ti...
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
Or, sometimes, rival tribes to fight with and kill -- not everything is (necessarily) hunky-dory in every tribal society.
OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds.
* Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
I have always loved how Star Trek aliens are a reflection of some part of humanity.
Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
What makes a bigot crazier than anything? Seeing one of "our" females with one of "their" males.
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare.
Minor motivations and proximity are enough to set it off. And thereare plenty of motivations anyway: fighting over good hunting areas, water, gathering areas, and women.
Outside of what, the ministry of hunting and gathering?
Not to turn this into something else, but pursuing things during "idle" time is another reason why if reasonably possible, basic income could be great alongside more advancements like automation occurring.
I'm not very familiar with this particular area, but I do know from books like The Better Angles Of Our Nature (and criticisms thereof) that this is a contentious statement. There are many myths about ancient humans, some that overly indulge in 'savagery' and others that are too idyllic.
The evidence for either interpretation is fairly fraught and I'm deeply skeptical of any affirmative claims one way or another.
It’s interesting you’d say that. I agree on average, but the enjoyment in that lifestyle would be hard to imagine in ours. I don’t think it’s hard to see our perception of pleasurable things is different from frequency.
Frankly I think there are only small, incremental improvements to happiness possible after modern healthcare and plumbing. Which are, granted, still extremely expensive where I live.
Looking at it purely in terms for food and survival requires very little energy to get by life. But that comes with its own problems. Actually Hellenistic period in many ways was a far better time to live in than now.
Agriculture began about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. It's not much different than 6,000 years and I only mention it because of your question mark.
Here is a link, if you're curious:
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/development-of-ag...
It's worth adding that there were still some nomadic traits, initially. They'd plant and move on, hunting as they went, and would come back to where they planted when it was time to harvest. The speculation that I'm familiar with suggests that they did this with naturally growing crops before they began to cultivate them.
This isn't my domain, I just like documentaries.
Studies are only valuable when they form a scientific consensus over repeated experiments or provide some predictive power that can be confirmed through other experiments.
To use a studies as a prescriptive guide to base your life on, or change of habits is an error IMHO, and ironically, quite unscientific.
I guess you could say its a pet peeve of mine. 9 times out of 10 when I investigate a "studies have shown" comment, it turns out to be half-true or based on weak science, or too new to be replicated by other scientists, or sometimes the context is completely different from its use in an argument.
Suppose it were true. Join a heavy rock and a light rock by a cord and drop them from a tower. If the light rock falls slower, eventually the cord will be pulled taut and retard the fall of the heavier, so this system falls more slowly than the heavy rock alone. But the system is heavier than the heavy rock alone, so it should fall faster, a contradiction.
The gold standard is a model that explains that behavior, and experimental studies that work as the model predicts. The model that big ricks fall faster makes sense, but it isn't backed by experiences. Many studies have seemed to show something but in fact the authors just didn't realize they had to control for something important (sometimes an accident, sometimes outright scientific fraud)
"The experiment did take place in Delft in 16th century the Netherlands, when the mathematician and physicist Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot (the father of Hugo de Groot) conducted the experiment from the top of the Nieuwe Kerk."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_Leaning_Tower_of_P...
In 1971, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott repeated the experiment on the lunar surface with a hammer and a feather. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_Leaning_Tower_of_P... (includes a link to a video clip; jump to about 0:35).
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
You can kind of see this transition happening if you visit currently-industrializing countries like India or China.
For what it's worth I don't regret it but man, I really do think "hmm... when will I next have 15 minutes where I have the use of both hands and no creature yelling at me and I'm not at work?"
I could just sleep less (with dire consequences noted here), but I've managed to keep getting 7 hours or so a day (not all in one go, but it could be worse).
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
Many people still work +100 hour weeks - just not all for their primary paying jobs. Raising children, side projects, home repair, etc..
chores - have less stuff to maintain.
eating - not sure what can be done here.
exercise - look into tabata or hiit. you can workout 2x20min a week.
you can also find way to be more efficient with your activities to cut off time on each one, even if you keep it.
sure none of these suggestions is without cost. but these suggestions can be enacted to the end goal of more time (for sleep or whatever)
* You either pre-cook meals on the weekend, or utilize a meal substitute like Soylent (or both)
* Most chores involve cleaning things that just get dirty as part of their normal use, if you shower and spend most of your "toilet time" at work, you automatically have someone who's going to clean up after you.
What kind of life do you lead where being stuck in traffic, daily meal preparation, and shitting on your own toilet is a constant thrill ride?
I guess I'm just surprised when people don't share the same joy of cooking. Or, for that matter, taking an excellent bowel movement in one's own toilet.
On the other hand, as the saying goes: I make a nickel, boss makes a dime; that's why I poop on company time.
I told him I'd never again work at a job that required me to be there at 9am, because I'm effectively useless before 11am, completely independent of how much sleep I've had the night before. The only plus side, I joked, was that even though I'd only gotten 4-6 productive hours of work done, no one batted an eye when I left at 5pm, since I'd been there since 9.
Then I got layed off.
Remember, its not how many hours you work, its how many hours you work when the boss is there.I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
But that's not a global solution to the problem. We can't all be lazy rent seeking drains on society.
Sleep is a vital part of life. You are not missing out on life if you sleep--you are living.
It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.