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Comment by terryf | Hacker News Reader

I work my ass off. Lot more hours than would be technically necessary. High tech as well.

I've also gone hiking in the mountains in California. Been on the beach in Italy. Walked around in the center of Munich.

As a 14th century peasant I probably never even knew those places existed.

I can also get pain medication if I have a headache. I can go to a doctor to fix my broken bones if I happen to get one. Oh, and the likelihood of dying of a random infection or chicken pox is exceedingly low.

Is is worth spending more time in a nice, warm, comfortable office to be able to do all of those things? Hell yes. Is it all shits and giggles all the time? Of course not.

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One thing that's always suspicious about those "peasants had more time off" claims is that they imply medieval peasants had a bright line between work and recreation in a way that's just not true. Talking about the day with your family while you spin wool or sharpen a sickle is... work? play? all of the above?

For all that we have issues with a culture where people check work emails at home and are otherwise on-call, we've moved remarkably far from a culture where work was truly pervasive, where it formed the backdrop of everything else.

All of which is to say that both the quality, as you point out, and the purity of our recreation have improved quite a lot. Counting up a nebulous "time off" value seems to seriously misunderstand the changes in how we live.

>Talking about the day with your family while you spin wool or sharpen a sickle is...

Sounding pretty attractive to me right now.

But that is a false dichotomy. Your working long hours in an office in no way helps or correlates with the ability of being able to travel, or to have headache medication.

Work long hours to make money to pay for nice things like travel and medication because those things take time and effort to create and time spent creating should be rewarded and we reward people spending time working long hours creating things with money.

So yes, it does correlate.

ooh. much better put than my longer rant in sibling comment.

Technically, you're probably right.

Realistically I also like to live in a nice house, do have to (well, by choice obviously) take care of three kids and like to enjoy a luxury here and there.

That takes money. I have tried multiple times to build my own companies, but sadly haven't been successful in that.

So that's for the travel argument.

As for the headache medication argument - I have that only because thousands of people have spent a lot of time in offices and labs developing those drugs and treatments.

Personally, my work mostly revolves around making wind turbines more efficient at producing energy by helping with data analysis. I also like to think that's my small way of offsetting the environmental damage I do by travelling. It's probably not enough, but still. something. So yeah, I'd say spending time at the office correlates quite nicely.

If you care about offsetting environmental costs of travelling, etc. consider donating to coolearth.org! About 70$ can offset an average carbon footprint for a whole year I think... It‘s one of the most effective charities against climate change and comes recommended by people such as Will MacAskill and Peter Singer who have founded a movement concerned with effective charity or „doing good better“. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

It's kind of sad to realise reading a comment like this now makes me instantly suspicious about whether or not this is "true" enthusiasm or something motivated by profit. It's a fundamentally hard problem to solve, but IMO it is one of the bigger hurdles facing places like this now.

Even when you're not doubting the recommendation enthusiasm, it's hard to not be suspicious of the charity itself, given how badly most of them are managed.

Alot of people are workaholics, maybe because they feel aimless and need some outside driving force. I work, but I also make alot of time for family and other activities. I turn down jobs that ask for more then 40 hours a week and I've quit jobs that had an unhealthy obsession with having your ass in a chair 8 hours a day at exactly 8am.

Maybe it does, if he works at Boeing.

The reason we have all these advances that increase our quality of life is because generations have worked their ass off to build them

Modern healthcare is the one thing I would be truly scared to give up. Fancy food, elaborate shelters, and rapid transportation are things that don't really matter much to your actual happiness. The idea that a cut on your thumb could kill you in your early twenties is pretty scary though.

I am not sure how the two are related. Are you implying that your view of quality of life (“work hard / travel the world”) is universal?

Or, that everyone who works hard reaps the rewards, ignoring the ever-increasing disparity in compensation?

Certainly, I've been very lucky. No argument there.

But the only thing I'm saying is to not over romanticise the past. The life of a 14 century peasant was not good compared to mine.

I also realise that a lot of the comforts I enjoy are because lots of people spent time in boring offices before me. The article sounds quite dismissive of that.

I'm forever grateful and do my part to help. Nobody owes me a good life.

I hear you and I think the comparison was quantifying the time spent in labor more than anything else.

So because we have it good now we shouldn't seek to do things better?

I never argued that. I do believe that things are much better now than in the 14th century though. That's the comment I replied to.

We should always strive to improve, but the article had the tone of "oh look how bad everything is" while implying that it hasn't always been like that. Things are far better now in almost any quantifiable measure than they have ever been in human history. Not enough people talk about that.

What if you quantify against Europe? The article is pointing out the unhealthy work obsession and work environment of the US. How many people do you know with vacation the won't take for fear of losing their job? That is not the norm in every country.

> How many people do you know with vacation the won't take for fear of losing their job?

None. How many do you know?

At least a quarter of my coworkers when I worked at HP.

No, but because we have it good now we shouldn't frame the discussion to seem that the current situation is dire. We can and should do better, but things are already pretty great.

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