Why is everyone so busy? (2014)
economist.com
economist.com
Great quote from the doc:
Naoki:"You (the West) game me this f*cking Capitalist system 100 years ago..."
Cameramen: "And now you're rich"
Naoki: "Is this rich...is this a good system?"
I hope - and expect - that one day offices are viewed in the same way we view the factories of the early industrial age: prisons of drudgery and misery.
I'm not naive, civilization and its innumerable benefits (like actually being able to live past 65) has a cost. But the notion that sitting in traffic each morning to reach a room where one stares into a screen for 9 hours - every day, for 40 odd years - is desirable is the greatest con capitalism has ever pulled.
Moreover, could you expand a bit on "ethical and psychological problems with selling and buying time and land"? This sounds like a novel idea to me.
I think you're ignoring the biggest benefit of capitalism. While many people will do something fairly similar to what you're describing, it's not explicitly required or unchangeable. You have the ability, even if extremely challenging, to strive for better. For a person washing toilets, this could be the dream of sitting in front of that screen one day. For the person in front of that screen, it could be starting their own business or taking an early retirement and living the rest of their years off the beach.
Capitalism enables people to move up. The system you described would actually be perfectly reflective of a more social economic system like communism. The government would measure your competency and then offer you a series of jobs. You would take that a job off that list and you would do it til the day you were allowed to stop working. All without any chance for ever achieving something better beyond that list of jobs they decided you were qualified for. And of course you'd receive the same compensation when you're 18 as when you're 50 with decades of experience, because that's fair...
I think it would be phenomenally interesting to live in a pre-industrial time, just to experience it - but I suspect we'd quickly find that the tedium and unfairness of the systems we have to do would seem like utopia compared to the tedium and unfairness of those times. And so too can we expect people a few hundred years from now to live in what we would consider a utopia, yet themselves lack contentment striving for something better which will indeed come about a few centuries beyond. It's the nature of man to always strive for better and, at least to date, achieve it.
And socialism could eliminate entirely the need to have someone washing toilets. I work in an office of about 2,000 people, over 10 floors, each with 2 sets of bathrooms for each gender. Going by 200 people per floor, assuming 50/50 gender split, that's 50 people per bathroom. It takes about half an hour to clean and restock each bathroom each day. Would you be hugely inconvenienced if you had to give up half an hour of your time every 50 days to clean the bathroom you use at work? I definitely wouldn't, and I think a lot of people would probably treat the bathrooms better if they did have to clean them on occasion.
Furthermore, the cleaners we have now aren't brain-dead animals: they have intellect, ideas, and ambitions of their own. I've met plenty of caretakers and other low-skilled workers who had been trained in other fields in the past, lost their jobs for varying reasons, and couldn't retrain due to time or financial constraints and got stuck in menial labour. Much of the time they simply cannot realistically ever move up the ladder. To quote Stephen Jay Gould:
>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
We have created a lot of menial jobs for the sake of them: and in a lot of cases, they have been created because as this article mentions, a lot of well-educated workers no longer have the time to do non-work related tasks themselves. Would takeaway deliver drivers really be as common as they are now if people were working twenty hours a week, and had time to cook for themselves? What about Starbucks employees? Taxi drivers? There are millions of people who could actually use their full potential if they weren't constrained by wage slavery. Those people would also be much more efficient at what they do if they had the freedom to do what they enjoyed.
>Capitalism enables people to move up. The system you described would actually be perfectly reflective of a more social economic system like communism. The government would measure your competency and then offer you a series of jobs. You would take that a job off that list and you would do it til the day you were allowed to stop working. All without any chance for ever achieving something better beyond that list of jobs they decided you were qualified for. And of course you'd receive the same compensation when you're 18 as when you're 50 with decades of experience, because that's fair...
This is a huge misunderstanding of communism. There are many, many different forms of anti-capitalism, and very few actually believe a centralised government forcing people to work in pre-determined fields is a good idea. I'm not as clued up on communist/socialist theory as I should be, but afaik what you're describing is a form of state socialism, and one which almost all anti-capitalists vehemently disagree with. I've seen many arguments started by people suggesting state ownership of capital: almost everyone agrees that the risk of corruption is far too high with a centralised state.
I highly recommend reading The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It paints an excellent picture of a more reasonable anarcho-communist society, without a centralised state, which could realistically exist. Just to make this comment relevant to the original article: he originally suggested, in the late 19th century, that the industrial era had already increased production to the point that nobody should have to work more than four hours a day. Furthermore, that the time people saved could be spent building tools of automation to further reduce people's workload. It is, if anything, far more relevant today than it was when it was written.
Beyond this your argument that janitors have ideas/ambitions/etc again supports a capitalist system. There is nothing overtly stopping these people from trying to take their shot, difficult though it may be. Jack Ma is a good example there. He came from extremely humble beginnings and couldn't get a job even at KFC. He didn't ended up manually biking 'rich' tourists around to get by. In the process he ended up learning English and got exposed to some ideas and concepts that weren't so well known in China. A bit of luck, a lot of ambition, and some great ideas - and he's now one of the richest people in the world. He started his first business when he was already in his 30s, got his first computer when he was 33.
Really I think people are unrealistically critical. Today every child in developed nations has the internet and guaranteed access to basic education and effectively guaranteed access to advanced education. Einstein, for instance, was teaching himself calculus at age 12. That sort of extreme outlier in ability, and maybe even more importantly - ambition and motivation, is not something or somebody that's going to end up end up toiling fields in modern society. And the privileges we all have today are largely a product of the extremes of wealth that allow people to be educated for decades before having to return a single cent back to society.
I've been doing this everyday for 12 years..and I'm about to blow my brains out.
I encourage everyone to find one thing they love and find a way to do it everyday for the rest of your life.
Entrepreneurship is romanticised by entreporn on Medium.
Essentially there is no black and white answer, everyone should just do what gives him/her meaning.
> I encourage everyone to find one thing they love and find a way to do it everyday for the rest of your life.
...is translated to entrepreneurship, when that doesn't have to be a given. I'm still struggling with the alternative possibilities, but I just wanted to point that out.
That said I do agree with your conclusion. It's the path to get there that can keep me up at night, and perhaps not framing it purely in terms of being employed or self-employed might help (not saying that that's what you were saying, btw).
Please don't.
A. You'll mess up that screen you're paid to stare into ;)
B. More seriously, if you ain't being facetious, switch jobs.
But to your point: work is a drag. I don't care how free the food is or how comfortable your ergonomic keyboard feels. Deep down there's something dissatisfying about most corporate life. But at the same time it's never been easier to (try!) start your own thing, as you suggest.
To anybody reading this, go for it. Before responsibility limits your risk-taking. And give it absolutely everything.
I tend to see perks like "free food" as a red flag when I'm job hunting. In my experience, employers that go way above and beyond to make an office comfortable are doing it because they expect you to spend virtually all of your time there. Any office that has a game room or a cafeteria is extremely suspect.
All I need is relative quiet, a reasonable meeting schedule, and decent equipment. I'll buy my own lunch and leave at 5, thanks.
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.
I always wondered what his employees thought when they read that article and whether the perks worked as nicely after he explained his thinking in public.
If everyone followed your advice, we would probably have garbage piling up in the streets, because I doubt there are enough people who love collecting it or working in landfills to handle even a fraction of the garbage we generate.
That's ridiculous, my reasoning assumes no such thing. I'm well aware that there are, and for at least decades have been, many people engaged in that exact activity. (Whether they "love" it or not.) And yet, we still need many many people who are willing to undergo the drudgery of manually collecting garbage. My reasoning does assume that we will continue to need those people, albeit in decreasing numbers, for decades to come.
I'm seeking something somewhat in between these. At least I get paid by the hour which in tech is a great luxury.
Salaries are a scam and I stay away from them, at the price of job security. Which doesn't exist anyway, right?
It is, based on all conventional historical sources, originating around the 15th century or so with the city states of Italy.
>Japan, like many Asian countries, were within China’s sphere of influence long before there was any contact with Westerners.
Which is irrelevant. It was a feudal economy back then, and it tried to be so even after contact with Westerners for a while.
But it realized that with those pesky westerners it couldn't defend itself if it didn't get in with the program and build an industry.
The parent comment was speaking of “capitalism” as an euphemism for “wage slavery”, not in the classical sense of capitalism as defined by economics i.e. private ownership of the means of production. In that comment, payment for services i.e. wages is hardly “Western”, nor invented in the 15th century CE.
>Which is irrelevant.<
It is relevant because Japan imported many things from China, including the Kanji writing system, culture, mercantilism, systems of government etc.
Well, the TFA speaks specifically about the "modern" form of "wage slavery" in Japan -- as tied to big corporations, office and factory jobs, consumer culture, etc, not generally about working to make a living by being paid a wage.
Which is tied to capitalism. People didn't work like that before their contact with capitalism and when "free trade" was imposed on them by force.
This is why we are so busy and why companies are chasing growth at all costs.
The headlines you see about 9-figure CEO compensation are mainly related to companies whose stock has outperformed. CEOs whose stock languished and didn’t amount to much compensation rarely make magazine covers.
My thinking is that we're constantly being pushed to work harder because no business today can reach a successful steady-state -- it must keep growing. The reason businesses must keep growing is that investors demand it. Investors demand it because they believe that wealth sitting around not making more wealth is a waste. Inflation, I believe, is a big component of this view. What would happen if we keep inflation near-zero? Is slow growth really a bad thing?
Something I've noticed a lot in tech is that companies will spend a huge amount of money to push new features that aren't core to the business and to launch new products that frequently fail. I've always viewed these as attempting to prevent competition from emerging rather than trying to compensate for inflation.
There is a massive, blinding, focus on quarterly profits and dividends.
This leads to all kinds of hype cycles and cargo cults to try to goose the stock price, no matter how hail mary or unhealthy it is for the corporation in the long term.
Current projections estimate that population will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055. Nearly all of that growth will occur in "developing" countries. Yuval Harari makes the case in Homo Deus that the world is quickly reaching a point where the less developed areas of the world will be mostly ignored and left behind in the coming years, as the developed world has reached a sort of critical mass that it makes more sense -- economically -- to keep investing there.
As technology continues to get more and more efficient, it is quite possible we are near peak energy consumption.
Interest rates have been around 0% for quite some time.
To me, it's interesting to wonder if we live in a world that might "objectively" be getting better, but we don't see the verification with the same type of economic growth that's occurred in the past.
[1] - https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/29/the-long-term-tie-betw...
this is related [1].
[1]: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
Add to this the fact that deflating currency makes loans hard to service and biases the lending market toward default. This further decreases the incentive for those with a lot of currency to lend it since the probability of losing it to default becomes higher.
The ideal is probably a little bit of inflation. I think it's possible that we have too much, and that we are misinformed about that because we are measuring the wrong things. I'm not positive but I seem to remember that the CPI does not include things like rent and college tuition, which if true is utterly insane and makes it a bogus statistic.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
So let's say everyone moves to a smaller house because housing costs are so high, that's not a sign of inflation?!
If you mix "hedonic adjustments" into every number then there is zero value in the numbers. There is no meaningful way to quantify a "hedonic adjustment". Is a smartphone a positive or negative "hedonic adjustment" relative to a landline? Lots of people would say it's positive. Lots would say it's negative. Nobody knows the actual answer because smartphones have only existed for a few years.
That's true of growth investors, but rarely represents the entire investment community.
Bond investors (whose market is an order of magnitude larger than stocks) want fixed yield - they could care less if the business grows or languishes during that time, as long as the coupon checks keep coming. Real estate investors (whose playing field is also orders of magnitudes larger than public equities market) also usually sign up for a preferred fixed yield, growth being secondary.
Even within the equities markets not everybody is a growth investor, with a lot of people buying for value or dividend yield.
Removing inflation wouldn't stop people from chasing growth. People want to make more money. 2% annual inflation changes the calculations a bit (towards more proactive investing), but in a world of 0% inflation people would still want to make money. They would just be a bit more conservative since there's no penalty for holding.
And yes, slow growth is a bad thing. Our population is growing. The pie has to be grown if we don't want living standards to nosedive.
This is literally Finance 101.
Our econonomic system is predicated on continual growth but inflation has been incredibly low since the late 1990s in most western economies, 0-2% compared to 10% or more in the 1970s and 80s.
I'd also say there really isn't any such thing as a steady state for businesses not because of inflation but due to the need to keep pace with general human progress and invention in order to stay competitive in the market place.
Bigger investors can have more direct force, either in voting power or in assigning their own director to the board.
Luckily, we also evolved big brains that let us override almost any instinct and with a bit of effort we can be perfectly happy with any slice of the pie.
P.S. I'm somebody that gave up a large fraction of my salary to be able to work part time and travel the country. It's been worth it so far.
I suspect it has more to do with our inability to measure modern work, instead we use a poor proxy for productivity, keeping your seat warm.
There was lots of time spent with friends and family, it was great.
My current job, I eat lunch at my desk and spend so much less time with friends and family. A couple of months ago I was working from 8AM to 3:30AM, then was back to the office for 8AM the following day.
I make more money now, but I was so much happier before.
I often think about just quitting work and taking a year or two off, just do me things and figure stuff out. What I want from life, what my prioritie are etc.
But then I worry if you take that long off, how hard would it be to get back to work afterwards? Are employers even going to entertain my CV
In one of my previous jobs, while leaving at 5:30 pm (started at 9 am), the CTO asks "half day today?", only half jokingly :(
Dont worry, its pointless, you must do what makes you happy, everything else will follow.
2 years is nothing, if the time is used to learn more about yourself or helping others, its a huge plus in a CV.
Good luck.
This is just my creative imagination, I'm not jaded.
Honestly, the time off has been amazing (more than I expected), but it's hard to overstate how hard it is to readjust now. Employers haven't been a problem, it's about myself: I'm experiencing anxiety attacks for the first time in my life and I'm worried I'm going to slip into depression - something I've never gone through before.
If you want my advice: If you've got some savings you can afford to spend, try to actively search for a job that is more bearable, and yet sustainable long term.
It shouldn't require you leaving your current job until you find a new one, but rather you want your money to act as a mattress to fall back on if things go south so you can try new things. NEVER let your savings drop below a certain threshold, because going to work is way more manageable if you can tell yourself that you can walk away if you really need it. Once that possibility is gone you feel like a slave.
And believed the sales pitch, which was never true.
I have a lot of stuff to do, and was kind of getting on top of it recently. I needed to renew my driving license here in Spain. I needed two appointments (trying to fit them around work). I have been given a temporary license for the time being and am waiting on the new one to be posted. I noticed that the temporary paper has my name spelled wrong, so there is a good chance I will need at least one more appointment just to get that typo fixed when the plastic version comes through.
I guess another factor is the changing nature of jobs. Certainly in IT you need to devote at least some time to keeping up with new tech or you will become obsolete. I find this especially frustrating when a lot of the "new" is just a rehash of stuff from 30 years ago. Its also why I hate fronted work, as the ecosystem is a constantly changing mess.
"Leisure time is now the stuff of myth. Some are cursed with too much. Others find it too costly to enjoy. Many spend their spare moments staring at a screen of some kind, even though doing other things (visiting friends, volunteering at a church) tends to make people happier. Not a few presume they will cash in on all their stored leisure time when they finally retire, whenever that may be. In the meantime, being busy has its rewards. Otherwise why would people go to such trouble?
Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead, most people worry over how it flies, and wonder where it goes. Cruelly, it runs away faster as people get older, as each accumulating year grows less significant, proportionally, but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past, with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something, the swifter it seems to go"
It was Grandfather’s watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s.
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
[...]
I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.
[...]
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
William Faulkner — the Sound and the Fury
But most people never get far enough to worry about. Our world has been designed to lure people into poor behavioral loops like watching TV, browsing social media, and otherwise consuming aimlessly and mindlessly. Sadly, there appears to be a strong incentive to induce that kind of adverse behavior in users/customers.
“An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
What a great goal. Structuring life as a series of awe inspiring experiences.
I’m not convinced it’s novelty that drives it as opposed to how much awe is inspired. For instance, sitting on the park bench with your gorgeous wife could be as mesmerizing the 100th time as it was the first time.
Edit: A more nuanced interpretation could be that if you’re fully in the moment, that 100th time is purely novel.
> "what's important in life"
Very common epithet. The important thing in your life is the next person? And then the important thing in the life of that person is their next person? Wait, what?
Something here is just not right.
Living fully in this moment now feels way underrated.
Besides that:
> No one has ever complained of having too much of it.
Isn't that just being bored? I'm sure I've heard people complaining about that.
I think this "gotta be busybusybusy" thing originated in the US, but it is definitely spreading.
I see way too many people who are way too wrapped up in their careers or are constantly stressing about all the things they "have to do", and they forget to actually enjoy anything, because they're already mentally at the next thing.
I love lazy Saturdays on the couch, and I wouldn't trade them for anything.
And because wages are so artificially depressed by the suprarich, it takes two jobs to support a life far too often. Noam Chomsky talks about how at the beginning of the industrial revolution the people were skeptical of the 6-9 job that payed a pittance as essentially not much better than chattel slavery, the only difference being you got to go home at night.
This is about class warfare, this is about the oligarchs fucking us all constantly and consistently while we do nothing because the people we expect to do something (the government) are corrupted, blackmailed, coerced, and lobbied into the ground until they break to the oligarchs will (which is why there is truly only one party at the moment, the oligarchs party).
Add on top of that the unconstitutional private banking conglomerate known as the fed and the 16th amendment, and you have a recipe for runaway inflation, devaluation of purchasing power, and increases in poverty, homelessness, and work hours needed to support the cost of living per area.
Jackson was a piece of shit when it came to the natives, but that far too often overshadows the importance of his effort to fight the banks. (Also, him beating the brits with marines, sailors, militiamen and pirates is a movie I want to make someday.)
Shades of Smedley Butler if you ask me. Anyone remember that? Oh yeah, they don't teach you in public school that a bunch of facist corporate oligarch banker types tried to attempt a coup on the American government via a Marine Corps general who double-crossed them and reported it all to congress all in ~1933? Oh yeah, they blacked out the names until John Spivak published them.
(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/McCormack%E2%80%93Dickstein_C...)
(http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/spivak-NewMasses.pd...)
If you unplug and simplify your life, don't bother with pursuing a family, you'll see how disincentivized to be busy you are and how absurdly everyone else appears to be living. But if you pursue all the things your competitors are pursuing, you'll find yourself having to acquire similar levels of resources. There's not enough to go around for _everyone_ to have that amount of excess, hence it must be fought over.
Basically what you have is a non-violent (most of the time) resource competition determining who gets how much of what in what order, where the participants aren't even pursuing a specific quantity - they're just after as much as possible while they're still able, MORE.
edit:
After writing the above, I remembered this short video from the 90s, semi-related. [1]
Alternatively, you do go into lunch break, because you have to network with colleagues or business partners.
Keynes and others seem to have labored under the delusion that the history of social organization is a history of ever-increasing happiness for society's members.
+ other things, like continuous learning, information collection, designing exercise schedules, designing diet systems...
With the persistent threat that if you mess these up there will be trouble.
Related to this, I wonder if the proliferation of these things is why conscientiousness is currently strongly associated with success. I've seen highly intelligent people have significant failures in their lives because they simply couldn't efficiently manage the bureaucracy that it seems it is assumed you can just manage automatically, which very much does not seem to be the case.
In reality, I think the current small (and large) task management load is simply too large for most people to properly handle, and wealth doesn't particularly help with all this because it doesn't directly increase the mental load surface... unless you outsource the work somewhere else...
Every day on the 'net I see that hundreds of people who've not only found specialized, fascinating topics, but finally have someone to talk to about them. Sure beats taking anti-depressants.
To the extent that busy means 'paying for all this stuff I have to have': how much of it do I really need? Are we victims of 'have to have' obesity? I'll just gently suggest that, for many in the West, the answer is yes.
I would never let a job get in the way of family and social experiences, in the way of my life. Relaxation and leisure time is absolutely non-negotiable for me, I would never give up on a concert or culinary experience or anything else for something as mundane as work.
I think this mindset has also gifted me with more patience and more ability to not be bored, compared to most of my peers. Luckily, all of my friends share my mindset, anyone too work-obsessed simply doesn't fit in for long.
I am a slacker, and I enjoy it very much.
I do wonder why people who can afford to spend time with their family and not work 60-70 hours per week, actually do.
I can only imagine it would be that they really enjoy their work that much, or their in a culture such as here in Japan where you stay until the boss leaves - or else. (Not my situation, I'm a chef, stupid hours in my industry).
I've found that being unhappy at home can lead to working late (even subconsciously). The thing is, these things are often related in subtle ways. If I were to over-generalize I might say that having poor boundaries is part of why they stay late, and a part of the problems they are avoiding at home.
And that's not subconscious, it's a very present tension between "ugh I shouldn't be here so much (but it's easy)" and "ugh I don't want to go home and face the reality I'm avoiding".
Sadly, I'm not sure it translates well to industries like yours, where there is just a lot of physical labor involved, and long door hours. My understanding, is that one of the problems is simply the hours in the restaurant business require chef's attention for long hours each day, coupled with the vital need that the kitchen's output is consistent.
Hopefully you're thinking of ways to not have to be present, or ways to spend money instead of time, or just simplifying the menu to be less labor intensive. My heart goes out to you though, I know some chefs, and they are a special breed.
You might want to work on that stuff before it catches up to you in ways you don't anticipate.
You come home and it is empty and lonely - you can watch tv or play game, but it likely feels pointless. Staying long in work allows you to drown the pointless feeling, at least you can feel good about yourself.
For some people there is little choice. I have a limited mental budget for social experiences. Spending 40hr/week at the office already over-extends this budget, resulting in no social life whatsoever.
Thanks!
I'll stay half an hour or an hour beyond by nominal working hours, if I have a time critical task that depends on me, but I'll compensate for it the next day. And I won't do it if it conflicts with my life outside of work. Then the work will simply have to be delayed a bit.
Luckily, I have only ever had colleagues and managers who understand this 100%. I've even had a few tell me directly that they wish they could have the same attitude and take better care of themselves.
At least in software dev, we have some choices. There aren't that many choices for people in other professions. It is put up or leave situation, and people end up with long hours.
I like to say I'm discovery-oriented rather than goal-oriented. Being so means I also seek to avoid being overworked because I don't know how to not prioritize discovery. I've tried joining work with pleasure but I find it doesn't lead to good things.
Humans, like every other organism on this Earth, have been shaped by evolution, which has instilled a set of adaptations into them.
Like most other species, there is a competition for mates, reproduction opportunities and resources within the sexes. So, along the ages, humans have acquired a set of adaptations that "maximize" wealth, status, (whether they still work in the current environment as opposed to the ones in which these adaptations evolved is another question). So, in essence, humans who tended to work more, tended to obtain more resources/wealth thereby becoming more attractive reproductive prospects. You also get more opportunities to help fellow tribe members, improving your status within your community etc. In other words, a highly competitive arms race has emerged.
However, only in recent times, intellectual work has become more common, where the size of the input is not proportional to the quality of the output.
There is another dimension to this. Many humans today work in corporate environments where there is an intense competition for advancing in a rigid hierarchical structure. These advances are strongly correlated with income growth, and power and control over many work-related issues, which is strongly related to status. In these environments, it is often difficult to actually measure the output quality and quantity of each human, partly because there is little incentive to do that, partly because people doing the measurement are not the most technically knowledgeable in the field, but mostly because they are humans themselves and thus have their own interests (namely improving their reproductive prospects themselves, so they need to forge allegiances that stabilize their positions etc). Promoting the most capable worker is sometimes outside their interests. So in this environment, many other cues are used to evaluate the worth of employees, many completely unrelated to their capabilities and work. So, marketing oneself becomes an important aspect in this economy.
One clear way to signal to others that you are very dedicated to the company and an important employee is to spend more time at the office than the others. Busyness is a signal of importance/status and value to the company. Of course, people actually interested in performing high quality intellectual work will know that time spent on a task is only one (minor) factor ...
"Simultaneous consumption" is one of my new favourite phrases, actually.
That said - a lot of folks have access to sites like NYT and WSJ through work.