Hacker News Reader

It's an extremely American tradition that was practiced and pushed by one of its founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin. Himself being called "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become". A nontrivial amount of his autobiography is him espousing productivity and the ways he accomplished so much in his life.

I think it's fine to kind of just chill in life, but I think it's also great that some people feel a real fire under themselves to get as much done in their lifetime before they die. It's why we have people like Benjamin Franklin who helped usher in the next several eras of progress for humanity.

It’s important to point out that many people also helped usher in the next several eras of progress for humanity without following that path.

Eg Charles Darwin, who seemed to work in 3 slots of 1h30 every day:

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/2008/12/char...

That's pretty awesome. Though I'm sure we could quibble over the relative effects of each upon the course of human history, or the fact that Benjamin Franklin started with almost no means whereas Charles Darwin was born into a wealthy family-- I agree that the takeaway is that we may all have meaningful impacts on society without having to make sacrifices in the name of productivity. But, that being said, I'd personally say those sacrifices are not in vain as I think Benjamin Franklin's contributions to the course of American History outweigh Darwin's contributions to science.

Darwin contributed on a more global scale.

How can we compare those contributions?

For some reason, those of us in the US measure productivity in terms of "value created for our employer" or "value created for the business". That doesn't make any sense. You need to measure productivity in terms of what matters to you, which includes time with your kids, spirituality, and such. The amount of value you create for your employer probably shouldn't get much weight.

It makes perfect sense when one realizes increasing productivity is the single key to extracting maximum surplus value from labor under capitalism. Measuring (and increasing) productivity wasn’t invented for workers.

We're learning that in the debates over public education funding. For some reason, at least in the US, public education is justified if and only if it creates a more productive workforce. Why the government should subsidize the cost of training employees is rarely stated (probably for a good reason).

Maybe educated emploers pay more taxes?

Well, of course. People aren’t educated for happiness, or even to be better humans. They are educated to standards that meet the expectations of the work place, since nearly all members of society will live to sell themselves for wages (unless they join the ranks of capitalists).

Capital requires an always-ready labor pool whose numbers exceed available employment. It helps keep constant downward pressure on wages. It also ensures people who aren’t hired—or are fired—are available the next time capital needs to put them to work to create more capital.

Mass education can’t be effectively sold to the People as the thing that enables them to become a wage slave. However, capital has long convinced the state to take an interest in economic growth at nearly all costs, so the state doesn’t even question the ways in which it is employed by capital to secure new markets, more labor, and more capital.

That said, it obviously isn’t education that creates a more productive workforce alone—but it makes for an effective bludgeon with which certain interests can beat back efforts to teach things that aren’t considered to be job-relevant. Education merely produces the raw human material capital can put to work to create more capital, without having to shoulder the cost/time burden itself. The extent to which capital successfully externalizes costs onto society at large is quite impressive.

Really makes you wonder why people don't value themselves. Does society systematically strip the underclass of their self-esteem? Every single job I've had I knew that the purpose was either 1) to make me money 2) to help me develop skills or career experience. Idgaf about my employer making money (except as it relates to my goals); that's his problem to care about. I'm contracted to provide labor, not make his business profitable for him

I think as a professional your job description should include using your skills to improve a critical metric or a process of the business, and this should include using your abilities to contribute in a meaningful way. IMHO, this attitude may be harmful to one's career. In the end, you can always find another job, but would not it be nice to actually care about the business? If you are in a place where you feel like they do not care about you, maybe you should look for something else, but maybe with a more caring approach, because it is a two way street.

Just my 2 cents, though.

The fact of the matter is, they may not actually care about you. Especially if the money is tight, employers are rare yo actually reward investment into the company.

> Idgaf about my employer making money

Whilst I applaud the sentiment, it's worth remembering that's pretty much the only reason you have a job and can make money. You have a job because you provide the employer with more value than you take - if that equation shifts against you, then you're bang out of luck.

If you have easily transferable skills, then maybe you can get away with not caring and jump from place to place, but I'd at least be a little bit mindful of how your role fits into the organisation requirements, unless you want a nasty shock one day.

That's very true!

Unfortunately I don't have the references to back this up but it's my understanding that the latest understanding of sleep, and sleep in humans, is that we're naturally biphasic, one long period at night and one short period in the afternoon, and this is what you find with communities today that live as hunter-gatherers. Slightly less "natural" is the monophasic pattern most people follow, which is sleeping at night.

I'm not sure what words to describe that waking in the middle of night pattern as other than fad or historical myth—there's no evidence that it's healthier or beneficial given our understanding of the various systems that drive sleep and waking, and evidence for its occurrence is very limited. Indeed it's odd to think that given everything we know about human physiology, that we're all tuned to wake up in the middle of the night, y'know, to do important stuff just without our eyes.

> The Church of Productivity strikes me as a very American kind of religion.

It's our protestant roots and the very Calvinist view of success, really. There's a reason they call it the Protestant Work Ethic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

It’s the imperative of capitalist production, really. The “Protestant Work Ethic” was coined long after the imperative of productivity had been noticed and written at length about (e.g., see Marx, Proudhon, Smith, et al.).

Also strikes me as related to the core difference in views on mental health (Western analytical psychology a la Jung vs Eastern demonological/mystical)

To be fair, much of America spent the 19th century heroically drunk.

> sleeping in two sessions ("first sleep" and "second sleep") of a few hours each.

I still do this sometimes. Eat and shower directly after work. Then sleep until like 9pm and stay wake until 2am. Then sleep again until i have to get up to go to work.

Thanks for the link! There's also a transcript:

https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/#transcr...

We need someone to advocate for sloth, as Gordon Gekko did for greed.

Slothful folk take shortcuts, and shortcuts lead to serendipitous productivity improvements (if they aren't persistently reducing quality).

How would you put into words the opposing, "non-productivity focused" viewpoint? I'm an American and I don't know that I can currently comprehend what the opposite would be.

Thinking about it in the current context, I might say that there is something like a prodictivity counter-culture? For example Deep Work seems to value high-poductivity focus on one hand, but being lazy and completely switching off workis lauded as well.

Ritch Hickie talk Hammock-driven development seems to be about simmilar concept as well https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

Last thing it reminds me of, is the Mythical Man Month, with its warnings about how adding more people to a project makes it makes it even more behind the schedule.

But even here, I still live with the undrlying assumption that you as a person want to keep producing interesting/important/useful/profitable things. Just that slowing down can get you further.

I have experienced this with myself when working on my masters thesis. I remember that for three months I was just thinking about it. Not really working on anything. And after the idea slowly over the months crystalized as the "right thing to do" I solved a problem in a way that replaced 3Kloc C++ code with 50 lines of Python over a weekend. Then I spent rest of the time running experiments and writing the text :-)

And sometimes I miss this, especially in current agile environment, where sprint retrospective is always around the corner, I don´t feel like I have time to just think about stuff anymore.

Bertrand Russels 'In Praise of Idleness' describes it perfectly: it is sufficient to work just so much that you have enough money to spend the rest of the day with whatever you enjoy, without considering its usefulness and even less your productivity.

European theorists were grappling with the demands of productivity for a long while before (and while) it became an American cultural demand. The imperative of productivity was very much imported to the US by the Europeans who came to the US. It’s certainly taken on a life of its own here, and I don’t discount its nearly religious nature to US work culture—it underpins so much of American thought. Productivity is a demand imposed upon all who work under capitalism—there is no other way to extract increasing surplus value from labor without it.