A Day in the Life of Americans | Hacker News Reader

A Day in the Life of Americans

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155 pointspaulb8161 comments

I wake up @ 4AM most days to get my work out in. Walking to the gym gives me a glimpse of a different America. It's mostly men, white guys in my city, they are all middle class looking dudes. Loading up trucks at the nearby grocery or beginning/ending their shift, maybe some security guards once in a while.

There's some homeless people every once in a while but for the most part they don't seem to be active. There are no cars in the streets and it feels like a movie set. Always an interesting hour, 4 AM.

It's a wonderful time to be out driving on the streets. You often have even the biggest thoroughfares to yourself in a quiet world.

I used to go jogging in the wee hours. There was no traffic, it was cool, and very peaceful.

But after incidents of drunk drivers, people throwing things at me from a car, the cops giving me the once-over, and once hearing a shot fired, I decided it was best to give that up and jog like a normal person.

Curious, do you manage to fall asleep by 8 or 9? I'd love to get up early more regularly, but I find it tough up turn my mind off before the world quiets down.

I try to be in bed by 10 or 10:30.

So are you sleeping 5.5-6 hours per night? Is this just on work days or all the time? How long can you / have you sustained doing this regularly?

Sounds like the Jay Leno gene. Must be nice. I need a solid 8.5 hours otherwise I'm useless.

Mostly on work days (weekdays), throughout the day I have plenty of energy but around 9:30 I start yawning and the exhaustion kicks in. I don't drink coffee or anything to get through the day.

I've known a few people who were fine on 4 hours a night. just the way they were built. for me, less than 7 and I simply can't concentrate on anything all day, til about an hour before my next bedtime...

Scientific evidence matches your anecdotes. There is a very small percentage of people whose genes allow them to only need 4-5 hours of sleep each night. It's somewhere in the low single digit percentages.

For the rest of us, 7-9 hours are required for proper functioning. If we get by on less, we're functioning suboptimally whether we realize it or not.

Like everything else, there's a TED Talk on 4 AM: https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m

3am is when the really strange things happen. It's too late for most people to be out after a night at the bar and too early for even the earlybirds to be out and about. The last time I regularly saw 3am was my first couple of years in college when we were experimenting with things that make it tough to sleep.

Makes sense. According to the data sim, from 3:15am to just before 4am, about 96% of people are asleep. So if you're up and about at that time, you're really seeing an unusual slice of the population.

It's like the How I Met Your Mother said: Nothing good happens after 2am!

what exactly is an 'active' homeless person

Presumably "not asleep like most people are at 4 AM".

> It's mostly men, white guys in my city

I am sorry, I am not American, though I live here. Does this not in itself contribute to the uncomfortable feelings of women and minorities in your city?

That the people loading and unloading trucks at 4 in the morning are white? How would they even know?

I'm pretty confident that the people who load and unload trucks are mostly men regardless of what time they do it or what country they're in.

This question kind of reeks of the non-American who consumes so much American media that they think their place of origin doesn't have the same characteristics like mostly men out and about at 4am operating the third shift or wandering home drunk.

And I'm not too sure men at work, regardless of race, rank very high on the scale of people you're scared to run into in the early morning, even in your place of origin.

If you're mostly interested in the breakdown of time spend, rather than these animations between activities, the charts at the data source are much clearer: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts.htm

For me it's very strange to see that a huge portion of the population sleeps until 9am (and a big number even until 10am!). I worked in many countries before and in most workplaces you had to show up at least by 9. Of course there were some exceptions but in general that's how it was.

Yeah, well there's a lot of businesses that operate late into the night. You think 24/7 pharmacies, retail, restaurants, etc operate themselves? There's also emergency personnel, security, even night construction crews.

I think it also depends a LOT on if you're an early / late morning or even night person.

I find it much easier to stay up later than to wake up earlier; for others it's the opposite.

You have clearly worked in ‘white collar’ environments.

2-10 or 4-12 shifts frequently involve waking up at 9 or 10.

Seems like my sleeping patterns are a lot different than those of most other people.

Also, I felt depressed to see that people spend most of their lives sleeping and working or in some transition thereof.

Well, we spend a third of our lives sleeping by design (which, you should rest reassured, improves the quality of your waking hours).

As for the third spent working, for as long as we have liked eating & having a roof over our heads, that has required steady effort.

I don't actually think your second point is correct on either a historical or practical level. Historically, humans had a lot of what would now be considered downtime, especially in certain societies. And practically, nothing actually "requires" that except for the fact that we've set up society in such a way to allow some people get to grow wildly wealthy on the backs on the labor of most of the people putting in that actual work. That's the result of a series of choices, and could absolutely be changed. Nothing "required" about it.

From what I recall, the Hadza (hunter gatherers of Tanzania) work ~6 hours a day. Sure, 8 hours a day is more, but same ballpark.

That six hours of work includes their commute and all of the household chores, so to speak, that we have to do in our off time.

Its really astonishing to me how wealthy some people are getting from others work. I completely support people getting wildly rich from their own efforts, but from the way that our society is structured, most wealth is just capturing the value of another persons labor.

Though this analysis often leaves out risk.

Classic example being to take on $100k of debt to start a business and then paying workers $20/hour. Only one person is on the hook for $100k and they are rewarded accordingly if it pays off.

It's easy for the workers to then conspire about how unfair it is that the debtor isn't out there in the sun like them, but that's not a very complete picture of reality. Zero risk is part of the workers' compensation.

There have been centuries of philosophical debate on this subject. I don't think anyone who seriously looks at the topic is leaving out risk.

The argument (outside of Marxist circles) is more to do with whether business owners are being overcompensated because owners are able to exploit the market failures of the labor market--information asymmetry, power imbalances, quasi monopsony positions, government assistance for low paid employees etc...

There are also arguments about whether owners are being overprotected from risks by relatively recent concepts like limited liability (and more direct forms of corporate welfare), and arguments that workers aren't really in a zero risk position.

Even in recent history my experience in countries that haven't caught up with the 'productive' Western-Europe approach contain a lot of downtime. The experience was often annoying for us Northern-Europeans, but in hindsight seemed moderately healthier to me.

It involved a bunch of guys standing around on construction sites sort of getting stuff done, but mostly when the owner was present, and enjoying their time outside part of the time when the owner was not.

Or women spending easily 50% of their time in their shops not selling things but chatting with various other women, or watching their kids.

I wasn't a fan of the clear gender-separation, but it was interesting to see that both men and women spent much of their day interacting in personally meaningful ways with their neighbors/customers, rather than bleeping products as fast as they could to hit some kind of target.

Fun fact: if you took all the income in the U.S. (labor + capital) and distributed it evenly, every adult person would make about $65,000. Quite comfortable, and maybe a big improvement on the status quo, but still "working stiff" territory. We still live in an era where America's protestant work ethic is relevant. Maybe that'll change decades from now, but we're still quite a ways away from being in a post-scarcity society.

Do you remember your source? I'd be interested to see the breakdown.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobmcteer/2012/11/30/the-income...

That would more than double the current average income. Right now the average family of four makes about 60k.

The OP suggested that people could work a lot less if our system wasn’t designed for making some people rich. But folks makin $65k still work eight hours a day, often more. People who can make $65k almost invariably choose to increase consumption rather than decrease hours and income. Our economy doesn’t have so much excess in it going to rich people that we could have both the consumption we want and also work a lot less.

Depends what you mean by post-scarcity. For example, if supermarkets weren't as interested in profit, they might choose a lower price point which would allow them to sell "ugly" produce. I've seen many different estimates of how much produce is discarded for ugliness, but all indicate a large portion.

The knock-on effects of profit-seeking are large. And not all bad, of course.

Supermarkets make almost no profit. It’s people who want better looking fruit.

So how is it that there's such a large variation in the price of produce at different supermarkets?

I think people might not be recording their sleeping times accurately in the time use survey they used because there is a cultural desire to be seen as an early riser.

"8 Hours for Work, 8 Hours for Rest, 8 Hours for What We Will" was a slogan in the labor movement, fighting for the eight hour day, coined in 1817.

If only that was just the beginning...

Unfortunately, it didn't count commute and chores eating into the "What We Will" part.

Even more suspicious or chore-seeming to those that are more productive during the evening, which studies recently suggest this could be how some of us are wired. There's this, I think Anglo-Saxon fixation on early mornings being where productive and good people do things.

Maybe a cultural byproduct of regions of the world with short, dark winter days?

That's me. I'm brain-dead in the mornings no matter how much sleep I have gotten. I'm extremely alert in the evenings. The evenings are definitely when I do my best thinking and best work.

One of the benefits I find with coming back from trips to Europe returning to the US East Coast is there's about a week where I'm tending to get up by 5AM or so. I slip back to a normal schedule but I really feel good getting a bunch of work done by 9AM or so. Can't really keep it up sans jetlag though.

It’s a really great feeling. I went for a while getting up at 5:00am, going to the gym, then straight to work by 7 or so. I’d often get the most important work of the day done by 10 and I felt pretty amazing. But having to go to sleep by 10 (which means in bed by 9:30) was too hard to adhere to.

>early mornings being where productive and good people do things

If everyone demands that you start work at 8:00 sharp, those who are at their best at 5:00pm will actually be worse at everything, all else equal, than those who are at their best at 8:00.

It the worst during winter. Wake up it's dark. Come home it's dark. Hello darkness my old friend...

The animation is a little hard to follow because the "balls" get stuck in different places for a while, and the colors aren't easy to distinguish or attribute to certain activities.

I like the guy who goes into work at 5am then goes back to 'sleeping' at 7:15am. heh.

pager duty, lol

That was some pretty dope animation

I was surprised the numbers at work around 1-3 PM only tops off at 30%. It said the diagram was for ages 25 to 34, most of these people should be working 9 to 5 jobs though.

I thought the numbers would go upwards of 50% to 60%

It's extremely surprising that by 3pm in the middle of the day, there are as many people enjoying leisure time as there are people working (about 30%). Where are these people? I don't see anyone leaving the office at 3pm where I work. I'm pretty sure that the 'average day' doesn't mean weekend.

I thought it might be night shift workers, but then during the night, only about 1% of people are working.

I would have agreed with you before I got a job in the public sector. I'd say a quarter of the people in the buildings around here are gone by 3, with hardly anyone still here by 6. Some of those people start their day at 6 too, but there are also some "in by 10, out by 2" kinds of people. Nearby DC seems to be the same way from their rush hour traffic patterns.

The American Time Use Survey covers all the days of the week, so these numbers represent averages across all the days.[1]

If you work a five-day week with a two-day weekend, then 28% of the time you're also not working at 3PM, so don't get too jealous of all the lucky stiffs having 3PM leisure time. :)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/tus/

Previous discussion in 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10738607

I'd be curious to see different countries at the same time of day. Would be quite illustrative, I believe.

The U.S. is the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World

https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product...

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