I'll be honest, all it took me was to learn about it, and I refuse to think that I'm the only one in that position.
I used to sit in front of a screen until the very last moment I went to bed, now I read, I go to bed when I'm tired, I avoid alcohol before bed, &c. Look around, in all the companies I went to, 40+ years old people were overweight and had poor posture, that's just the (visible) tip of the iceberg.
A lot of people eat like shit, don't exercise (enough), come back from 8 hours of sitting at a desk to do what ? Sit on a sofa and empty a few beers. After a while, when their body can't "catch up" they feel the effects and wonder what happened.
> But we've digressed.
Yes, too bad HN doesn't really work for longer conversations.
> An improvement over the nightmare of far longer hours in the early industrial revolution. But we've digressed.
Sure, but what is it now ? For most people in 1st world countries it isn't about survival, especially for us, IT workers. Albeit poor people in countries completely rejecting socialism ideas still struggle just as much as 100 years ago.
The survival nightmare isn't there anymore. Now we're suffering the blowback of an economy that can't sustain itself without constant growth.
"The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem