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chrisseaton

Don't you have any hobbies that give you a social life outside your work or family?

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A great many people in the USA work well beyond 40h a week, and have a few hours of daily commute time on top of that.

For them the weekends are for recovery; there is no physical or emotional energy for social engagement or self care.

My opinion, most of the united states communal infrastructure is a wasteland.

It is not just the US. 10 hour workdays (officially 7.8, but if you would actually 'just' do that and skip the 8am or the 6pm meetings you will not be keeping up with the Joneses and pay the piper) and spend 2-3 hours in commuting each day doesn't leave much for hobbies.

It's true; China has the 996 problem, for instance.

Meetings outside the working hours?! Where is this common?

Here we work 9-6, but even in the places I've worked on where unpaid overtime was common (otherwise you wouldn't keep up with the workload), no manager would have the gall to schedule regular meetings outside working hours.

> Meetings outside the working hours?! Where is this common?

If you have people in, for example, London and San Francisco, how can you possibly have a meeting inside both people's 9-5 working hours?

> how can you possibly have a meeting inside both people's 9-5 working hours?

Don't have 9-5 working hours? Having a meeting at 8 is okay, but that should mean people get to leave earlier as well.

You can always have meetings inside working hours if you’re prepared to expand working hours either side as much as needed like that!

In the modern international economy you’re going to have to be a bit flexible with hours.

Moving the hours around (from 9-5 to 8-4 or 10-6) is not expanding them, and it's already being flexible.

I don't get it then - you asked when do people have meetings outside normal working hours as if it was some sort of travesty that nobody would 'have the gall' to do, and now you're saying it's absolutely fine you just move your hours around...

PeterStuer, to whose post I originally replied, said those meetings were held outside working hours, so people effectively had "10 hour workdays".

I don't see why is it hard to understand the difference between having a 10 hour workday or having a shifted 8 hour workday.

> Meetings outside the working hours?! Where is this common?

In all FAANG companies I worked at when I had geographically distributed teams.

2-3 hours commuting is not the norm. The average commute in the US is around 25 minutes each way, so roughly 1 hour total. Super-long commutes are almost non-existent outside a handful of metro areas.

If you’re dealing with a very long commute, it might be worth it to move to a different metro, even if it requires a substantial pay cut. I think most people under-estimate the negative impact that a long commute has on their life.

Hobbies might not be sufficient for a social life.

I used to train seriously in mixed-martial arts. While I had no issue with any of my training mates, I also had zero interest in hanging out with them. Likewise for other, strictly cerebral, activities.

One thing that is valuable is activities with downtime where you’re forced to get to know one another outside of the activity. If you do something like martial arts or rowing (which I do), it’s when you travel for competitions that you bond. Activities like skiiing where you share housing for the season gives downtimebto get to know people between the activity. Hiking and camping is another good one where you spend time at the campsite at the end of the day preparing food together.

Or the military reserves - no better place to meet a large number of adults.

Diving is great for that - long hours spent “off-gassing” with nothing to do but talk to others on the same boat

Maybe not as in 'having a beer at each others houses', but when you go to each others fights as a team, go to seminars/camps together, or just work through your fight prep together at 4 or 6 week periods at a time, you develop bonds that cannot be described any other way than 'friendships', wouldn't you say? I mean sure, training 2 to 5 times a week in the gym, saying hi when you come in and see you when you leave doesn't give you that, but you can't be a complete fighter without friendships. I mean if dripping sweat into another guys mouth and rubbing all over each other wearing tights doesn't build friendships, what does?

Does the internet count

What are good hobbies for that?

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