Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a toll on society
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...
That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.
And I'm sure that still drives the numbers. They probably seem really high to me partly because I pretty much only have the TV on if I'm actively watching something. Used to always drive me crazy if I would share a room with someone on a trip and the first they did on entering a hotel room was to turn the TV on.
I've tried a handful "let's make a date" apps. None really work. Worse, I can't figure out how I'd do better.
One crucial missing feature is shared calendar event updates. For example, you need to push back our lunch 30 minutes, my calendar gets auto updated.
That would be divine!
In my case, I have the TV on for an hour and a half to two hours, but during that time it's mostly background noise for the rest of my morning routine; maybe 20-30 minutes is actually _watching_ the local news.
When I get home, it's the same: it's _on_ for 3 hours or so, but I'm only paying attention to it about half that time.
So, 5 hours a day, but under half that time is actually watching anything.
Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.
Speaking from anecdotal experience with online communities, when idling or toying at home during their free time, people actually engage socially with friends through chats, networks, games — pick your entertainment drug. They're everything but alone, and it's genuinely real if limited cognitively compared to a real physical interaction.
If you add voice chat to that, at the end of the day you really feel like you spent X hours with friend(s), there's just no other way to put it except for the physical location.
It's almost a given to me that with appropriate videoconf wall-sized (real-world size) screens in all living rooms, we'd just "invite" friends this way most of the time unless the physical interaction was necessary. Less maintenance, less friction to just spend a cool quality hour.
The 'effort' required to move out of your house is getting increasingly higher, your 'local maximum' would essentially converge to an actual maximum in a perfect virtual reality (of which the "80%" / good enough might be just around the next decade).
This is why you see people holding conversations in real life while still sneaking looks (or not sneaking) at their phones. They're junkies.
Perhaps people feel that if they commit in advance, they'll miss out if something more interesting pops up. But nothing more interesting pops up when the day comes around, and you end up watching TV because nobody would commit.
One of the main points of the article is that many people don't know their schedules in advance. So even if schedules do line up, they may not know in enough time to schedule something. TV watching is also a done-in-the-margins activity. The tv exists in the same place they sleep and eat. I don't see anything to reconcile.
I couldn't do those things while entertaining a guest. That requires much more mental effort.
The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them.
Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.
Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
no matter how you slice it, having other people prepare good food (ie, not pizza and wings) for you is relatively expensive. if you expect the food to come to you, it either has to be limited to dishes that travel well and don't suffer from sitting over heat for an hour, or you have to pay even more for people to cook it on location.
In our home, it's perfectly OK to have a friend drop in and share a pot of soup, a loaf of bread, and a couple of cheeses from the supermarket. Socializing doesn't have to be elaborate or burdensome.
Yeah, that's the way to do it if you really want to see friends regularly and not Make A Statement about cooking. Stew, slow cooker, something relatively easy. The friends grab a bottle of wine.
Having people over doesn't need to be some major stressor.
Or burden the host with getting the ingredients and recipes, and have the guests help with the actual cooking once they arrive. If the dinner party is supposed to be a social event, why not make the cooking part of that event? Social cooking can be fun!
>Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host.
This happened to a friend of mine that hosted dinners for a year or two. The idea would be other people would host it occasionally also, or help with food. Neither of those things ended up happening, so my friend just stopped doing it and nobody else picked it up.
I hosted Saturday pancakes (friends and family) and bimonthly book study group (geeks) for years. I miss both dearly.
About social obligation (other reply's point): after much trial and error, it was just easier if I provided all the food. Hoagies, spaghetti, greek food, whatever's easy. Early birds were "punished" with KP chores.
For study group, I asked for $5 donation per head. Some people always showed up early to help. Most geeks gave more, of course.
Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.
Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)
This was something I noticed a few years ago when I experimented with using Hired. They let you set your minimum salary. When I set it very high I got matched with companies that I was very disinterested in. When I lowered my minimum salary I heard from a wider range of companies that seemed a lot more compatible with my interests and values.
I was left with a job I disliked & never had agreed to _and_ making less money than before.
I realized the likes and dislikes, interestingness, culture, etc. can never ever be enforced and can change suddenly. Meanwhile it’s much harder for compensation to change like that.
Are you finding the opposite to be true?
There are higher-end driving schools for adults. But most of them are going to assume you already know how to basically drive and they'll be even less compatible with a full-time schedule. (i.e. you'd need to take some vacation time)
Agreed. But adults are more patient if you already have 10 hours of steering and finding the break pedal on someone else's car.
For the more advanced (and safe) driving, it’s all about predicting other drivers by recognizing their type and knowing how they will respond. That’s really hard and new/foreign drivers are the most difficult. It’s also what makes driving in other places so hard and occasionally dangerous for experienced drivers... LA is not NY is not Boston is not Berlin is not Naples is not Greece is not Shanghai is not Seoul is not Beijing is not Delhi (I think many people who’ve driven/riden a lot in these places will instantly feel how it is to drive each of these cities).
You have to drive differently in each place so that other drivers (even the ones who are just learning) know what you’re going to do... be predictable and like the other traffic (even if it breaks rules, goes too fast, and gets too close together. I've never driven in Africa or Eastern Europe, but as a passenger it’s terrifying. Other places like Shanghai seem to break the rules in more polite ways that I’m more comfortable with.
To give an example many people will recognize, if you leave ‘too much room’ or drive ‘too slowly’ on a LA freeway other drivers will cut you off in incredibly dangerous ways... you have to ‘move with the flow of traffic’ which often means 15mph over the speed limit with less than a 2 car length gap to the vehicle ahead.
I remember for about the first month making a real point of avoiding routes and times that would expose me to a lot of stop and go traffic, especially on inclines.
I can't imagine what initially learning to drive a stickshift somewhere like SF must have been like!
Which is the issue, as I have no friends or family nearby, nor anyone I'm close enough with to ask such a favor of.
I also have a full-time job. It is the first time in my life (since I started working FT at 16) that I have been able to do this though.
You can too.
First study the driving manual carefully. Most of the knowledge that you need is on there. I'm astonished how poorly non-drivers know the laws of the road (they're largely applicable to them too!). Also the booklet has a lot of techniques relevant to driving (two second separation, add a second for every risk fact, ect).
Now start driving. Get a friend to help you if you have one. Start [0] small, slow, empty, local residential streets and alleyways. Work your way up to more complicated situations.
That's how I learned to ride a motorcycle at age 32 with just the two day MSC course.
[0] Actually the first step is to "drive" with the car turned off. Pretend your driving and then.. BAM! Danger on the road! Can your foot find the breaks? Did they trip instead? Use a timer set to 40s.
Furthermore, yes "these kids" can afford to drive, but would rather someone else do it for them, because the independence of driving is no longer of such high social importance while posting on social media is.
Lots more ways to spend time without involving other people. TV was always there, but you didn't always have something interesting playing. Now you have on-demand Netflix. You have always-on Internet connections. You are always near your smartphone.
I think for most people, the reliable way to value time is to get put into a situation (e.g. job with long commutes) for a while, and then you're forced to eliminate a lot of the pointless things that were eating your time when you did have the time.
That transition may take a year or two, though.
> 1830 69.1 hours per week
> 1880 60.7
> 1929 50.6
> 1988 42.4
> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.
Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up.
So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same standard of living has increased.
So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.
...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have at worst been flat for certain sectors. The vast majority of people have seen inflation adjused wage increases.
btw, i didn’t know that:
> Full time is 35 hours or more per week; part time is less than 35 hours.
thats just barely above 4 days @ 8hrs... interesting...
The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME.
Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.
what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.
after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.
the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.
This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff.
Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility.
Its been much less stressful.
I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life
I work at an investment bank so I am no stranger to crazy hours. I’ve tried to think of a more sustainable alternative model but I haven’t found a compelling one.
I'm still not sure that sort of Orwellian new-speak was intentional by Perlow, but I also cannot imagine a world in which a highly paid management consultant is unaware that PTO was already a commonly used acronym.
Every single person at BCG could easily find another job that turns off at 5:01pm if they wanted to. They choose not to.
Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends?
That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.
To be blunt, what I mean is that a lot of problems we have nowadays come from the mere existence of modern technology, not exclusively from just the way people live. It's a bit hard for me to admit because I used to be an avid technologist (and am currently employed as a computer engineer), but it's gets harder and harder to deny everyday. No one in the world gets to choose what technology is the next logical step, and the decision to pursue its development is ultimately an arms race with the entire world as competitors. It is just not possible for any philosophy, economic system, or culture to change that fact. The good side-effects are inseparable from the bad. If you have nuclear energy, you have atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. If you have fast computer networking, you have on-demand entertainment and surveillance networks. If you can store information forever, you can instantly know someone's worst act and they can remember yours.
As humanity becomes more conscious it will begin to dawn that none of the life here is separate from any other life and we will move toward Love and unity.
You can see from globalization that we are moving toward a more unified world, it is inevitable if we can survive the consequences of the shadow side of stage orange.
Edit: To clarify, unification of the globe will help to prevent weaponizing technologies, and will lead to unified efforts to preserve and rescue our planets ecology from our excesses. But we have to be high enough on the spiral to implement that, if we're down at the psychological level of totalitarians and then try to implement marxism, we will end up with a totalitarian marxism like Stalin. Stalin wasn't a liberal you know ...
And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.
Aka artificial scarcity. Wealthy landowners prevent housing of adequate density being built. Public transport is hard to fund due to the expense driven by negotiating with landholders.
Landowners are creating artificial scarcity; the thing that is not scarce is land; it is habitable spaces proximate to quality employment opportunities.
It's become normalized for people to buy houses/condos with large amounts of inflating debt. Because you're indebted, you can't simply sell what you've bought for any less than you owe, eat the loss and walk away, as you might do with something you flat out own. You'd still owe your lender, with interest.
I'd argue that this game creates a significant incentive for people to hold onto a housing units and pass debt onto renters, that it turns would-be owner-occupants into virtual speculators/landlords. I say "virtual" because they are really just tenants of their lenders (banks), and many of them aren't really in it for the "win", they're just in it by coercion, in it for the "not loss".
This whole scheme, and many others like it, artificially restricts supply and inflates prices.
Food scarcity is one of the largest perpetrators of artificial scarcity. Massimo Bottura whole model for food for the soul is based on the appalling 30% of food waste he witnessed first hand. If you ever have the pleasure to hear this beautiful man speak, you will understand the little effort, but extreme creativity that goes into combating waste. It is quite sad some chefs throw out half the meat to get the perfect box for the plate. Use the scraps for ‘family meal’ aka staff meal and boom all that waste is gone. Such simple effort is apparently extremely innovative.
We have taken the thanos mindset too far ‘I yield this powerful glove that can do anything, the universe is over populated so destroy half the universe’. It’s so obvious that you can also create double the space. The exponential growth will be the same either way, maybe a couple years lean on the destruction, eventually they will equal out when your curve goes to infinity. It’s like people learned calculus 2 and are like ‘ahaha this is bullshit it has no real world applicability’. No look at your decisions and their consequences, create a curve and measure the area under the curve, see they converge at the same axis and realize regardless of the x shift the curves both converge at the same y. Like that math has an abstract application which should be used for critical thinking application. It is very sad to see people write ‘teach me about finances and taxes calculus is useless’. The very passive application of calculus has helped me go from being in the biggest rut of my life to actually feeling productive in the field.
Anyways I diverged 3 times sorry.
One day, we had a lot of leftover desserts, like several trays of untouched fancy desserts. I was instructed to throw them all in the bin.
I asked the manager if I could instead take these trays with desserts to the staff room so that people could eat them during their lunch break.
This would have taken 5-10 minutes max, there was nothing urgent that needed to be done.
Manager got upset at the question, told me off, I had to throw out all that fancy food.
I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.
One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non-optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and interests.
I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when they are in meat-space.
If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.
France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest (at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else will lose more control.
I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.
I have time to see my family and friends as I can, to a certain extend, trust they will be available when I am off work.
Vote for change!
I would bet you do not, but out of curiosity, what state is that?
We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.
I am?
I honestly don't care what they do, how much they make, etc; if they are doing better (financially), great for them.
Myself? I'm what I call "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - I have no unsecured debt, I have no car payments, I use my credit cards wisely and pay off the amount owed monthly if not weekly. The only debt I have is my mortgage, and honestly I could pay it off in full tomorrow if I wanted to.
Many of so-called peers who might be making more, aren't anywhere near as lucky. Some of them I know struggle and live paycheck-to-paycheck. I used to be there myself. I can empathize with the situation.
Buying a house changed all of that. My wife and I changed our financial situation completely. It took a few years of ramen and beans, but we did it. Anyone can do it - but the first step is to stop competing with your peers, and stop trying to "keep up with the Jones".
In the end, when you're dead, you're dead. Nobody is going to say "well, s/he had more than their neighbor/peer over there, at least" - and the fact is, even if they do, you'll be dead; you won't care.
Insane example: just the average cost of processing the legally required paperwork for partitioning and buying a plot and get all permits to build is higher for me today than it was for my grandfather in 1960 to buy the land and all materials to build a house. As measured in net income - hours of work after taxes. And I'm in a higher income bracket than he was.
even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a thread about this just the other day.
Well yeah obviously I wouldn't be able to live working @30% doing food delivery or cleaning bathrooms...
> there are people working less than full-time.
There are some for sure but so far I haven't found a company accepting my requests. It's probably highly dependent on the country/industry.
So, I wouldn't say "no one will ever employ you at 30%", but its definitely not easy and it does come with a cost beyond what the fewer hours would suggest.
Yeah they will - you just haven't figured it out yet (but you can - if you're willing).
/Bob Dobbs can show you the way...
After cutting basically everything else except the cellphone bill because you basically can't get by in the modern world without a phone and an internet connection. (And that replaces the landline bill they would have had a few decades back.)
edit: before the downvote storm, have a look at https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Raoul... and https://libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacl... it's doing a very good job at explaining the shift we went through after WWII, when everyone was promising 5 hours workdays and retirement at 45.
I'm as down on capitalism as anyone, but one of HN's very good guidelines is that you should be more thoughtful and substantive as the topic gets more divisive. Dropping the word "capitalism" in response to someone asking what's wrong on a forum full of capitalists is never going to go well.
Put a little effort in.
2. Humans aren't good at predicting what will make them happy.
3. Work comes in quanta (9-5 job, either you have one or not). For some reason there are few options to take half a job, if you want to.
Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc.
But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.
How much of that is due to demographic changes in the Western professional class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure.
https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-ba...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social...
What a remarkable understatement.
The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random nights and weekends.
I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be convinced.
They were hooked into the fabric of society enough that they contributed to social care, elder care, welfare, special needs and a whole selection of other roles that modern government have placed on the individual. Spun as giving "choice", the intent was to remove that bedrock foundation.
The removal of that foundation was as much part of 80s monetarism/neoliberalism as deregulation or privatisation. We gained individualism and private everything, and lost all the community resources that glued those individuals together.
Someone inevitably mentions Bowling Alone in these threads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
TLDR: man up
Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. That is life. Or at least a life that is worth living.