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Comment by pochamago | Hacker News Reader

It's not like you can't work fewer hours and have all the things greater productivity offered. But it's also created even more things you can get by continuing to work more, and most people do not feel satisfied living without them

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I'd work 30% of what I do now if I could. The truth is that no one will ever employ you at 30%.

first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim. shift work pays by the hour for however many hours you work (and possibly overtime), and most of these jobs don't expect you to work full-time. in fact, they might prefer that you don't. you're probably not gonna get an aeron chair and a mechanical switch keyboard though.

even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a thread about this just the other day.

> first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim

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.

I currently work a three day week. Finding somewhere that let me do this was not easy. There were rather few places willing to do it and I took a pretty big pay cut (on top of earning 40% less by working 40% less, I mean). I don't think I'll be able to sustain it indefinitely, financially speaking. Maybe I can find somewhere for 4 days for less of a pay cut (or increase my hours here).

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.

> The truth is that no one will ever employ you at 30%.

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...

This is exactly it. We can get the same standard of living we had 50 years ago while working a hell of a lot less than we did 50 years ago. But of course nobody wants to live that way (myself included).

I wonder how this true this sentiment actually is. For instance, my house was built in the twenties. Other than internet and a television (which are hardly bank breaking expenses), living in this home is not meaningfully different than it would have been in the 50s. All of my major expenses are things that would have been accessible (if cheaper, eg college education) in the 1950s. Cutting all modern luxuries from my life would hardly move the needle on my ability to “work a hell of a lot less”.

No. This is a myth. Check costs of various expense segments against net salaries and you will see how much certain areas have changed.

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.

I'm not sure that's true any more at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. People I know are having a very difficult time covering just rent, electricity, food, and transportation for a family of 4 on a dual full-time income.

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.)

That only works if only a few people decide to work more, since in capitalism prices/wages are set by the marginal rate. So if everyone works more, wages just go down, till no one is actually any better off.

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