Busyness leads to bad decisions
bbc.com
bbc.com
A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now. I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it.
I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay for every day I took to make it. Given the luxury of time, I made a much better buying decision for the new-to-me vehicle.
One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor.
These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.
I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the luxury of enough assets and steady income that I quickly setup autopayments on my credit card and never had to think about it again.
I had relatives and friends who couldn't setup autopayment because they were never sure if they'd have enough in their account or ability to pay their credit card and had to strategically optimize when and what they'd pay. The amount of cognative load folks endure juggling many of these artificial constructs makes it difficult for them to pursue and seize opportunity when it arises to get ahead.
Arguments could be made as to why some should or should not be in such situations but this is just one example. I often think about how difficult it is to fit certain necessary things in my schedule and then remember I don't ride the bus in the work which dramatically reduces my commute time.
There are many such aspects people deal with daily and it can be daunting. If you're very wealthy, a lot of these problems you can throw relatively marginal money at and the problem is solved while focusing on furthering yourself.
Without connections like that, and especially that one, certain periods of my life would have been a lot harder. With all the long term impacts that has.
The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it.
I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or wealth (real estate, investments etc.)
I think the insistence of many people that they aren't "working class" is bad as it prevents them from seeing what is really in their best interests.
Class B is a different species. If they stop working, their money will still go up, indefinitely due to passive investments. The idea of getting to $0 is ridiculous because they get richer every day by doing nothing. Class B’s lifestyle is totally different than Class A.
Class A people like to invent all these other sub-classes to distance themselves from others in Class A: middle class. Upper middle class. Lower middle class. Middle upper middle class. It’s all pretty silly. We all have much more in common with each other than we do with people who get richer every day simply by existing.
Um, did you accidentally mix those two up? I think you meant Class B controls Class A. No?
The typically discussed classes in the US are lower, middle, upper which I always took to be one std below the mean income (lower) and one std above mean income (upper). Perhaps if we used mean days until $0 dollars in the bank if you stopped working it would be more useful.
However in the classic socialist sense of the world, or in other parts of the world, "working class" often just means "work for someone else."
And in that definition even I, an overpaid Google employee, am "working class"
On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me.
If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.
Neither do the old-money (or socialized to behave the same) rich. That's the behavior of someone who's worried about being mistaken for poor.
Regardless of the hit it would take to your social status, you CAN choose to opt out of a rich neighbourhood or a rich car, if you need a car, you can't opt out of that choice. There's nowhere to opt out to.
>Next, participants received our standard instructions to entertain themselves with their thoughts (in this case for 15 min). If they wanted, they learned, they could receive an electric shock again during the thinking period by pressing a button. We went to some length to explain that the primary goal was to entertain themselves with their thoughts and that the decision to receive a shock was entirely up to them. Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period [range = 0 to 4 shocks, mean (M) = 1.47, SD = 1.46, not including one outlier who administered 190 shocks to himself], compared to 25% of women (6 of 24; range = 0 to 9 shocks, M = 1.00, SD = 2.32).
You can read the complete study here, https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/WILSON%20ET%20AL%202014.pdf
I´m quite intrigued about the outlier who managed to shock himself every 4.7 seconds for 15 minutes straight. Was he trying to go for a record or just plain masochism...
But I will shock myself at least once just to see how bad the shock is... not because I would be bored.
(unless they took this into account and let everyone shock themselves before starting the experiment? That would be smart of them... didn't have time to read the study)
Either way, I was wondering if people shocked themselves out of curiosity, but the part after what you quoted says "Note that these results only include participants who had reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again... But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid." They all already knew what it would feel like and they did it anyway.
From the supplementary material:
> All participants delivered the shock to themselves in this first part of the study. Thus, in Part 2 of the study, when people had the opportunity to shock themselves again, everyone knew what the shock entailed and how painful it was.
They also asked the participants to rate the experience from the sock in a 1-10 scale (negative to positive) and removed all participants who didn't find the shock as a negative experience.
The grade the remaining participants gave to the shock experience was in the lowest part of the scale, which makes it even more insane:
> ratings of the shock, t(52) = 1.40, p = .167
I have never enjoyed feeling busy.
It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break. Some people do not perceive this, they're either workaholics or aboulics. Tiredness and boredom are good things evolved to prevent damaging ourselves.
If you ignore these you get burnout on one end, but no idea what is the opposite called.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/12/americas-white-collar-w...
You might not realise it but this stuff gets exported to the rest of the world. I frequently see American lobbyists on British TV pushing a low regulation agenda with the intention to weaken workers rights.
We got two consultants from the US of A and that was a hell of a month, constantly pushing us to overwork our employees, saying that we need to show them the carrot on the stick. Their idea was that people will work for 80 hours per week out of their own initiative because life is all about money made and time saved.
Whenever we would argue anything, they would start almost chanting Wolf of Wall Street style: "Time & money!". I've never felt more relieved to have someone leave as when they got back to the US. It took us almost half a year to get back on track after that whole shebang and the CEO still has nightmares of how much was payed for them to come there and bro up the place.
I was intending to write a short message but it turned into a little rant. What I mean to say is that yes, I believe you are correct and this American way of doing business is pushed around the world in what I think is a real bad direction for work-life balance.
There's definitely something to that. Calvinistic thinking that labor is pious seems to have been a part of American workplaces forever, especially tech. It's even a part even of the stackoverflow ethos-- god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front.
But it's all over the place. Look at the China tech sector with their popular 9-9-6 workweek. Is that an import from Western Calvinist thinking? I'm not sure, maybe?
Whatever the case, "busyness" certainly has been exploited to serve "the man" and not "god".
Rugged individualism was probably never a thing. The first thing that settlers did when they moved west was to create towns and communities.
Anyone believing otherwise should try to live in the equivalent of the 19th century west without the support of a town and the services it provides.
(I.e.: no blacksmith, no doctor, no general store, no post office, no telegraph...)
I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.
The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!
So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.
[1] "How to ask questions the smart way": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
[2] "What is a help vampire": http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy.
Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard.
It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly harsh standard that turns off a lot of people who need help.
BTW the dated, smug and dismissive ESR advice and premature labeling of people as "help vampires" doesn't help the argument on the SO side.
Put yourself in the position of the people answering questions for free. It wastes their time. How long would it take to burn you if every day you had to answer the same questions by people too lazy to write with punctuation and to search for the answers to see if they already exist, who never come back to tell you if it helped them or not, who never reply to requests for clarification, who could have found the answer for themselves if they simply tried to run the code, and who are sometimes rude if you ask them a counter-question? There are so many times you can attempt to help someone asking "plz help this code doesn't run why doesn't it run plz help me" before giving up on the website.
Low quality, poorly researched questions also make SO as a whole less useful to other people. Forums full of garbage often devolve into more garbage. So there has to be a threshold -- arbitrary by definition -- and you may or may not agree with the precise one, but without one SO would be full of garbage. SO evolved into trigger-happiness because of the problem it was trying to solve: quality Q&A without the noise and garbage.
This has nothing to do with puritan work ethic or "worthiness" or gatekeeping. How to ask good questions is something every programmer (or tech-minded) needs to be good at in order to do their job. It's not too much to ask. How else would they know what code to write or what problem to solve?
In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.
Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.
To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?
> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)
> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?
BTW, no fishing I've ever done has been idle or boring. Fishing is generally a lot of work.
Nope, there's a hidden axis you're implicitly ignoring. It's possible to be active and "in flow" doing something without feeling "busy". So it's not just a 1-dimensional spectrum of whether one is idle or doing things, but also the psyche/attitude experienced when doing those things. The corresponding analogue to idleness is "leisure", where it is possible to enjoy idling or acting without coherent purpose.
It takes a particular kind of anemic perspective to ignore the experiential axis, and just consider the axis corresponding to "things done" or "output produced".
For a more detailed exposition on what goes into achieving a "flow" state, I recommend checking out Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's book titled Flow. For more on "leisure", I recommend Bertrand Russell's essay In praise of idleness.
I really like tackling things on my own time, and I feel this "tunnelling" a lot and I don't like it at all. Sometimes it can be nice, but I feel like due to stress I tunnel too much.
And I noticed that after being stressed for a while (weeks/months) it is very hard to come back and enjoy idleness. I think this is a problem in cultures with a "busy" work ethic.
You can accomplish a lot of task checkboxes that are irrelevant. This is exactly what the article talks about. You must ask questions on whether what you're doing has any value - ultimately for you or someone/something you value. And while in flow state you cannot ask such questions as they're not directly related to what you're doing.
Company values are at least a few degrees removed from this ultimate value.
If you spend all the time in the flow state, you're likely are achieving nothing for your own goals, because you're not setting any. (Or worse, the goals are not thought out.)
Flow is the same as hyperfocus physically, and overdoing will ultimately harm you physically, if not psychologically or socially first. It's also related to meditation. Like meditation it is not always beneficial, especially in excess.
If this author has some other definition of flow, be careful, there might be a tautology or "no true Scotsman" involved.
Flow is so hard to maintain that it's self limiting anyway.
I think there's little chance of overdoing flow when the entire social system is designed to keep us busy distracted and checking boxes.
Acedia
I don't even think I hate my job that much. I'm not really even working crazy hours; yet it still seems like there's no free time, and I don't want the little time available to fly by.
i.e. the enjoyment I think is in projecting a certain image of oneself; not necessarily actually embodying that image.
Alleged accomplishment tickles reward centers in the brain. In most people, reward from repetitive tasks fades quickly, in some others it does not. (Perfect employees for assembly line. Except we have robots.)
A masochist instead may thrive on the discomfort of it.
Clearly, you are not manager material.
Managers like to flaunt their busyness. It's their essence, their halo.
A 2 week project crunch can be exhilarating, but 6 months? No thanks!
Similarly a few weeks of beach vacation can be wonderfully relaxing, but months, years of "doing nothing" will soon become boring.
Met plenty of people stuck in travelling mode for years, but yeah they don't just lie around the beach (most of the time).
http://stmaryvalleybloom.org/pascal-diversion.html
Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage:
>And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
Have you figured anything out? Perhaps this can give you some practice every day:
The irony is not lost on me that the man in this anecdote is bringing untimely death to the hare, to distract himself from his own.
Death probably feels just like you felt before you were born.
Why not celebrate that there is anything to experience at all? It seems so improbable.
Metaphorically, that passion project or artistic pursuit that you can't quite explain a practical use for is more or less the same idea.
http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1696-1787,_De_Ligo...
And yes, being busy resulted in a couple of less than perfect decisions on my behalf. The worst ones just for the sake of doing and deciding something.
--------------------------
What did I do?
- I started thinking about the tasks I needed to do, assessing if they were actually important to begin with.
- I often found that they were not adding value to my product (DarwinMail[1]) and so I discarded them.
- I also quickly completed any task that would take 5 minutes or less to complete.
--------------------------
What was the result?
- About a year on and I have a successful product (well, success in my head is a product which has thousands of users of which at least hundreds love the product and could not live without it).
- I feel more successful, more fulfilled and a greater sense of accomplishment.
I've found answering "Is this important?" very hard. I find it much easier to answer "What is the impact if I do this?"
I like your style.. and sometimes I ask myself other questions like will it matter to me in 10 hours, 10 days or 10 weeks?
The longer into the future it matters to me, the more important it is to get done IMO :)
Mind that both are estimates and can change.
I think you want to ask both questions.