Are we too busy to enjoy life?
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https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ebooks/seneca/on-the-shortn...
"But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men's fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: 'The part of life we really live is small.'"
Absolutely incredible that his words can speak to someone 2000 years later and make them feel something in the core of their essence. Thanks for sharing this really helped me with some things this morning.
There's also a hilarious passage about a wealthy guy who gets carried everywhere, and becomes so numbed by luxury that he can't tell whether he's sitting down or not.
I find texts written by my conationals a century or 2 ago already hard to relate to, also modern ones written by people from cultures very different from mine.
We've been debating the nature versus nurture question since philosophy was a concrete concept with no visible light at the end of the tunnel. Many people, myself included, would strongly disagree with the latter half of that statement.
In your earlier comment you seemed to be in perfect agreement:
> Human nature may not have changed
This echoes my sentiment that nurture may change from one generation to the next but nature stays the same. Our traits that stubbornly stay the same probably come from our nature, while the ones that change easier over generations or centuries come from nurture. This isn't about which one is more important in defining you. Fresh out of the womb humans have probably been the same for many, many millennia. Like x86 CPUs running newer and newer software.
It seems to me that human nature has changed quite a lot in the last few hundred years. Examples would be the change in how we view other humans, slavery is regarded as barbaric now, we have the declaration of human rights and equality for women and people of different sexuality etc.
2,000 years is very little time on a genetic timescale, I wouldn't expect to see many changes. Some, sure, but not much.
If you take a number of modern humans and put them in a Bronze Age setting you will get Bronze Age humans. Our genetics stayed pretty much the same and education just reigns in and steer our human nature.
There's no reason to debate "who would survive if the world was so-and-so" it's interesting, but not important in discussion what human nature means.
So, let's swap people from today and the earliest homo sapiens: Newborns with type 1 diabetes - Only the one from the past survives 5 year old healthy kids: - They'd probably do fine, assuming the one from today can adapt their immune system (and vice-versa). 10 year old healthy kids: - Probably already issues here, I'd not bet on the modern kid. 30 year old person: - Not betting on the modern one, might be they can integrate themselves into the group, but it might become apparat that they're not carrying their weight, and ousted. - The one from old, if they manage to learn our language, that'd be success, they'd probably end up in prison or an institution.
One thing I do find a little overdone in the Stoics is the constant focus on death. There's a great recent book about Montaigne called "How to Live" and I think it does a great job of describing how Montaigne took the best parts of Stoicism but also created his own humanistic take on living.
There are many sentiments in that book that are highly relatable and one marvels at how long ago they were written. Of course, there's also a fair share of things to recoil from.
Well, this certainly stings. Tough talk across millennia.
“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
There are very few exceptions to this depending on your career and mindset. I can say that I enjoyed life a lot during my 8 years in the military, and it had nothing to do with the job ( the job sucked ). It had everything to do with the people. Friendships forged, the understanding involved, the familial bond that came with it. That made me feel happy.
After that, normal jobs were just busy work. Which iswhy I'm happy to say that my current job ( 100% remote ) is much more satisfactory, and not as "busy". I enjoy life as it is. I lucked out so far.
But I will say that while everyone might have different standards of "enjoying life", the key factor is actually _belonging_ to a family. Doesn't mater if that family is blood related, it just needs to be people you fully trust and can do anything with and be completely comfortable with.
This is not something that is easily attained, but it can be easier to find if you're not working some shit job 10 hours a day every day five days a week with no chance of vacation and no job security.
That shit needs to change,a nd the majority of us are slaves to it.
I'm ready for you to not understand this, civilians usually do not.
Mmmmm.
Either way, some things do happen occasionally, and this is something most people shrug off.
That’s the other problem as well though; civilians will never, truly understand the feeling we have from the military lifestyle. It’s why a lot of veterans gravitate towards eachother.
This is exactly what I hear from people in cults.
This is also what I hear from people in cults.
1000% agreed. Everything about current life has done a good job siloing and isolating people to be nothing but worker drones. There is no sense of community, no sense of belonging to something, or even being allowed to be human.
How many people work jobs so compartmentalized, so abstract, that they can't even see the bigger picture of what they are working on? Better yet, how about all those people who work in the "gig economy", working odd hours, working for scraps, unable to make rent? In each case, the worker is almost completely divorced from anything and it all ultimately starts to be (and feel) completely pointless.
It's not something that happened by accident.
People like it and gravitate towards it.
Doing one, and preferably only one thing is really comforting.
When my friends who live in the city complain that their sink is backing up and how hard it is to get a plumber even after offering $350/visit, I listen to the symptoms, figure out the tools needed, pay a visit and fix the problem.
When I tell them how easy it is to diagnose a plumbing problem, and how next time they don't need to pay me in beers or even the plumber - they are just. not. interested.
Writing the same React application a 100 times is far more enjoyable (and profitable).
People really like to say they want to do more things in life, but when push comes to a shove, doing the same old thing, repeatedly, is extremely comforting.
Doing different things is risky and non-comforting.
That takes deliberate practice and planning.
Your react app example is an interesting one because it touches on the profit motive. Yes, it's easier to be disinterested in say, your plumbing example, but how much of that is due to genuine disinterest and how much is due to the constant implicit pressure to produce produce produce?
General Personal growth (including being able to diagnose issues with say your plumbing) takes a back seat to personal growth that can net you the most amount of money and the constant grind of needing to prove your monetary value to society.
Simply put, yes there is a bit of the human condition to being interested in what's safe, and what you know, but there's also the implicit need to be hyper-specialized in an unhealthy way in order to maximize your output, to the detriment of everything else and for me personally, the latter is definitely where I fall to the absolute detriment of my own mental health. And that is where I think we are failing as a society.
For sure!
I would love your inputs on my thoughts on this topic but I'm in a conundrum:
1. If I put a link to my thought, people flag my post as self promotion
2. If I copy paste my thoughts more than once on the same thread, people flag my post as adding noise, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961683
So I guess the only thing I can do now is kindly request you to look at my recent post history on this thread.
One of the cornerstones of modern society is however specialization; there simply isn't enough time to learn everything.
I'm not sure how plumbing charts on the scales. Probably it's just something people usually avoid if they can find someone else to do it.
If I'm feeling chill, and not tired then I'm much more interested in learning something new, and solving my own problems.
Question is what to do about it? I'm not sure if this requires a cultural shift, but other places in the world seems to be better at it.
I would actually argue it is a cultural thing to be completely honest. Speaking from experience as an American at least, there is large cultural tradition driving this: the protestant work ethic that drives the idea of rugged individualism, the automobile, the implicit requirement that you consume consume consume and every waking hour not at your job must be doing something profitable.
You can't have a "hobby", you gotta try to transform that into a "side hustle" (ughhh) because your day to day job likely doesn't pay enough to live while you pay hundreds of dollars a month towards student loans for an education that you likely don't even use to live in a house or apartment that you can barely afford due to lack of housing and the high prices that creates, while driving a car you probably can't afford due to the high housing prices necessitating you to live an hour or more away from your job.
Maybe living arrangements can be rethought to encourage some of these local communities. Instead of massive self contained houses, we should think more about clusters of dwellings. Each dwelling can have individual bedroom and bathing facilities but with shared common areas like kitchens / bbq that encourages interaction. I'm thinking something like a 6 - 10 small units linked to a larger communal area.
Even something as simple as closing streets and rerouting traffic like Barcelona is doing[0] would be an excellent start with already existing infrastructure.
[0]https://www.vox.com/2016/8/4/12342806/barcelona-superblocks
The problem is, it is very difficult to coordinate the creation of a community. Whatever you think should be its boundaries, someone within the proposed boundaries will disagree with you. Actually, most of them would disagree with you, and each of them for a different reason. The end result is usually that there is no community. Sometimes, an external force (such as school or army) temporarily creates an involuntary community, where the people find each other's company pleasant, so the community remains even after the external force is gone.
Should you base the community on common education/profession? Or rather common values? Hobbies? Age? Geographical proximity is important, too, because then you can meet in person, organize things together, discuss local things. But each of these choices makes you compromise on the other ones.
Even on personal level, sometimes person A enjoys the company of person B; person B enjoys the company of person C; but the person C hates person A. So the approach "instead of defining some unifying principle, just base it on personal chemistry" fails, too.
Maybe we are unable to construct a community, so the best we could do is just throw a few random people together, make them stay together for a few weeks, and then leave it up to them whether they want to keep contact with each other. I could imagine doing this as a service: organize the lottery that assigns people to each other; rent them the place they can continue meeting each other once a week.
But still, where can an average person find "a few weeks" of time necessary to build the community? (Yeah, in a job, but job-based communities are problematic; if you lose a job, you lose your community, too, at the very moment you might need their support most.) Or would one day a week be enough? Sign up to become a community member, promise to spend the following 12 Friday evenings in our place, meet the same group of randomly selected people who also subscribed for the same service... and hopefully start something that can survive a few years? Not sure this would work. (Among other things, it might select for the most desperate people, who ultimately wouldn't desire to have a community with each other.)
I can't even solve this problem for myself, so I can't give advice to entire society. If I dared, I would encourage people to have more hobbies, and perhaps to reduce the work time, so that people have more time for their hobbies and communities.
It's a short article and has some great points I haven't heard. But perhaps you were too busy...
I was reading about "Blue Zones" (areas of the world where people live exceptionally long lives) earlier today and one of the common traits among these areas is exactly what you're saying: have a close-knit social circle of family and friends. As an introvert, this idea goes completely against what I feel comfortable/happier with of course, but I think that's more a result of toxic people in my life in the past. When I reflect back on my social interactions with past friends (of the non-toxic variety), I do get a sense of being happier.
What makes this especially interesting to me is while I have access to more "friends" now as a software developer, the white-collar interactions are less meaningful than when I was working minimum wage jobs. The friendships from my blue-collar jobs were far more memorable. The software work is more meaningful, but the blue-collar jobs gave me true happiness and I think the people I socialized with played a big part in that.
Ever since I started feeling that disconnect with the group I have been deeply unhappy. I don't know where to start. Do I try and take them with me? Do I try and find a new community? How do I do find a new community?
For that we need to change the banking system which puts people in debt. Ie working to pay of debt is voluntary wage debt enslavement. The previous sentence is controversial. Most still want status quo vs radical change.
The banking system doesn't put people into debt by itself. People voluntarily take on debt for reasons such as to attain a college degree because they are told the long-term benefit is worth it.
So rather than go after the banking system, I think it would be more fruitful to go after the reasons people voluntarily take on debt. What are those, and how can we make them more affordable with something other than debt?
If I want to buy a house without a mortgage (or with a limited, affordable mortgage), I still need to be able to outbid other buyers who might have no qualms about taking on an unaffordable debt. So even if I'm just making an individual decision for myself not to go into debt, I'm severely influenced by the behaviour of other members in society, and how much banks are willing to lend to them.
It's still not the bank's fault that people will voluntarily enter unsustainable agreements because they think they need to live in overpriced areas. The banks in this scenario are merely an accessory to financial suicide.
So I think my point still stands: how do we break up this obsession with living in overpriced areas? Improved remote work opportunities? Better cultural opportunities outside major metropolitan areas?
>Better cultural opportunities outside major metropolitan areas?
There is so much historical inertia behind the cultural opportunities in many places that this one will be hard to do and take an inordinate amount of time I think.
Difficulty: houses are more expensive near good schools, because demand is higher, so you can't get away with cheaper housing without harming your children's future prospects.
And no, it's not mostly a funding thing, so just distributing funds more evenly won't fix it. It has a lot more to do with selection bias, of which housing prices are a major part.
An expensive home is a place to live and sleep, but it's also: 1) a ticket of admission into a good school district 2) a ticket of admission to a local economy with well-paying jobs 3) a retirement investing account
I do think changing the way schools are funded will help the first point, and the rise of remote-work will help with the second point, but as to the third point - who knows. There are too many government incentives to buying a home that I don't think it'll change any time soon.
The areas aren’t overpriced, they’re correctly priced given the reduction in value of many types of labor due to automation and outsourcing.
This is a structural change where many Americans now have to compete with people in poorer countries who are up and coming, and at the same time facing redundancies due to technology sufficiently automating their tasks that far fewer people can output more labor.
The obsession is not with living in overpriced areas, the obsession is trying to be in the top quintile/decile and having a network of people in the top quintile/decile because you see the value of labor of the rest of the population going down.
This the solution has to involve either making more people’s labor more valuable, or reducing people’s need for income from their labor.
The first might be accomplished by better educating people so their labor is more valuable and funding research and development, and/or reducing the amount of labor available.
The second can be accomplished with a universal basic income.
Whether this would continue to let a country be economically competitive against other countries in the world, I don’t know, but probably not.
I'd blame local zoning boards for that, they won't let new houses be built, so the prices keep going up, screwing folks who don't own homes already.
Let's say the rules right now permit 30 year mortgages. Someone suggests allowing 100 year mortgages. I don't presently own property, but I have $300k saved up in the bank, which is enough to get a low-end apartment that would be a step down from where I'm renting now, or enough for a mortgage downpayment on a house. I don't want to live in debt so I have no plans to get a mortgage.
Should I believe that these rules changes won't affect me, because I don't have any plans to get a mortgage?
Or should I be worried that the cheaper availability of credit will quickly put those entry-level apartments out of my price range?
Basically, my point is that changes in details regarding contracts that I'm not a party to can still significantly affect me!
In Sweden, you'd be competing against people getting 110 year mortgages.
The more predatory side of taking on excessive debt, because one's back is against the wall or one wants to make an impulse purchase, gives you very little additional time (e.g. weeks or months instead of years). This kind of debt is dangerous.
I bought my house about 60% cash, 40% an unsecured personal loan I could default on without losing my house. This is only because my house was insanely cheap, though.
Singapore don't penalize saving and you see how competitive they are. More importantly, they have a lot of savings.
Personally, I'd love to see a political push to ease back income taxes and capital gains taxes (why are we disincentivizing working and saving?), and implement either a VAT or a progressive consumption tax instead, which discourages spending beyond one's means.
We could also take away corporate income taxes, and replace them with hefty Pigovian carbon taxes (to offset negative externalities), and land value taxes (as they're non-distortionary).
At the end of the day this all adds up to millions of dollars for what my parents and grandparents could easily afford on mediocre pay by today's standards.
It means I spend all day every day thinking about career moves. If I'm sittin here on Slacker News I'm not gaining knowledge or skills to move ahead. I can easily see this causing one to feel isolated and trapped which isn't good for mental health.
You've unfortunately picked up a wrong country to continue living (and possibly retire). Many european countries offer all of this, US currently none. Unless you jump into career rat race, but even then you are 1 severe illness/accident away from financial ruin.
Apart form the last point about good area. Depends on what is good for you. If its good for everybody, its unreasonable to expect that it can be available to many. That's unrealistic... anywhere
Daniel Kahneman argues that people optimize for satisfaction over happiness. If we had UBI many parents would choose to spend extra time with their children instead of friends. That may not make them happier.
https://qz.com/1503207/a-nobel-prize-winning-psychologist-de...
It feels a bit like the supply of housing and the supply of debt are both manipulated to make sure people work as hard as possible but without revolting. Living free and clear of debt is extremely hard; the places you can build a home without restriction are generally not near decent jobs, and the places near decent jobs make it more or less illegal to build homes (and those you are allowed to build have to meet labrynthine requirements about outdoor space, parking, density, etc. - certainly the sorts of homes normal people could afford to build with the cash they have aren't allowed in the major metros).
Of course, those who already own homes have a strong incentive to preserve the housing cartel, as it increases the value of their asset (which they can then sell when they retire and move somewhere cheap with no jobs)
So far as I can tell the best path out is remote work and a low cost of living area, but that's open to rather few people and I have a suspicion wages will drop as more people gravitate towards this option and there's more competition.
Not to mention that we explicitly encourage young people to throw away 4 years of their life _and_ take on massive debt before starting. I'm not sure a degree, a pile of debt, and 4 years of opportunity cost are worth more than your wits and a clean slate.
In any case, property prices in high CoL locations is mainly the cost of the land. I've visited homes in the midwest nicer than almost anything I ever saw in the Bay Area that cost 200-300k.
When you buy a house here it’s more like you’re buying a $900,000 piece of land and getting a free house in the deal. Those houses are practically worthless and a lot of new buyers tear them down and build a new one.
I’d guess that doing that costs a few hundred thousand. But most of the time I see that, the new houses are way better quality. If you wanted to bare minimum meet code, it’d probably still be cheaper to build a new house than to refit the old one.
And land you can build on is expensive because it's scarce, because people vote to make building anything illegal (except places that are already in decline and need residents)
My house is a death trap, for that matter, but it's thatched..
I have to agree, it isn't.
College these days are a business like any other. Its almost more valuable to toss someone into the deep end to learn to think on their own feet rather than have them come out of a college with 4 years of 'experience' thinking they know anything about how life/business/money works. Going to college to get a certification (i.e. law, medicine) might potentially be worth it but I know people who have left those industries as well.
What I think is more unbelievable is that all degrees are 4 year highly structured degrees, which is simply not the case for every job out there. Looking back it all seems so ludicrous, the whole process of being educated in that system. Even video games today are more realistic than this.
Recently, I asked at a new job that I was about to start if I can work 4 days per week instead of 5. Now they're doubting to even hire me. Screw this. Contracts don't make sense, they claim you trade time for money, but that's a lie, otherwise I could work 20% less than what's normal.
When I did enjoy life, I was at university.
I didn't have those concerns and I studied whatever I felt like. I enjoyed life then. Also when I'm on vacation and know that I can take a break from worrying, then I also can enjoy life, or maybe it's simply that hiking with good friends is amazing.
It's easy to enjoy life given unconstrained resources. Unfortunately, I see that we're mostly resource starved. Rent? That's about a 2 week paycheck (otherwise 3).
With that said, it beats dying because you don't have access to medicine. It beats a lot of things that medieval people used to do. It's better.
But it still sucks.
It often feels like the way companies/teams/tasks are structured causes employees to waste time or be a lot less productive than they could be. But it turns out that, for companies to scale beyond a certain size, the winning recipe is (depressingly):
* Fungible employees are more important than productive employees. It's incredibly risky to rely on the specialized abilities or knowledge of any single employee. Keep your bus factor high. * It's OK if your employees are kept "idling" most of the time, as long as they're available when you actually need them. In most white collar industries, demand for labor is extremely bursty.
This is one reason companies are so reluctant to adopt irregular work schedules. It works fine for (small) companies that are OK with relying on competence/specialization and accepting small bus factors, but it breaks the strategies larger companies use to scale.
That's the core message of Slack. Do not operate at peak efficiency, it will hurt you when you can least afford to be hurt.
Don't mistake effort for value. An employee who is grinding 24/7 isn't necessarily more productive than one who is doing only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
This isn't the dimension of productivity I'm talking about. I would be 10x more productive if I didn't have to do code review, didn't have to coordinate with other people when they wanted to use my systems (or vice versa), etc. However, I acknowledge that, in practice, this would actually be bad for my employer. It's better (for them) if I operate at 10% productivity and it won't be catastrophic if/when I leave.
That's just true. And the risk goes both ways. There's an ideology in administration, let's call it "anti-Deming" since I guess it's the most descriptive, that believes that risks only go one way.
The funny thing is that for minimizing their bets on individual contributors that are plentyful enough to hedge each other they automatically go and maximize their bets on management, focusing on a single person's skill to solve anything.
* Most of us have no clue what enjoyment means.
* We are living in a world where others define our purpose and meaning of enjoyment.
I honestly feel that the majority of people in Western countries don't know day to day happiness.
i don't necessarily believe that people down there are happier on average, because i know that many are not. but, i have noticed that latin americans seem to have the latitude to take more joy and passion in their daily lives. and i think that if the two can be separated, people are more content on average there than they are here.
not everything is a business transaction, and it isn't necessarily desirable for someone to be spending their time clawing their way through the world. there's less of a culture of marketing/advertising creating new problems for people and offering products to solve them, too.
[1]https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
I've never been to India, though the Northern regions are high on my list of must-visits!
C.W. Mills
One of the few times I found to be "in the moment" was on a substance(m) which I'm not saying that's the only way. My point in this comment is, this is the time when I'm not in my "auto-pilot tasks in mind" mode everyday where I forget I'm sitting on a chair/inside a box most of my day.
Other similar feelings being in nature, looking at things closely like the color of leaves. Watching a stream of water flow or something.
I think that sentiment of "something you enjoyed sticks to you/makes time seem longer/remember it more" vs. repetitive tasks that are joined together later forget.
My personal goal is freedom because I'm always afraid of "what if I lose my job" and "I have to get up at this hour". I can't just be like "today I'm just gonna go do this randomly because it peaked my interest". I think I will be a homesteader with a garage producing videos of whatever stuff I build.
But for now... gotta pay my debts/work. FiRe will get there as I don't need much.
And I don't know at the end of the day the clock ticks, time is running down... what matters to you?
Yeah I don't do the stuff anymore because it does not go with my brain(paranoia/feeds into delusion). I also can't logically function(write code). But yeah I'm going to try and do that more often, like stop and look around me, count items or something.
To each their own. For me, the culture reinforced a sort of blind dedication to a company or a cause. Everyone you would meet or talk to would want to talk tech or entrepreneurship. You could tell they were comparing themselves with you or trying to figure out a way to collaborate. Everything was about work. If you weren't hustling, someone else would out hustle you.
I missed a balance in life. Visiting with friends, family, hiking, talking, enjoying the weather. In the bay, even when I did take a break and venture out to enjoy life, it felt like the world was barren. In comparison to other places I've lived, the food, the culture, art, and life were just bland outside of work. It's just a reflection of the priorities of the people living and working there.
The other thing is, what better way to get return on your business investment. It's obvious that if you cultivate a culture of competitiveness, combined with dangling the carrot of prestige from working at a place that would unlikely become a unicorn, combined with scarcity of resources (expensive housing, high cost of living), you get people burning more of their precious time for the benefit of founders and investors. It's an excellent situation if you are a founder or investor. Aside from experience and skills gained, it's a tough situation if you are an individual contributor.
The Bay Area definitely has some problems - but a lot of your complaints are untethered from reality.
Yes. The Bay Area has an awful restaurant scene - overpriced and not very good (unless you're talking about $$$ places). It's just one disappointment after another. The high cost of living precludes any of the quality workers from being employed at moderate-cost eateries.
But I don't blame them. There's no way they could afford to live within what you or I would call a reasonable commute. So they would trek daily to provide for people making orders of magnitude more money.
And the ones who were wiling to accept that kind of torture, were the ones who couldn't get jobs anywhere else more reasonable.
There is plenty of hiking and skiing nearby but the point I was trying to make is that it was tough to break away both from work and from people who loved to talk about work.
The same pattern holds for cultural activities and the outdoors; SF has the same things over and over again, while the Bay Area as a whole has an abundance of options to fill your life with. I have also found that many people who move to San Francisco spend 99%+ of their time in SF.
I do agree with your sentiments about what a large amount of people in the Bay Area want to spend their time thinking and talking about. I stopped going to parties years ago after I couldn’t find a conversation that wasn’t about how this dude worked at Apple.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
While the man and his actions were reprehensible, his manifesto was lucid and insightful and, in my opinion, correctly diagnoses many of modern society's ails.
>In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. [...] Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction [...]
>For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs autonomously but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.
> 61. [...] There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually, in lower- to middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it.
It's a very readable and interesting essay indeed. Sadly it seems it criticizes too much both left and right wings for people to recommend it in certain circles, or avoid it altogether saying the guy was a terrorist, with yet another example of the noncentral fallacy.
Ted did go off to live in the woods, the ancient natural environment, so I shouldn't be surprised.
The changes we need aren't that big, we just need to advocate for them.
[Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change] https://ecology.iww.org/PDF/misc/climate-change-workshare-20...
Great, how do we do that without reducing output? If the share of society that supports all of it cuts their hours in half, their personal situation will certainly improve. But a lot of people will go hungry.
Will they? Honest question. How much of the labor share is human versus automation in 2020?
The real issues with scalability are things like medical care and other higher skilled labor - not just because of task switching inefficiencies but because any proportional hour reduction means increased demand - assuming that the hours worked are useful.
Less skilled labor is more or less commoditized and would be easier to spread the burden around and would likely show a boost instead of a decline in productivity (although involving say 10 people working 4 hour shifts instead of 5 working 8 hour shifts).
Regardless of stance on what we should do a massive societal lifestyle shift would neither be easy nor well received.
You don't need to play the game, but being inside the game also provides security. Humans are very social, the odd outlier that prefers his own company and is happy to trade comfort and safety for simplicity and freedom really is an exception.
What we have got though is an onslaught of marketing encouraging us to thing of a vehicle as part of our identity and status. New tail fins making us think our current model is obsolete. Advertising implying that we aren't a good parent if we don't have a new German car. Product placement telling us suave British spies all drive Aston Martins.
The car market is the furthest thing from utility.
If everyone cut their hours in half the only thing that would happen is growth would slow a little bit and billionaires would make a little less money. If people are going hungry, that's not a problem of productivity. There is more than enough money in most Western countries to make sure that doesn't happen. The only problem is how that money is distributed.
I'm not talking about distribution of profits, I'm talking about raw output.
Sure. But not everyone wants the same, and central planning has proven that it's even more inefficient and wasteful than the capitalist free market system with its insane shoe-storage-system-stores and shoe-storage-systems-insurance-salespeople.
Consider the fashion industry, to take a somewhat arbitrary example. I don't mean the clothing industry -- most of us would agree we need clothing -- but the fashion industry, which exists not to clothe us but to convince us to constantly buy new and different clothing, because otherwise we won't be seen as "cool" or "fashionable" or "successful" enough.
And it's not the only such case.
Also there is the whole essential vs non-essential work debate.
Don't think it's such a black and white picture, there are many variables to consider, probably way too many for a human brain to comprehend.
No electrical light? Not working the night.
No subway? No work if there is snow.
No internet? No remote work.
etc
Snow - subway = no work? Hardly. In the suburbs, people drove, in the cities people walked.
As for the suburbs and people walking etc...mostly agree.
But surely you'd agree that the onset of the internet has extended most people's working hours in a significant way.
What's the < year 2000 equivalent of receiving/responding to a work email at 10pm?
Your horse running away or the wolf jumping into your sheep pen among others.
Humans have never had a dearth of interruptions.
What's sad is, today, most of those interruptions are completely ignorable (no one has a sheep pen thats not well protected and monitored) - yet, we treat that work email at 10pm with the same urgency as one.
Atleast back then, it was your sheep pen.
On a more serious note, their land really applies to the rich could tax you. They didn't care about taking care of the land - the only reason why they owned it is to tax it.
Nothing's changed for the better on that front.
It is easy on these forums to imagine that everyone is working in a similar environment.
> What % of the workforce was still agrarian in the late 19th century?
They worked pretty hard, too. In Virgil's Georgic I, there occur the lines "toil conquered all,/Remorseless toil, and poverty's shrewd push/In times of hardship." Things hadn't changed much until the 19th Century.
Steel wasn't particularly an outlier compared to other industrial workplaces. Everything ran around the clock in shifts and shifts were longer with less breaks because low-training factory work tends to gravitate toward conditions that are the minimum of what is legal while still attracting sufficient quality labor. Farmers worked longer and harder before everyone and their brother had plenty of mechanized horsepower at their disposal. All the stuff you have to do to maintain the horse/oxen that you use for work gets tacked on the beginning and end of your workday.
Pure arable farming is a little different, but harvest time would be dawn-to-dusk working for everyone.
Also, on farms, people were always working.
So yes, we are too busy... but not due to pragmatic limitations - we simply have gotten too caught up in our work.
Step 2: Volunteer your time towards creating reality from a shared dream.
I know nobody has time. I know the people are weird. I know it's awkward and you're self conscious. But you'll have to trust an internet stranger here: it's worth it.
Make something with others. Don't sit around talking about your opinions, that's not society. Working together towards a common goal is society.
> You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on,” supposedly said Heraclitus. Time is like a river. If you’re too busy to enjoy life—too busy to spend time with friends and family, too busy to learn how to paint or play the guitar, too busy to go on that hike, too busy to cook something nice for yourself—these moments will be gone, and you will never get that time back
> Being busy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way to avoid just—being. Having responsibilities, deadlines, a long task list… Overloading our senses can make us believe we are moving in the right direction, or a list in a direction. But the constant cycle of tasks we tackle without ever thinking often leaves us stagnant
Having grown up in a "developing" country (India) with its high mortality and having suffered the emotional trauma of losing family members, friends and coworkers, unexpectedly , gives a perspective about life.
Having been battered to near death for starting small businesses that threatened established ones in the state I grew up in, gives a perspective about life.
Having been put at gun point, shackled to a post in a kneeling position by the mafia of another state I moved to, to start businesses, away from my home state (where they knew who my family was and could kill them), gives a perspective about life.
And that perspective is - there is abisolutely NOTHING like family and friends. No, not the fake ones. The real ones who open up their own homes, in the face of danger when you're battered, bleeding, destitute and broken.
Which is why, when I moved to the U.S., the obsession with "start up" success at the expense of anything else was/is extremely fascinating!
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
The work life "balance" in the U.S. is incredibly messed up - like real bad.
The assumption most people make is "Let's work real hard while we are young so we have all the money we need when we are older. We will have fun then".
So right out of college, with six figures in debt, people are working 40+ hours/week (typically 60+ hours/week), working weekends without blinking an eye.
Everyone's doing it, it's the norm, so what's wrong with doing what everyone is doing.
No one has time to make meaningful relationships.
Most people spend less than 3 years at a job, so what's the point anyways. You can't get a good salary hike without quitting your existing and joining a new company.
That model bleeds into one's personal life as well - people are so busy working hard that they miss the opportunities to build a meaningful relationship with their spouse and children.
Guilt sets in so the spouse and children get showered with expensive gifts and vacations but they have nothing much to talk about during those vacations either so they spend most of their time visiting random places, taking tons of photos, posting them on social and handling the barrage of comments they get for those photos, which again steals time from whatever chance was left of having a private conversation.
The emptiness does not resolve though - and when it gets intolerable the spouses file for divorce.
Maybe it will work out with someone else.
Once they retire - they have two big problems:
1. yes, they do have money, but don't know what to do with it
2. they also don't know what to do with the free hours they now have available!
To address #1, they hand over their money to fund managers who proceed to loose all or most of that money because they are sure they can beat the market.
In the meantime, they have been so frigging busy most of their adult life with the one thing they did for their employers that they did not develop social skills (outside the fake "professional" facade) or general skills that they can use to improve their own lives outside the work context - and everyone's so fake that it gets down under your skin because deep inside you can feel the fakeness so you hesitate to make more social ties.
Now, with the money depleted and being bored out of their minds, what's the next step?
So yes, it does feel to me that here in the U.S., being busy is a defense mechanism - because it's a good excuse for procrastinating on what really matters.
I'm glad you are still alive and in a country where you can do business freely.
None of my coworkers who did a standard job faced these specific issues although a few business partners did.
I refused to pay bribes or strike "deals" with established businesses and that's business 101 in India.
I also dont respond well to threats or attempts at restricting my freedom without good cause.
Most Indians don't take the path I chose to take in life and didnt get exposed to the same things but the random death is still a thing (although the type that hangs out here on HN arn't aware of how many die in freak train/car/electricity/machete accidents because they themselves lead a very posh life isolated from reality.)
I am told things have changed for the better over the last two decades.
I really hesitate to find out and confirm though.
My experience is quite the opposite. The vacations you described is how we vactioned in India :). Vacations here in USA are insane fun by comparision. For example, we go on ski vacations multiple times in the winter, its not too expensive because we buy ikon pass. Kids are now very decent skiers and get better every year. We have tons of fun challenging ourselves on moguls, going into trees that kids love, hiking up a little to find powder stashes. We do take similar vacations in summer when there is even more to do. I had no idea you could actually have so much fun in vacations until i visited USA, i used to think of them as "something for kids and family".
Options in india are very limited, I used to love going to ancient temples but kids aren't into it that much.
You're not wrong about the compulsive over working of the population. It's rarely optional in the tech industry (and many others but I haven't experienced those, only heard tale) if you want to participate. This ignores a lot of research about maximizing total output but it often serves the emotional needs of some people for status.
Assuming you're not a fool with your money, what you do with it is turn around and help make the world around yourself even better. If you're smart/wise you find efficient ways to do this. Consider looking into efficient altruism, or even better, doing that but also creating a system (i.e business/organization/et cetera) that lifts more people into better circumstances and gives them some slack and support to be more efficient and wise.
I tend to agree. Saying “I am so busy” is the socially acceptable excuse for a lot of things.
That said, people are not helpless.
They can just think things through and come to this exact conclusion.
In theory, I was studying, and working on building a few things, but I never did much of either. I rented a spot in an old warehouse in the countryside for $100 a month and decided to build myself a sort of tiny home inside there. It started out rough; I won't forget freezing on the concrete floor those first few nights, wrapped in one of those foil survival blankets.
The winter left quickly, and with it the last of my ambitions. I'd do a bit of work, here and there, but doing nothing was my primary occupation. I would lay in fields and watch horses in the distance, I would sit on the side of a stream and rest my feet in it. One of my favorite activities was to bike to the nearest town about a half hour away and buy ice cream, lying in the grass and tearing into it like a child.
Biking was always great fun. I would bike with no purpose, simply being free. There is no greater feeling than cruising the countryside with the wind in your hair and absolutely no idea of where you will go that day.
Occasionally a horse would match me for the length of its pasture. I got the feeling that the horses dreamed of my bike as a child dreams of wings.
Things always seemed to just work out. When my bike gave out, the friendly locals were happy enough to give me rides until I fixed it with some rope I found. When the seasons again changed and my tiny home grew colder I was offered a free room in a lovely old farmhouse.
But as the snow returned so did my ambitions. I planned to finish months of work in days, then grew frustrated when I didn't. I grew crazier and crazier and at the end neglected all reason. Eventually, I accepted the advice of a local and decided to move to the city, get an apartment, and find work as a programmer. I did all of these quickly. The apartment lasted; the job did not. After so long doing nothing, I found myself nearly unable to work, paralyzed.
The next year I continued to do nothing. I had a flash of ambition, but it was quickly interrupted by falling in love early in the year: a beautiful girl far, far out of my league. We fled our responsibilities to the south of France. Perhaps the best single week of my life was there with her doing nothing: lying in the sun, swimming naked in the sea, smoking a joint on the windowsill, watching the boats go by.
We spent a wonderful year together, but the winter came as it did before to drive ambition: this time not mine but hers. We separated.
Now I find myself a normal programmer. Like most people here, I do an awful lot of something and get paid well for it. But you can bet that once I've stashed up enough of those paychecks my schedule will have a lot more nothing on it.
I’d argue the answers to these questions are all “yes”, but alas, I have no scientific data to back my claim, purely anecdotes.
If one is not struggling for basic needs, the current global situation truly shines a light on which “time sucks” in your life are/were/will be actually worth the effort and time moving forward (once past this health crisis). From personal experience, I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for my relationships with my family, following the passing of several individuals whom I’ve known for 20+ years.
Are we enjoying life too much to be busy?
(Before this is taken as general anti-drug hate, plz check username -- I'm pointing out what I see as a weird set of seemingly hypocritical priorities in a time of pandemic, not telling you that you can never have your delicious soma.)
Essential is a very task focused state in other words - trying to draw generic wisdom from it without reference to the new task or situation is a mistake.
Edit: just to clarify, when I say "valid" above I mean "the reason these decisions were made" -- my use of this term was not meant to suggest that the reasons given would be a clever basis for policy. Alcohol withdrawal would be a real problem. While I don't support making either drug discussed illegal, I generally think weed is less of a detriment to society, yet in the context of discussing "essential" services during a pandemic access to weed seems less essential than staving off the life threatening withdrawal symptoms of alcohol.
Anecdotal but many people in my family don't have jobs and are still too busy to spend time with their parents, siblings, etc. who would love to support them.
https://www.resources.soundstrue.com/podcast/dr-lise-van-sus...
The talk appproaches how to mediate and fundamentally resolve this experience (it's partly support of a book that was just released, I am in the process of reading it - I feel this is going to be really helpful context for many people).
The quarantine has put it in perspective for me, I'm able to exercise more and enjoy life since I don't have a 1-hour commute each way to work.
You are only meant to aspire enjoyment at the end of a never ending path of conspicuous consumption.
if robots could do everything for humans we'd probably play the most realistic VR video games while high with all our time
suffering and scarcity is actually a requirement for enjoyment imo
I don't believe that suffering is a requirement for enjoyment. Some level of discomfort when you're not having fun, yes - something that pushes you to descent the gradient. An occasional pain even, maybe. But not suffering.
Most people, in my experience, have to struggle to enjoy life. They spend most of their time working a job they don't really like, come home too tired to do anything meaningful, have weekends where they can't decide between doing something or relaxing, and binge on food and alcohol and teevee to feel like they're alive.
While I'm fortunate in that I naturally enjoy software engineering, there's a lot about the job of being a software engineer that is lacking. I think a lot of programmers would say the same, but because everyone wants to keep their job, they repress their disappointment. People become demoralized with their jobs when company ideals turn out to be lies, leaders lack appreciation for their talent, standards decline, and more and more work is asked of them for the same pay as time goes on. Sure, we can be promoted by changing companies, but that also can come at a huge cost unless you live in Silicon Valley, perhaps. All these things wear on people, encroach on their personal time, and makes them feel trapped. I'm not just talking about the profession of programming. There's lots of alienation happening that's preventing people from enjoying their lives to its fullest. (alienation is probably one of the only theories of marxism that I think are correct)
Maybe we'll learn a lesson from being locked down. I'm not optimistic, but it would be ideal. By now, maybe a lot of people will figure out that they don't have the kind of job security they thought they did, and that sacrificing so much of themselves wasn't really worth it for what they were gaining. Perhaps more people will realize that they don't necessarily need the next promotion, or they will choose to follow their passion because, well, even if they have a high falootin' corporate job, they could lose what they've got anyway, so they might as well do what they enjoy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio...
Americans also tend to work more hours than their European counterparts. So to me, the idea that we are too busy to enjoy life is categorically FALSE. We have more leisure time now than we ever did at any point in history.
Work demands one’s most productive hours, focused concentration, concentrated decision making, bodily stress etc. There is little left for the remaining leisure time to do anything meaningful.
It is also not true that we have more leisure time than any point in history. Academic consensus is that hunter gatherers worked about 2.5 days a week for example. And this was non-alienating work you did with your family and friends (i.e. tribe), outdoors. Compare that to hiking, hunting, fishing, frisbeeing etc we do for recreation nowadays.
There are also tons of other externalities embedded to this. We often forget the cost of working. For example living in a city to be close to a job brings a lot of externalities that you don’t get paid for; you need to commute to work, but also commute to any leisure activity that is not in or near your house. In bay area you can’t visit a friend that is 30 minutes away in nominal distance after work because that would be a real 1.30 hour commute during rush hour. The urban design of a city is more likely to be centered around economic activity than facilitating quality leisure time. Even if it once was, economic activity on it changes over time, along with the population, and the utility decreases drastically.
Another externality is your house. If you are crammed in an apartment, your leisure choices are restricted as well. Someone with a garage or a backyard can take up gardening, woodworking, playing the drums etc without paying a commute cost. The apartment dweller? Well, thankfully TV’s are flat and trick some part of our brains that we are elsewhere with other people so that we ignore the reality of where we physically are.
Final externality is other people. If you want to engage in meaning relationships, it doesn’t suffice that you want that and weather the cost of commute, low energy after work etc. The other people also needs to want those. That makes it combinatorially difficult for a group of people to gather for a meaningful leisure time shared. Oh also assuming working hours coincide, the other guy is not running for promo and doing overtime etc. It is a game theoretic mess.
Also TV is one of the few things you can do while also doing other things, like I had it on while I was cooking and doing the dishes and eating dinner yesterday, after I finished working at 6:30pm, and was finally done with everything at 9:30pm, just in time to do 20 minutes of saving interesting articles about the pandemic, and then passing out.
I'm doing the pandemic article collection, in case people are curious, for multiple reasons. So I can look back and reflect on how it developed later (or show future children), and maybe use it as inspiration for future game designs or short stories I might develop in the future, since I'll likely forget most of the more unusual stories or side effects of the pandemic eventually.