Work/life balance should be difficult
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Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before.
The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
For some of those other companies, a TPS report is required.
I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative violence, hunger, boredom, etc.) Of course it can be improved, and there are some real problems, particularly around wealth inequality. But I can't help but think that we're doing pretty damn good.
It's not "modern work" but work-the-social-institution. Which is the primary definition of "work."
What they don't mean is productive activity. Every productive activity that takes place within the social institution of work also takes place outside of that social institution. For example, farming, building construction, cooking, cleaning, education -- all of these take place both inside and outside of work.
Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.
What I'm saying is Maslow's scale is tipped upside down with an overabundance of leisure and scarcity of high quality basic fulfillment. There's so much entertainment, that we can afford for a few markets to crash and disappear, hence why I called them "made-up".
I think you've got cause and effect reversed. It's our exceptional progress on basic fulfillment that has enabled our economy to support these so-called "made-up" jobs.
That’s just what it takes to live, we forget that because of how far removed we are from actual survival. But take away modern society, and the world is much harsher and much less fulfilling.
Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend two or three weeks idling most of the time, but after that I need something to direct my energy and concentration toward. I need a goal that stretches my abilities, or I find myself constantly battling a depressive spiral.
What people need is to be able to channel their energy into something productive, whether it be learning, hobbies, helping others in a meaningful way, or maybe some sort of self-improvement in terms of health.
I suppose you could put all of that under the vague umbrella of "work", but for the purpose of having a conversation that's not arguing about semantics, work is what most people do to generate an income to support their life goals and activities.
> Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
I've also gone through a few such periods, in between jobs. Best time of my life. Even though I didn't accomplish a whole lot during it that you could put on paper and call work. Learned a few things, improved friendships, and did a little room remodel.
If your passion is painting, and its something you would do for free, then fulfilling your artistic potential is still work. It still requires hours upon hours of deliberate practice. The great masters would spend years working on a single painting. You don't think there would be times when they just didn't feel like making progress? Where they wanted to just take the day off and hang out at a bar with their friends?
Part of the human condition is struggle, imo. That's what I think the OP is getting at when he says that human beings need work. Maybe not a 9-5, but we all need something worth staving off instant gratification for.
Some people still consider tasks they enjoy doing a form of "work". Work doesn't have to be compensated activities engaged in out of a desperate need to provide basic necessities.
Just different people using the same word to mean different things.
Would your abilities feel stretched by being a cashier? How about a janitor? Waiter?
These jobs are what "work" actually is for most people. I think most people could go without doing those things.
Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work (and for most people those things and "work" are hardly related at all). Therefore, saying we (as humans) "need" work is generally incorrect (at least for the reasons you stated) since most people don't even get what you say we "need" from work anyway.
Just different definitions of "work". I think the sense meant by those saying people "need work" is "meaningful toil". Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
So cashier, janitor, waiter would fit that broad definition, even though they are not a focus of intellectual life. But there can be other types of work that also fulfill intellectual needs, that might be more fulfilling for many (most? all?) people.
I'm going to disagree on this simplification. There is a common definition of work, e.g. the definition used in the context of work/life balance (i.e. the context of the original article), that is widely used; redefining it to be as broad as you've described is detrimental to the conversation.
> Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
Essentially everything can be made to fit this definition, making it, I think, not very useful.
The author literally said "We need food. We need shelter." right after saying we need work.
I meaningfully toiled over a 3D print of a twisted hexagonal mesh over a tube around a 5,4 torus knot yesterday. Guess how much it helped me pay rent.
Your reply is entirely reasonable but it seems the gp already covered what you wrote and anticipated it in his disclaimer: ">It needn’t be employment,[...]"
He just happened to use the imprecise label "work" -- which is so tainted and overloaded that one can't re-use that word to also describe "non-employment intellectual activity" because it inadvertently tricks people into talking past each other.
(E.g. Notice that you used "work" as synonym for "employment" but the gp did not.)
With that in mind, I'll just agree with your analysis, redefining "work" to include "non-employment" is detrimental to the conversation. When people discuss work/life balance (i.e. in the original article), they are (almost universally) not talking about balancing intellectually stimulating hobbies and the rest of life. We are, from the onset, talking about jobs, i.e. employment.
Additionally, I think my original comment is still useful when discussing the more common definition of work.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all... but I do that kind of interesting. I like to think that if I had unlimited free time, there's no way I'd ever be bored, I have so many things that I love doing... No way I'd give up 20 hours of my week just to go work as a cashier when I don't need to.
That said... things might change when I get older.
First, as I said in my comment, the man in your example is likely not working in order to "stretch [his] abilities" as was the context of my comment...
Second, I'm not sure that doing something out of boredom is equivalent to a "need," regardless of how one might describe it.
Third, it seems to me that many people's only source of purpose is work (partially because they must work exhaustively to survive), so, when the need or ability to work is removed, they have nothing else; the idea that "work" is either a necessity or a noble pursuit in of itself only serves to reinforce this outlook and the resulting behavior (i.e. deriving all purpose from work).
I don't want to push too hard, but it should be somewhat self-evident who might benefit from a culture that perpetuates a myth of work as necessity.
Or: having a public-facing job is something to do that also served as a social outlet for him (especially if it's related to his hobbies) that was free (how many social activities (the kind where you meet people, not the kind where you spend time with folks you already know) are free these days?).
Every time I go to a nursery I think about how much fun it would be to "work" there, if I didn't have to consider the pay, because I love plants and talking about plants and making chit-chat with strangers.
Sure but that is taking a short break from your job/career. Its not like leaving school and never working.
"It is difficult for a man who always has a full stomach to put his mind to some use. Are there not players of liubo and go? Even playing these games is better than being idle." -- Confucious
Intellectual life and work are completely orthogonal.
People have been taught to confuse them because it benefits the ruling class.
Alas, alas, work has been co-opted to mean employment in most people's minds.
There's learning, there's helping, there's contributing, there are a million things that aren't idling and require effort, but net you with no money.
So they don't count as "work".
Rather, I think that this post is about balance, and about being emotionally present. He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care. The only way to avoid the struggle is to cease caring, and that means you push something out of your mind that you really should be paying attention to because it's uncomfortable.
I've got plenty of stories about a dad who went the other way - full time househusband, gave up his career entirely soon after my sister and I were born - but they're a bit too personal to share on HN. It's not all roses and sunshine on that side either, though.
Yay, survival should be a struggle, because it shows you care (about increasing the ROI for the shareholders you'll never see)!
"We need work" is justified by "we need shelter and food".
The only thing a constant struggle shows is that you don't have the freedom to choose how you spend your life.
What people need is a vocation, a calling, fulfilment from creativity or helping other people out. The things that we call hobbies, that is (and people who enjoy them - amateurs).
Work is an exchange of about half of your waking hours for the privilege of not dying in this society (because as far as food and shelter go, yes, we actually do need them, as well as healthcare, education, transportation, etc).
The only way to avoid struggle is to be rich - and that's because the rich had set it up that way.
Van Gogh never even had a career to give up, and his struggles weren't because it was hard for him to divide his attention.
You complete with others to stretch yourself.
People that build huge businesses keep push and building for more. Many like the money but are more motivated by the Vision of what they're building.
There is something built into us that wants to strive that wants to work.
Hobbies don't satisfy the same need. Hobbies are self directed and motivated. You don't get the same sense of achievement.
That said grinding 40 hours a week as a process worker is life sucking. That is not a good long term way of being. You need a hope of moving up to make that worth it.
Ummm, no? Not really? You think "the rich" could just magically end the need for work if they chose?
We live in an age of abundance relative to the past, but not to the point where we don't have to struggle for our existence, at least somewhat.
(Though to be clear, I am personally incredibly well placed in this society, and though I have to work, my profession is way easier than many other people's and my compensation far greater, as is true of many people on this forum)
We struggle for _inclusion_ in the institutions that allow is to consume from this fountain of wealth. Production is reliable, but inclusion is always precarious.
The "we" that doesn't have to pay rent?
The "we" for whom food is free?
The "we" whose student loans were paid off by someone?
The "we" that doesn't know that being homeless is, essentially, illegal?
The "we" that doesn't realize that there is no alternative to inclusion in the system of institutions?
Seriously, what do you think "exclusion" here is. The only way out is 6 feet under, otherwise you are still a part of the system, and the "struggle" is an inherent part of it.
This is where the socialists and libertarians agree, by the way. Except the Libertarians imagine there's a way to be sort of outside the system (while, somehow, still getting the benefits), and the Socialists aim to improve the system instead. Regardless, either would agree that the struggle of existing within the system is an artificial, and purposeful effect of the way the system was structured.
> Seriously, what do you think "exclusion" here is.
Exclusion from any of the social institutions of income distribution. Whether private or state. Whether a job, a government pension, an unemployment check, or a dividend from a private fund.
> The only way out is 6 feet under, otherwise you are still a part of the system
The system is a system of exclusions (or a hierarchy of exclusivity) used to enforce rules against or create incentives for the included. Prison is a kind of exclusion, and so is unemployment.
Yes[1]. And it's not that I think so, it's that the likes of Bertrand Russel have observed it to be the case[2] back in the 50s.
If you think it's impossible to ensure that every citizen has access to food, shelter, education, transportation, and healthcare regardless of their employment status, you seriously underestimate how everything we do is struggling to fight over crumbles.
Of course it's possible. Most people will choose to work, still. Right now, it's not a choice.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
[2]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Something I believe, but can't really prove is that this is completely wrong and there's very little about the need for "work" that's socially determined. We are biological creatures that evolved under very specific circumstances. And "work" in the most basic sense is a big part of that. We need to be struggling to feed ourselves (or simulating it) -- every day. Most of us wither and die when that need is removed.
Most (I avoid saying all, because I'm not that smart) animals, when not surviving (finding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex) are super idle. It's energetically expensive to work, and, so far as I can tell, nothing has evolved to be energetically stressed.
If we're throwing around words like "evolution" we need to understand that we're talking about genetic survival (passing genes on through generations). The state of "struggling to feed ourselves" is directly antithetical to the goal of having sex. At best you could argue that the hypothesis that peacocks attract mates with their flamboyant tail feathers suggests that they've survived to maturity as intact as they are because of their good genes (survival in spite of being an easy, colorful target for predators), but that's a stretch.
"[F]inding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex" is the work I'm talking about. So, yes, animals are either working or they're "super idle." There's no third mode where they're, like, finding their true selves. They're either working or they're asleep.
I'd love to hear a different argument.
It didn't always use to be that way, and it doesn't have to. That we have physical needs is a fact. That we have alienated work from life, or family, or expressing ourselves is not. That work created an absentee father is not in the laws of physics, obviously, but that it's hard to perceive it as anything else is what OP pointed out, and that's something worth paying attention to.
The idea that you have to 'move work around' (kind of sounds like moving garbage around) wouldn't make sense to a person who is able to express themselves in their work. Ask a craftsman for example, an artist, or someone on a family farm.
The fact that people are detached from their work, that they're objects of their work, that their work dehumanizes them in extreme cases, that is a result of a particular mode of production we are living under. Someone for whom their work is an extension of their life, who are not detached from the products of their work, and for whom work strengthens their social relations, there is no work-life balance, because there is no work-life conflict.
When I go over to the printmaking studio, I recognize that in principle someone else might be able to grind the limestone slabs I intend to use for printing, maintain the printing press, clean up the ink, or perform any number of tasks incidental to the expressive portion.
I am just as sure that anyone on a family farm knows they can, in principle, get someone else in the family to do work, and that hired hands exist, and can take care of many tasks or unpleasant chores. They may prefer to do the work themselves, so that they get better results, or have more control or feel useful, or because they have a duty to contribute productively.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. It is essentially never entirely fun.
While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work.
Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if we believe we need it". The logic is just plain faulty.
And not in some bs "part time vs full time" but that we have enough humans on this freakin planet that you should only need to work 30 hours a week to live a healthy, balanced life.
https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/602609/cheapest-small-...
What happens is that other humans do more hours of work per household and outbid you on things that you might otherwise want. Some people are OK with that and go on to live happy lives. Others get frustrated and join the race to keep up with the others. (Which I think is a choice that people should have; I would strongly oppose taking that choice away, but the end result is that lots of people are working lots of hours to buy lots of things.)
IMO it's simply that money is a better motivator than equality. Money is tangible with easy to understand value, while equality is intangible and dubious in value, according to some.
Once you realize you can beat the guy working 20 hours a week by working 40 hours a week, you quickly find yourself optimizing for productivity over anything else. The rest of us get swept up in the current of the people that want it the most.
Is there anything you would die for?
Is there anything you fear worse than death?
Some are meanings are constructs, but some are limitations of complete communication from a single English world.
I'm not saying that we all need to work for hyper-capitalistic machines. Or even anything remotely resembling a "business". But humans need to do semi-regular things that approximate work. Whether it's something like running a farm, coding programs, or passing lessons on to the next generation—we all need something semi-recurring, with some perception of value.
I do agree that the sense of duty towards work that is stereo-typically cultivated in Silicon Valley is a social construct and not at all a universal truth. THAT we can both agree is definitely a social construct.
Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work.
At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
To me when you write “we need work” is a social fact, I read “we need jobs/full employment.”
Work to me is a term that applies to any system doing a task; input->(processing)->output.
So like you’re saying, it’s “work” in a “biological sense” to learn wine.
Inherently we need to “work” but our social idea of work is arbitrary, a lot is busy work.
Police violence, don’t let government have weapons of mass destruction to police global violence, wind down superfluous industrialism, deflate chads whose dads own dealerships and be humans.
Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future.
However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old.
It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.
People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
Not only that, but it's probably true even less often when looking at the totality of jobs everywhere.
It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.
Most tech companies I'm familiar with (and probably companies in other fields as well) seem to think they own you, body and soul, and take issue with any indications otherwise.
It's always about incentives.
1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.
2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.
3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.
If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.
Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.
His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister.
You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.
Second, people grieve in different ways. Some might engage in self-destructive behavior. Others might fall into a deep depression and have trouble getting out of bed. The father might have found comfort with the routine of work where he could pretend everything was fine. He was at least aware enough to make sure his children were care for, by passing them to the grandmother. He might find seeing his wife or child too much to bear, as they remind him too much of his daughter. There is a reason why couples often separate if a child dies. He might not have the skills to deal with his grief, might not have had help, might not know where to get help, might not have even know he needed help.
Third, there are several different ways of parenting. One of which is what you mentioned, making sure the family has modest needs so that they can live within those means, reducing the burden on the parents to have to constantly strive for ever increasing wages. There are also parents who want to provide as much as possible for their children, the healthiest foods, the best medical care, exposure to many ideas and activities and cultures, which necessitates a tradeoff between effort put into work and direct time with family. It might be easy to agree that the extremes of the spectrum are poor choices, but harder to say where along the middle of the spectrum is the optimum. Which is the main point of the article, whether you agree or not.
then the author's father should have figured it out. i don't have a lot of sympathy for people in problem solving fields that, for the life of them, somehow can't solve for family. You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. Just like everything else.
Of course even flawed people deserve some level of empathy, but there's a difference between empathy and immunity from responsibility or criticism.
Going a little beyond the case of the article, for something like interpersonal relationships, there are as many methods as there are practitioners, many of them diametrically opposed to each other. What's considered best varies by culture, by demographics, fades in and out like fashion, works for some personalities and relationships and not others, might be harmful in ways not currently understood. It's not like math where there are empirically correct answers that can be logically proven. Certainly one can do what one considers best based on the current situation and general consensus, but I don't think it would be surprising if some people find that their best intentions are considered strange or unacceptable some time down the road, as society changes.
Getting back to the article, the author did not mention whether they talked to the father about their needs and wants. It is possible that the father thought he was solving for family quite adequately. We don't have both sides of the story.
Lotsa things like personalities/emotional makeup can't be learned. Different people have different personalities. Sometimes you just need to live with what you have.
Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money.
So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.
I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.
So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.
The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.
I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.
PS:
Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.
I agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life.
This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
If we assume the following premise from the article is true...
> The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame.
The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.
Indeed. If we assume "work" is doing something you wouldn't otherwise do, then absolutely, you should be asking that question. And for most people, that's likely true of almost any employment.
Significant research has gone into evaluation actual productivity. Sure people tend to go into the office for 40 hours but the amount of time where they actually work is more like 15 hours or less.
If we drop to say 30 hour weeks. How's that work/life balance going? Easy peasy.
It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice.
I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in.
I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.
As a second point, reincarnation is a common religious concept, and there could very well be another exciting life after this one (although you probably shouldn't peg any plans on that).
My parents didn't have any exciting projects either, in fact, children's lives depend on my mother who is a pediatric cardiologist in 3rd world country. Nevertheless, she came back from work and read the book with me before bed. I couldn't ask for more.
But when people pull long shifts to get the next version of the browser that makes marginal improvements instead of spending time with friends/family/doing a hobby (essentially living, not working) and take it as a medal of honor, they are missing a lot in life. People working late hours to put the food on the table and people deliberately working late and then using it as an excuse are different. If they're the latter, please don't tell that they're having hard time balancing work/life.
He also had two young children to provide for on his own. That seems to be omitted from this story.
We need action towards results.
We do not need 16 hour workdays.
But it’s quite the claim to say that work is a psychological need.
Think what work is for most people. Work for most people consists of providing surplus value to the owners of whatever organization that they work for. That is what work is in economic terms.
Where is your Maslow now?
But people like this author—although perhaps not him in particular—have to give some lip service to show fealty to the concept of Loving Work in case some potential employer or whatever other person-with-networking-potential stumbles upon his blog. (We have careers to maintain…)
Work can sometimes provide you with Esteem, Belonging and Self-actualization, but often it's a poor and unreliable mechanism to fill those.
Working on interesting things with other people you like and feeling accomplished and useful and respected in that way is great, but you can do that without it being a Job.
If I had an infinite stream of money, I'd still be working on interesting things when I need too, and it be easy enough to find those.
In my opinion the work as we've defined it today is accidental, a necessity to provide the lower things on the hierarchy like food and shelter, and in some cases can also be fulfilling and interesting, but rarely in a sustainable way and often it's not at all.
If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.
The older I get, the more I understand those people who only did enough to keep their job. I used to feel it was an ethical obligation to do my best, but I'm realizing that that is a one-sided view. The opposite argument was always "they don't treat me as well as they can" or something like that, and so they excused their own behavior... And I get it now.
I have no doubt that there are many garbage collectors who find their job rewarding... But I've also no doubt that there are many who just do it for the money, and would be just as happy (or more so) if their needs were met by society and they could concentrate on something they enjoyed instead.
FWIW, I think it's important that people do things that they feel contribute to society. But that doesn't have to be "work".
Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?
If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.
Yes, but the place you get a paycheck from doesn't have to be this kind of work, the work we need. I need a paycheck. I need work. They can come from different places. Give me my paycheck and let me spend time with family and on my true work, if not, in this market, I'll find another job that pays more.
Giving too much importance to work is stupid (IMHO) and its a highway to feeling your life was entire shit by the end of it whenever that is... I think this pandemic serves as the best example to how disposable you are to a company... Just one more replacable cog in the machine...
guy who works all the time loses some of his family, feels bad, continues to neglect the remaining family, and the son chastises him for not climbing the corporate ladder high enough. in conclusion work is a Very Important Thing
This dude, who graduated from the USC during a huge economic boom, landed a dream job at a small video game company that was about to blow up, then never had a different job since gets to decide who is a programmer or not?
You were born during an economic boom, graduated from a prestigious university with the perfect degree at EXACTLY the right time. You started out on 3rd base, why would anyone take career advice from you. If you were to re-enter the workforce today you would be down here with the rest of us, instead of lording over us with your fancy title. Have some humility.
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Nothing against Kent Beck, I rather like him and he is not being a jerk in this post, unlike the blizzard dude. But it is kind-of the same situation. A lot of us did not get in on the ground floor of the software engineering gold rush and got to become rich and (semi? kinda?)famous with our own Wikipedia article before the industry got crowded.
I'll speak for myself: I am extremely career oriented. I want to do good work and I have done well for myself. But I don't have a wikipedia article. I don't have the fancy degree to get my foot in the door. I don't have the 50 year long career that make people jump to attention when my resume slides across the desk. I don't have the mental stability to burn out my starry dynamo every night trying to make my boss more money.
Nobody cares about keeping me happy. I don't get the interesting work at my company. I take what I can get and I am a commodity level developer like 99% of everyone else on this website. I think I do high quality work but it ends there for me.
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Another aside: My parents were both workaholics. They weren't really around that much growing up, and I was always forced into band/sports/daycare/etc. because it was basically free baby-sitting and they didn't want to have to leave work to pick me up. They have even acknowledged this to me. As my mom once said: "Building your business was more fun than raising your kids."
I'm not complaining, they are nice people and did their best. Honestly, this is pretty normal and I don't think it is that big of a deal.
What IS a big deal is the lack of hobbies and interest my parents have outside of work. My dad is retiring, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He plays a lot of video poker. It is frustrating, I want him to thrive and not hang out at bars all day, but he hasn't developed any relationships and hobbies outside of his work. ( Living in a tiny town doesn't help either. )
He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored.
If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.
> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."
Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".
> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."
He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".
> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."
Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.
The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.
Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?
> "Jon’s world view, from his upbringing in the rural fields of Northeastern Thailand"
> "Jon has over 30 years experience of being an organic farmer"
That's more than "playing".
These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.
This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.
So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.
Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.
In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.
Very uninteresting counterpoint.
This modern economy is the exact religion that preaches the same gospel in the blog post: Maslow's pyramid of needs dictates that you need to work. Which is.. fine, I guess? My problem with that is that the work has become super productive in the past decades and that excess production allows only a fraction of people to stop working. Coupled with replacing the benefits of an actual community with the downgrade which is a workplace to give you that sense of belonging, self-sufficiency propaganda and employer-only provided healthcare, you get a nation of wage slaves.
We don't really need to work. I mean not all of us. A lot of the work done nowadays is bullshit [1]. The pandemic kinda showed us exactly who needs to go work to keep society going. The rest is just the result of:
- inertial protestant ethic
- wealth hoarding by the owners of production
- people tied to their workplace are easier to persuade/manage/manipulate politically
Work is good for the worker. Because humans need a purpose in life. We don't even need to experiment to see what society would be like if no one worked and a few robots produced our food. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking this would be a utopia - no, it would be a worse dystopia than you could possibly imagine.
Take away people's purpose, and you will be left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people with lots of time on their hands. Pretty clear recipe for constant depression and war.
I'll read the book before I comment on it directly.
That's unnecessarily condescending.
> Work is good for the worker.
That's some hardcore boomer logic right there..
> Because humans need a purpose in life.
Work is work and jobs are jobs. You can work without a job and you can have a purpose in life without a 9 to 5. Homemakers don't work or have no purpose in life? You're talking about a different thing here.. I was referring to what people are required to do in order to survive, eat and have shelter in modern society, not have purpose and fulfillment. Does caring for sick relatives with no pay constitute work in your view? Or is that person a slacker and a burden on society? If your purpose in life is your shitty 9 to 5 job then you kinda failed at life. I'm pretty sure the person blowing the leaves of the sidewalk doesn't stay awake at night with an existential life crisis thinking that he missed a spot.
It's the exact same narrative I always have to defend against when talking about financial independence. This is not to say people will be idle and just sit around doing nothing. People still do 'things' whether or not the things they do make money or not.
> left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people
There's that disgusting protestant work ethic again. It's really baked into the fabric of our society.. It's not your fault. Read a book or two, open your mind, I guarantee you'll recover.
You may find the options they offer to be unacceptable, but what if they didn’t exist? What options available to you if that were the case are not available to you because they do exist?
As far as I can see our current system is beneficial, if only because it allows people additional choices of how to live their lives.
The option to share resources in an egalitarian way so that people can meet their basic needs without subordination.
It doesn't need to be taken to that extreme. I find it hard to believe that the idea that work must take up all of your time, and any less means you're going to starve is this pervasive.
It is not unimaginable that we can improve things. We're constantly making improvements to efficiency, productivity, sustainability. We get more done in our time now than at any point in history. The same will be true tomorrow.
Why then, are so many still working such grueling hours?
In this country, and many others, the share of productivity gains has increasingly gone to capital rather than labor. Although I think that this is only part of it. Part of it is cultural, this ideology that work gives life meaning, and to reject it can mean losing a lot.
I'm pretty lucky myself, my job doesn't stress me out, it pays the bills and leaves me with some disposable income. A lot of people would describe me as unambitious, not driven, etc. I'd say I have it made.
Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.
If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.
When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.
It is not worth it but people do it again an again.
People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.
Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.