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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been embracing the opposite and finding success and tremendous happiness in life. I work extremely hard, constantly and at every opportunity. You’d think based on the current zeitgeist that I would be completely mentally messed up but the opposite is true. Without doing useful things with what little time I have on this planet, I feel like it is depressing and would lead me to worst mental health than staying productive.

I’ve never heard any sort of optimism from the fucking media. These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as “right-wing” which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics. These are the values my father taught me and I’d rather listen to him than to the stupid media.

YMMV.

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I assume you're young, and this is the right attitude if so. Not that it becomes "wrong" as you age, but many people cannot maintain it, through a combination of burnout, less energy, just becoming jaded, or having other interests and priorities.

I'm past middle age and hard work is no longer its own reward for me. Forget a 4-day workweek -- I work about 4 hours a day. Any more than that and it's just going through the motions, there's no additional productivity. I will still occasionally get really into something and find myself still engaged after many hours, but it's rare these days whereas it used to be common. However I do not think I would have liked this as a 25-year-old. At that age I was excited, still learning, and full of energy. A 4 hour workday would have felt like I was just getting started.

In my experience, it's that I don't want to maintain it. I've seen no real payoff.

Master's degree - worthless

Working as a tech lead and senior dev - no promotion, I'm still a midlevel

Etc

You'll only want to work hard if you're not disillusioned.

If you want a payoff for working hard, become an owner. Also, your boss will always agree with you. ;)

EDIT: "become an owner" could be a startup, a contracting firm, joining someone else as an owner, etc.

Or inherit stock ;)

Ha! Perhaps the easiest way, but you might have to wait a long time for it.

For employees this is certainly true.

>I would have liked this as a 25-year-old

I'm at this age and I turned from super eager to jaded in just a few years.

>hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics

Non-existent? They're hammered on everybody 24/7 by american work ethics and hustler culture - to the point of unhealthiness. And they are also enforced (whether you "find success" or not) at every level, with a cut-throad society and economy...

I think you should talk to your local bartender to get some perspective about how good software engineers have it. It’s hard work but I feel truly fortunate. Perspective is a hell of a thing.

>I think you should talk to your local bartender to get some perspective about how good software engineers have it.

They still have it comparative worse, work-life balance wise than software engineers in Europe, for example...

People don't generally want to be lazy. They want to feel like their effort matters. And even if you have a job that is important for society to function and improve, your efforts can be poisoned by seeing the vast majority of the value going to those at the top, or by constant verbal abuse and breakdown of your body. In lots of jobs, lots of stress comes from things that don't actually matter, but rather from minutia invented by someone else who doesn't trust you to put in effort. Hard work with tangible results is satisfying. Stressful work with poor pay and physical degradation is not.

People default to lazy as a self-protection measure after being repeatedly screwed over and not seeing their hard work pay off.

"lazy" is a moral judgement. You are talking about sound business decisions.

How does this relate to the article?

I didn't think it was against working hard. It sounded more like we should avoid distractions and context switching. Sort of mental version of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast".

I think most people can thrive in the situation you describe (extreme hard work) as long as they also feel a sense of control. I am at my peak (in productivity and "feeling alive") when 100% of my work hours demand my focus because I have that much to do. When I have a quiet period I get miserable; I can find plenty of my own ideas to work on, but they often feel either futile or wasteful - that part is my own problem. Similarly though, when I have too much to do (ie when I know that working 100% still won't get it done) I become demotivated - after all, it seems that none of these tasks are important enough to get proper scheduling, so why bother sweating over them myself?

Second point: working full-on as you describe can apply to non-employment too. The drive towards working fewer hours (for the same standard of living) is just a direct response to growing wealth inequality and general unfairness in society, not a softening or growing laziness.

I think the key phrase from your philosophy is "useful things". If you have a full plate of things that are satisfying to do, and accomplishing them brings you material benefit, there isn't really a downside to working a ton (assuming you can mentally and physically handle it, and you're not neglecting other more important stuff).

If your life is more like a skinner box, where some large percentage of the work is baloney and brings no material gain, this probably isn't an optimum strategy. You'd be wasting a lot of energy on nonsense. I think that's closer to the situation the average person finds themselves in, and their effort would be better spent identifying the part of the work that brings the most results rather than indiscriminately powering through all possible work.

"Work smarter not harder" is a saying for a reason. :)

> I’ve been embracing the opposite and finding success and tremendous happiness in life. I work extremely hard, constantly and at every opportunity.

> YMMV

Exactly. I used to be just like you but I changed a few years ago and I couldn't be much happier.

> finding success and tremendous happiness in life

Workaholics can get "high" on dopamine on the endless stream of activity. Until it breaks down.

> hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics

This are very empty words as they do not relate to what really motivates a person.

You cannot simply order yourself to be determined and hardworking, otherwise burnout and depressions would not exist in the first place.

The problem is you are thinking only about yourself which is what right-wingers are frequently accused of. You specifically might be able to work extremely hard, persevere, etc but not everyone can. Work needs to be sustainable especially in the US which does not provide a lot of benefits to workers (healthcare, child care, PTO, etc). Also, you might be able to work extremely hard today but can you do the same 20 years from now or when you are recovering from an illness? I used to work 14+ hours a day but out of the blue got diagnosed with cancer. I still pushed hard during that time but a year after surgery and treatment, I have lost all motivation to work and can barely focus for 4 hours a day.

I'm very curious what your life experience is like on certain axes. Have you chosen your work? Did your father? Likewise, have you had any major unexpected life events (deaths, divorces, illnesses, etc.)?

I ask because I've found what you've said to be true in certain cases.

Working hard and consistently at something is great when it comes to projects and tasks that I choose and that are mostly mathematical or logical. On the other hand, this mode/method completely fails me when it comes to creative or architect level work.

I also caution against holding one worldview as good in all situations. I worked much harder before I got MS, and learning my limits and accepting them was key to preserving my mental health.

If you can live such a directed life, it can be very fruitful, but on the other hand, trying to make yourself hustle even though it's a bad idea is a great way to hurt yourself.

It is similar to exercising for me. If I don’t exercise, I go down the spiral and it becomes really difficult to get back into a good routine again.

Not working or doing something useful with my time feels exactly the same. I am really happy and everything is better when I don’t slack, am demotivated or unwilling to put in the effort.

Life is fulfilling and tremendously fun when I’m surrounded by motivated people that are basically opposite of the HN culture these days. The people of HN are extremely uninspiring and frankly toxic to my own mental health.

> basically opposite of the HN culture these days

That's because the pendulum has swung. A decade ago, HN was full of optimism because we were at the apex of startup culture and the tech boom. Now that boom has receded, there is still a lot of dumb money (for now), but people are burned out and the tech is uninspiring or toxic. People are just tired.

This really became clear to me two years ago, shortly before the pandemic, when there was a long thread on HN arguing against joining a startup, simply because FAANG pays far better- not just because of crazy stock market shenanigans, but because many startups themselves have been captured by leadership that pursue policies that lead to share dilution. The economics have changed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065

First paragraph: I feel exactly the same way, but also definitely feel and sympathize with the article's topic sometimes. I don't think the two ideas are as mutually exclusive as they seem.

Second paragraph: I think you're letting the world's political bullshit get you a little reactive. Those words are championed more often explicitly by the right than the left, and some media outlets unreasonably demonize some right wing things, but those are two separate concepts. Those words are, by definition, positive words in a neutral context.

I think you have a point about the reactionism... A better gambit than pre-emptively complaining about a small difference in political stances on something like work ethics would be to just champion the virtues on their own, and if an actual political ideologue begins to act disparaging about it as being somehow a less positive thing, respond with "Alright, well you and your cohort can enjoy not benefiting from these virtues then".

To me the article seems a lot more focused on specific, concrete issues faced by some workers, and tangible actions and policies to address them.

It isn't making a moral case for or against hard work that I can see. Though I do think addressing the conflation of productivity with virtue is necessary to make meaningful change here.

Anyway yeah YMMV. I don't really get anything from my work except more money and less time so I'm gonna vary that mileage down as much as I can. I can't really follow you into the media and political scope of this though. I don't reject those values that you associate with... someone associating with... right-wing... something. idk man. This isn't a request for further explanation.

>These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as “right-wing” which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics.

>These are the values my father taught me

You just summarized Prussianism [0][1], so you're not far from the truth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussianism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_virtues

> YMMV

Precisely, different people are different.

I was once like you. It felt amazing. But then it stopped feeling amazing, and suddenly I could relate to the other 99% of the world.

i've been thinking about this comment since you posted it and am now getting back to it. I guess, at the end of the day, the key is finding what brings you happiness and maximizing it. Obviously, for a lot of people work is not it but for some, seemingly like you, it is. The key is knowing yourself well enough to know what makes you happy and then working to maximize your happiness.

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