Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)
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Basic everyday necessities took up so much of my grandparent’s time when they were younger. A meal would take hours to prep. All the veggies to prep said meal grown. And then the many hours spent cleaning, maintaining, and improving the living space. Social obligations. They basically just worked all day long to just live. Leisure were for festivals, holidays, and the rare moments where there was everything was done ahead of schedule.
I can—daily-exercise with my hobby sport of choice, eat at any restaurant of any cuisine at my choosing, watch and read more media than my grandparents couldn’t even imagine existing, and talk with strangers around globe.
It’s all perspective. We’ve definitely improved as a society. We can do better though. But we still have come pretty far.
I technically waste a lot of time on the internet that could be better served listening to classical music or reading a novel. Yet, I find it very difficult to get in the mood. I know that it is a very enjoyable and enriching experience, and once I start reading/listening, I enjoy it. Yet it is a struggle to get off the internet.
I am slowly working towards consuming media (movies, music, books) in a much slower and repetitive fashion. Strictly restrict what you watch/read. Read books you like more than once for better absorption.
“Modern society doesn’t have leisure time because people can’t help but check Twitter instead of listen to Beethoven, when they have ready access to both” becomes less of a valid critique every 50 years you rewind human history. Today’s problems are a substantial quality of life improvement over history’s problems for a sweeping majority of humans alive today.
If enough people fill up leisure time with work or work-like activities (doing the dishes), that increases the overall pace of life. You do live in a society after all. Other people's actions will affect you.
On a personal note, yes more spare time makes me more happy, more time spend doing nice things with family, more time to sport. Nothing makes more more happy than a day on the sea windsurfing, kitesurfing or windfoiling.
Why should society pay the price for their malfeasance?
The median US individual income is currently about $36k. People at the median are either not making it or just barely making it. How is that "free?" MIT has calculated that the living wage in the US is just over $24/hour which is $48k per year. The median is about 1/3 short of that. That's what you call "free?"
See https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Correction: a living wage for an individual is nearly $40k or $20/hour. This is approximately the median individual income. Half of people literally can't live self-sufficiently, and you want to call this a "free" society?
Wanting to regulate social media (when there are no meaningful regulations) is hardly tyranny.
There's nothing special about big tech websites that makes them particularly addicting. People spent too much time on BBS's and Usenet and video games back in the day. Or watching TV.
Now, the Internet is only focused on making content that fits our brains and people who grew up benefiting from those conspicuous rewards miss those rewards (but not enough to put in the work to get them now that there’s a much more fun alternative).
It really comes down to the idea that there is no “good” or “natural” thing for humans to do from an objective standpoint. Evolution is in many ways a manifest of preference.
You're going to have a lot more luck correcting yourself than moving others.
The internet is no way comparable to a physical addiction like tobacco, in fact I'm not sure if it could even be called an addiction. I'd put it this way: our way of life today has been altered because of the internet. By default, you have a lot of exposure to media today which means our baseline tolerance for media is very high. Toning this down is very achievable but is not trivial and requires some effort and habit-forming.
Ergo, we can deduce from this that God exists and does indeed have favorites...
If you visit an Amish community, they might talk about how people occasionally want to join them, only to realize just how much easier modern life is and not be able to take the constant work required to live without.
I've always thought the statistics for average television time for Americans seemed inflated, but even given that they might be, it is still pretty wild in perspective.
Still: you will have to go back to my grand parent generation to find folks carrying out the activity you describing.
And even then, that was seen at the time as a rural predicament ( bigger cities had «modern confort » already, but not isolated farm and so on.
( agreeing with all you says… just that the timing seems off )
Source : my 4 French grand parent born around 1920
Let's go through OPs list one by one:
> Don't forget making and mending your own clothes
Not making, or not a lot, but some. Mending, definitely.
> washing them by hand
No, we had a washing machine.
> beating rugs outdoors by hand
Yes! We did that regularly.
> Harvesting
We had the garden in front of the house and an extra one a little further away. We had veggies and fruit in both, lots of it and great variety. And it tasted great. And it was A LOT of work. We also regularly went into the forests for mushrooms and berries and also spent a lot of effort on preserving food for winter.
> chopping firewood
I did that as a kid, a lot, and it was fun! I managed to never hurt myself somehow.
> managing coal.
Yes! We got coal every year, unloaded in front of the house blocking the street for the neighbors, so I, after coming back from school, had to start asap to put it into buckets and slowly move that large mountain of black dirt behind the house into storage. I must have gotten a lot of coal dust into my lungs. It only stopped after reunification when we got natural gas and central heating, which was not an option to buy anywhere in the GDR.
We had our own house. On the other hand, he (in)famous concrete dwellings of the East Bloc, which East Germany had more and more of too to solve the housing crisis that lastet I think well into the 1970s or even the early 1980s, had central heating from the (extremely dirty) coal power plant of the (very large) local chemical factory. Still, even those living in that kind of housing often also still had a garden nearby usually used to grow fruit and vegetables to supplant what could be bought in the stores.
Of course, city folk had electricity and gas much earlier, but even today a full 1/5 of the population is outside of urban areas; it was at least that much back then.
Not sure what generations you're talking about, but as sibling said, location and age matter. Boomers had it extremely well here past their 30s and more than enough services available to do the things you described, unless you want to save a bit of money or do something for fun.
Indoor toilets weren't a feature in many rural homes until 1950; I think my dad's farmhouse didn't have indoor plumbing the first few years of his life.
They encountered their first flush toilets in the airport on the way out of the country.
My maternal grandparents were city dwellers and while they did not have as many menial tasks to simply live, the economic conditions of the time made for very long work days.
Now it is common to live life where both parents work and no homemaker.
But consider the huge leisure industries that have grown over the past 100 years. Movies, TV, now streaming services. Radio and now Spotify and podcasts. Video games. Sports and all the media around sports. Even social media is arguably mostly entertainment these days.
Or look at active leisure. How many more cyclists and rock climbers are there today vs 100 years ago? Or skiers or runners or hikers?
Judging by the shape of the economy, there is a lot more leisure time than before. As a whole, Americans spend a lot less time growing food and making clothes and, well, surviving in general, and a lot more time doing the things above. But Americans also spend a lot more time making the things we fill our leisure time with.
Is managing one's 'personal brand' on the many social media sites leisure time?
If you're doing mundane activities that generates value for a social media company, is it leisure time? For example vetting, posting and re-posting ad copy is basically a low-level marketing job, yet a large percentage of the population say that they spend hours a day doing this.
What percentage of our 'leisure time' is spent watching or listening to ads? Is that truly leisure?
I guess the argument goes that we choose if and when to do these things - I wonder how much people really feel like they have a choice in the matter anymore.
Everyone needs to eat, so getting/preparing food is work in some sense. There’s a hobby/leisure component too though: you definitely don’t need to spend two hours every day cooking a perfect coq au vin or visiting farm stands to find the tastiest, most interesting produce. On the gripping hand, doing the absolute bare minimum (Soylent or pot noodles or whatever) might be okay for a little while, but many people don’t find it physically or mentally sufficient for the long term either.
If that seems a bit off, consider that a lot of people barely work at all (especially those under 25 and over 65), and those that have full time employment usually only work 5 days per week, which lowers the average hours per day considerably. So throughout an entire lifetime, I think it's true that Americans spend a lot more time on leisure and sport than on work. It just doesn't feel that way, especially when you're in prime working age.
But even full time employed parents (probably the group that perceives themselves most time starved) still spend 2.95 (mothers) to 3.52 (fathers) hours per day on Leisure and sports[2].
I would bet a higher percentage of people under 21 today are still in school, vs 100 years ago. School is not leisure time, but comes with leisure time.
And on the old end, Social Security and Medicare are probably allowing a higher percentage of people over 65 to enjoy a full retirement, vs 100 years ago.
You also have commutes going from walking to driving - and the first may feel leisurely but the second rarely does.
What explains that?
So what is it? I think these sorts of “idle activities” like TV and games carry with them a burden of guilt that our time could be better spent pursuing a hobby or otherwise learning something which might enrich our lives beyond the mere time we spend doing the activity.
So why do we spend all this time on idleness instead of hobby, sport, music, or other “higher leisure” activities (folk dancing?)? I think, and it’s been argued quite effectively, that work has become all-consuming in our lives even if it hasn’t taken all of our time. For many of us now, work is a mentally rather than physically taxing task. We get home from work (or log off the computer and walk out of the home office) but our minds are still at work. We think about the problems we’re trying to solve outside of work hours. Many of us are also on-call to deal with any crisis affecting the business, even after work hours or on the weekends.
We never get off work! And that’s why we have no time for leisure. Any time we have outside of active work we spend on idle activities like TV or video games so that we can drown out our chattering minds. Pursuing a quiet activity like reading or woodworking is just too difficult if we’re still thinking about work (or worse, worrying about being on-call).
It's a repeated stimuli, which causes your brain to filter a lot of it and discard it, leading to the feeling like a night watching TV was a night doing nothing. Your memory of watching TV blends with all memories of you watching TV, especially after a few days have passed.
You have to switch up your routine and do something new or otherwise different, and you will retain a memory of that event much more clearly and it will feel like you "did something".
My most clear memory of a night in the past week was game night where we played a physical card game. I don't remember any individual night where we watched TV.
Saying “I don’t have the time” means “I don’t have the will.”
There was an NPR “wait wait don’t tell me” episode question a couple of years back that went “most respondents in the survey said they don’t have the energy after work to do _______” what?
The answer: “anything”
2.) Specifically with Netflix, people watch Netflix while doing other things or when when they are already tired. I turn on tv or listen podcasts when cooking or cleaning or am doing other boring activities. Or when watching small children.
3.) For many people, these are evening activities and activities they use to relax - when they are actually tired. When I watch netflix or turn on game, typically it is in the evening when I am tired. I cant code, I cant read something educational or difficult, my brain is tired.
4.) There are some people who spend a lot of time on Netflix who also say they dont have time. These people pretty often are trying to say polite "no" to whatever you want them. They are trying to reject you without making you feel bad.
You don't think this counts as leisure time? Cooking while listening to music or a podcast is much more enjoyable than doing it in silence.
I'd argue that the size of the leisure economy and the amount of leisure time are only very loosely correlated.
For example, if I meditate for 1 hour it is leisure time with no direct economic impact.
One the other hand, one could argue that the more leisure time we have, the more we will spend in leisure related equipment, culture etc.
However, one might also argue that leisure related spending correlates with disposable income, not leisure time.
That isn't to say that it's trivial: I had to identify why I was doing it (I don't even like watching TV!), and then work on myself so that I had the mental energy to replace it with activities I find rewarding, like reading in the park or playing music.
But this sounds more like "making your leisure time fulfilling is a life skill and a mental health challenge", not "leisure time doesn't exist because we're forced to use it on certain things".
Of course, I'd work on your emotional stability first. Seriously, man: wild-eyed cursing at internet strangers for imaginary statements they didn't make is the modern equivalent of getting into a screaming match with the voices in your head. I truly wish you all the best.
One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries.
Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk.
Another are video games that stimulate your brain in an amazing way. Another is spending time close to nature. Another is talking and listening to people.
When I come across a person that tells me "But what would you do if you had more free time?", I realize it's like this because people can't imagine a different world. They don't know how to live freely. So they willfully fight to maintain this broken world, insisting that it's the only way.
So I do my work, try to get it done as fast as possible. I earn a lot, but my work makes no difference to anyone's life. If I could get 1/10 of what I earn but without having to perform all this theatre, it would be better for everyone.
What does this mean? You would take a 90% pay cut for 90% less work? Seems pretty doable
I agree that most employers wont offer 10% positions, but my feeling is that someone can work 10-20% for 10% pay by gigging pretty easily.
Whether 10% pay is sustainable is a different question, but I was under the impression that you thought it was.
If you are looking for 10% work and 50% pay, I agree that is much less attainable.
Im a bit skeptical that the poster would actually be happy with 10% pay, which would probably not cover the insurance, shelter, and food they are used to.
That said, I am open minded and there are certainly people that do live on 10% of a SWE salary. You can rent a mobile home in a low CoL area, get on Medicaid, and have a lot of free time. Some people do exactly this, but it is a pretty rare breed.
It’s doable, but not on a standard employment contract.
No idea how to deal with the uncertainty of being able to get enough contracts that pay enough.
>> Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk
Maybe you should get a job doing repetitive manual labor. You get plenty of activity and it is completely mindless so you can be thinking about whatever you want. That's how it was for me at least.
Do you just enjoy reading about it and that's it? Or how do you make philisophy interactive and interesting beyond satisfying curiousites? I got kind of into some sub topics of philosophy, but lost a lot of motivation once i realized no one cares about what you have to say or even really wants to cater to you unless your part of academia
Understanding such a text often is an interactive experience - you formulate your own claims and try to relate then to the argument that the text contains. It's challenging but very satisfying.
Nevertheless, it helps to have teachers - joining courses lead by people who learned philosophy in academia is a common way to find them. YMMV, and it depends on what's available to you locally.
With more even distribution I could totally see more middle class deciding they've got a "good" life and no reason to work another 20 hours extra.
I fear that the reason that applies much more often is that most of our energy is being spent on doing the wrong things, or being spent on competition with others.
Think of somebody building a web scraper: They are spending hours or days building something whose purpose is essentially to overcome defenses created by other people. So it’s a Red Queen thing. Both parties have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
And I believe this is happening in many areas. Marketing. Government. Compliance. Software. You name it.
It’s what Hannah Arendt called work turning into labor. In other words, that which used to be the act of creating something once has turned into that which constantly needs to be repeated for the mere sake of subsistence.
The better question to ask, in my opinion, is not “Who is at fault for this?“, but “ How do I, personally, avoid wasting my own energy like that?“
>“If only the rich people...”
My comment wasn't really aimed at allocating any sort of blame or implying the rich should fix it.
>most of our energy is being spent on doing the wrong things, or being spent on competition with others.
Is it though? The fact that total wealth is increasing overall to me suggests it is an allocation issue rather than
>Both parties have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
That def is true for some areas, but not in aggregate I think.
Though frankly total wealth generated seems a little sus to me as well. How much of that is on paper?
But I'm afraid I don't have a better answer than that it seems to be a constant struggle. As Feynman said, "The first rule is not to fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool". It's incredibly difficult to keep yourself on track. It's just so easy to work on bullshit.
Things that never cease to blow my mind in that regard:
- Asking yourself constantly, "What am I trying to achieve here?" - Disengaging from the computer, going for a walk to lying down in the hammock. Often gives you ideas that you didn't see while you were in the "tunnel vision" of execution. - If you're waiting for result of action A so you can do action B, try if you can't do action B even without action A completed. Often, you will notice that you actually can.
Also, being conscious of the distinction between "labor" and "work" in Hannah Arendt's sense is helpful:
She defines "labor" as anything that is a recurring drain on your time and energy, and necessary to your survival. So, in a sense, it's the equivalent to a business' overhead. Eating food, mowing the lawn - these are all things that you have to do over and over again just to keep "afloat". These are also the things which do not change the future. One month from now, it just won't make much of a difference whether you mowed your lawn today or not.
In contrast, "work" in Arendt's sense is anything where you create something that did not exist before. Something that has a value in and of itself. And which, once created, will continue to exist, and will continue to add value to the future, even if you did drop dead right now. Writing a piece of software that people use. Building a lawn mowing robot. And, not to forget, teaching your kids and being a good role model to them. These are all examples of "work".
This is not to say that, when demands of "work" and "labor" collide, you should always choose the work over the labor. But you should be conscious of the difference, and take that into account when you choose what activity is going to have the greatest value to you.
This is the "keeping yourself on track" part, and the "not wasting your energy on things that do not need to get done".
The other part is the Red Queen / arms race thing. And I think one thing that might be important and useful here is to try to avoid competition (duh!). Or, at least, to be very strategic about when to engage in competition and when not to. Picking your battles, so to speak, as opposed to fighting any battle that presents itself.
I mean, one way some people get out of the rat race is to let others compete against each other. Amazon is doing that with its marketplace sellers. So not allowing yourself to become an Amazon marketplace seller would probably be a good idea. There are always these areas that are "en vogue", where there's a community about it, podcasts about it, etc.. I tend to see those things as red flags. Because if there are people there already "selling shovels", you know that the space is over-crowded. Much better to go some place no one seems to be talking about. Or even a place which, if you talk about it, people will think you're an idiot.
In investing they say, "Buy on fear, sell on greed". The same, I think, applies to choosing where to "invest" your time and energy. Any place that people avoid, do not see, or even fear likely is a much better choice. Although, just as in investing, the price you pay for the freedom from competition is uncertainty, a lack of approval from others, and not being taken seriously. Though one can slowly learn to recognize these symptoms as a sign that the path you've chosen is a good one in terms of being free from hype and competition. That's not a guarantee that it will work out for you, of course. But you're at least playing according to your own rules now.
I'd be happy to continue the conversation.
We often talk about the distribution of wealth, but I wonder about the distribution of labor consumption and physical goods.
I think it would be a interesting lens to look at the same question with different implications.
I can’t easily make six figures, nor can SWEs in many other places of the world.
With that said, I do enjoy more leisure (4 day workweek). I know that’s a privilege as well.
Greetings from Europe
Check out the salaries on levels.fyi
And no, it is not reasonable to make 100k in the Midwest instead. Unless you're buying like $50,000 worth of gas and eggs per year, you're going to save WAY more in the SF Bay Area and reclaim years of your life by retiring earlier
And it'll have a lawn instead of a tent city.
Having lived in Toledo before, the Midwest has its own economic problems (yes, not even the unhoused want to setup tent cities there).
There's definitely a tradeoff, but it's disingenuous to imply that it's a good financial move to take a 50% pay cut
That said, these last couple of years remote work has really taken off, so maybe you can have your nice house in the Midwest and retire early in it too
Most people on this site are severely lacking.
I would meet a lot of people
Study and teach many things for fun
Travel wherever
Experience many different things
Play a lot
Alas, I work. I can hack it a bit by remote working and doing a 4 day work week. I have to give up playing and a studying/teaching for that.
I don’t understand how people can say that people need directions and therefore need to work. I need the exact opposite and I am sure I am not alone. I could imagine that some people need direction and therefore need to work. Not me though. I’d love to have all the free time in the world.
repeated failures makes lack of pain the goal vs. pursuing something great
Now, get off my lawn.
If you don’t, then I don’t really see the point of your comment.
The average person (in my life) is kinda waiting to die. Not suicidal but just clearly waiting for death.
One can always extend a helping hand into making society more safe, fun and better. Or at least die trying to do that. It doesn't matter how old I get, simply knowing that I can help certain people directly or do my best to advance some state of knowledge by the tiniest bit, in science or in a human being itself means to me that there's always something to do that I'd consider to be meaningful and/or even enjoyable.
To be explicit, I don’t think individual consumption explains the whole story (e.g. inequality and wealth distribution) but normalizing for it paints a clearer picture.
If you spread out the work hours evenly, everyone would work about 25 hours a week.
If you add in the young and elder, the percentage of non-working people in the US rises to 52%.
The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests, keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities.
I think digital technology did the opposite in many ways. It turned us into robots.
Another thing I noted while reading the article is it mentions trades as the best sort of work. If you're a plumber, bricklayer, or electrician then every job has an end. A wall is finished when you lay the last brick.
By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to.
Like that page that said "You have reached the end of the Internet", I sometimes wonder if Microsoft might one day release "Windows Final Edition" , the operating system that is finished.
Go home developers. Your work is complete. Well done!
What I think you may be feeling though, is that working on software sometimes feels "endless", but that's really what happens when a project is poorly managed and no "strategic milestones" are reached. This is particularly severe in web dev, less so in the game dev scene where there are more of those "definite walls" to reach.
Most programming doesn't have the first and only sometimes do you get the second. It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever. Programming is like being a contractor building the Winchester mansion.
The difference that you are probably feeling here, at least from what i can see, is that once a house is built by a construction company, it is "handed over" pretty much completely, whereas with software there is almost never such a handover, but instead a "support period". This I suppose can lead to fatigue as you end up never reaching a "final final" product per se like the house.
Personally, i have always found it helpful to plan by milestones/major versions, such that it, in a "hack the human brain" kind of way, provides a synthetic almost-copy of that " ah, all done, time to move on" that the human brain gets when a house is built, or a mountain is climbed.
Interesting philosophies hidden within all this, particularly for team leads and such of dev teams.
So it would be like owning a house?
sure, business needs and software/IT complexity explosion means that only a small fraction of the problem-design space gets properly covered pushed the majority of the industry toward more agility
You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic].
Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.
I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
> Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.
You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all without telos, other than as ends in themselves.
However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life.
Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away from.
> I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them.
Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag you.
> if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness of so much activity.
I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle.
I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.
I've worked lots in both, and it really is not. There's something satisfying about the physical movements, and being in different locations, about the house building work, but that is very different to the issue of completion of work you mentioned and I guess you just never did more than one physical building job?
The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up.
At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet!
- - - -
Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?)
Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.
1. Both couple partners have to work in the past only one.
2. We work more.
3. We take loans (obligate to future work).
Why is it so? I always hear that. I am not married yet but I keep it a little challenge to myself to one day disprove that.
I believe with a clever lifestyle of not spending on useless stuff and moving into a cheap region one can easily make that work.
So I say, brazenly and naively ...
New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s while holding one less occupant on average.
Houses have a lot more amenities than they used to have, like AC and a clothes dryer instead of a clothes line.
We have torn down about a million SROs* since the 1950s and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle housing.
We are more car oriented than in the past and cars are typically the second largest expense in a household budget and they've gotten crazy expensive as well.
Having said that, I will recommend the (possibly out of print) book How to survive without a salary by Charles Long in support of your crazy plan. ;)
Thanks for the recommendation!
Things like older cars, smaller houses, location differences, etc. But there are major cost savings that offset, especially with the kids. Single car may work out, less gas, less tax, even less food expenses (many people faced with two incomes eat out more, and prepare food less).
Seeing people do is on $40k salaries means it should be entirely possible on larger ones. Note that if you want to try, it is almost always best for the lower earner to be the one who "stays home" so as to maximize income and minimize tax.
Also "not working a 9-5" is not synonymous with "no income" - there are actual non-scammy work that can be done at home in spare time if desired, and things like teaching exercise class, coaching, also exist.
Your last point is very good as well. I wouldn't want my wife to do nothing, just not slave off at some stupid corporate 9-5 job lessening her, mine and our children's quality of life. There are so many options for quality remote work these days.
We've done this for 17 years now on my salary which has been maybe a little over the national median for software engineers in that time. We live in a median-cost city. Since we are homeschooling, we have avoided communities with high property taxes (we pay 50% less than our neighbors in good school districts).
We've had two cars the entire time, although we'll let them age rather than trade them in for newer models. Our house is modest and we were actually able to pay off the mortgage years early. We max out my 401k and our IRA contributions.
We don't take fancy vacations, which is more of a personal preference rather than a cost cutting decision.
At this point everything is completely commingled financially and we just think of it as our money. Legally that's pretty much the way it is, if we were to get divorced (not going to happen) my wife would be entitled to half of everything (including my 401k). My sister was in a similar situation and I saw this happen in her divorce.
So there are safeguards for the non-working spouse. But still, if there isn't a high degree of trust and openness in the relationship it might not be a good idea. It has been great for our children.
Heck, it can be difficult enough after a couple of extended parental leaves, much less half a marriage.
This is easy to do alone. Bring a partner into your life and slowly but surely you will be seen as a resource to be maxed out and consumed.
I know billionaires that share your dream. Do it. Save yourself. Go now.
Statistically, people in long-term committed relationships have more stable incomes, longer lives, and better outcomes than those who don’t [1]. The direction of causality is somewhat unclear, but that such a relationship exists at all is a fairly strong refutation of your claim.
Which isn’t to say that all of them work out or that it is always sunshine and rainbows. But there is nothing inevitable about the outcome you claim. It’s actually lower probability.
If children aren't a life goal for you, it gets a lot easier.
The simplest example that we can relate to may be email. Before email, writing letters was awful. You got out a nice pen and paper and whiteout, and carefully wrote in your best penmanship a few pages to your grandmother thanking her for a nice new pair of socks. You did this twice a year. Now we have email, and the whole family sends low-effort messages and photos every day. Nobody would have guessed that this was any sort of need, but you do need to do it because family inclusion and affection is now competitive and that is a basic need.
Almost nothing we are spending our time on right now would be considered a need even 50 years ago, but most of it is spent trying to satisfy a need that was easy for them. Much of that is spent “working”, which is mostly now just wasted time and miserable interactions under artificial stress and unending hours. That makes people feel awful, and ruins any leisure time they might have had.
Any by the way, some people here are saying that rich people have leisure on the backs of the working class. Just look at their families. They’re not healthy, nor happy. They are scared to death in every moment of losing everything, and they can’t trust anybody. Don’t envy them. It may look like leisure but it doesn’t feel like it.
You could also consider the FIRE people to be leisure rich - often at even lower total assets. Paid off house, modest investments, even more modest expenses.
A couple of notes:
While there may be less "leisure" and higher poverty, I found there was more mental leisure when working. In part because more manual labor I think. So your body was working, but your mind was not. For mental health this wasn't bad.
No one expected anything to be done particularly on time. There are some pejoratives in the west of this "xxx time" where xxx is the place. Yes, it makes getting stuff done in a western sense hard, but I liked the QoL.
Higher levels of community. Walk to work, walk to store - you got to know a lot of people. A fair number of people hanging out. You could usually go down and get a drink / play some cards etc if you wanted at end of day even at like the corner store. Mental side had a big community focus vs news focus. Very little news following etc - I sometimes thought if a war broke out unless it messed with sports it'd get a shoulder shrug. I was almost completely of social media etc beyond emails at an internet cafe periodically.
Govt couldn't be trusted at all, but could sort of be ignored as well. I was just looking at US based 150+ page permit application for a 300sq ft project. Special inspections, zoning, design review, permit etc etc. took 3 revisions and 18 months to get through paperwork. This simply couldn't happen in these countries.
At the time I was broke. Obviously some downsides if you had money / assets - theft etc. But without much "stuff" I wasn't bothered much on that side.
No all roses, was very glad to be back in the US for reasons (creature comforts). That said, I slept like a baby when working overseas - much more physical labor, much less mental stress.
All this is biased tremendously by being a foreigner. But there might be elements to learn from there.
Jevons' Paradox I suspect.
What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated.
It's my understanding that we prefer individualism and status. The housing market with reduced interests rates has shown that people don't take the opportunity to work less. Instead, they are willing to max out what they can spend per month.
Apart from individual status, don't we want leisure time to be as low as possible to have maximum progress [1]? If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next?
[1] Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
We could experiment by making that available as a baseline - anyone who wants to can sleep in the flophouse, wear the durable clothes, eat the soup kitchen food.
And anyone who wants more could continue as they are.
Right now we theoretically have that, but in practice it's a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare to partake in social services, and once you fall of the Employment Train it's extremely hard to get back on unless you have connections or very valuable skills
I wonder what society would be like with a perfect safety net.. I'm kinda worried we'd end up with horrible ghettoes full of disgruntled people like the future in Judge Dredd, but I want to believe that society would adjust and we'd value connecting to other people, learning, and enriching ourselves
No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose.
Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.
Forty hour work weeks are relatively new too.
But I always get pushback saying that farm work is not valuable because it is unskilled and can be done by anyone. Yet, we have a shortage of farmers.
The huge problem of the modern workplace is the psychological pressure that is applied by bosses such that deadlines are hold.
>Just why this has happened is both a mystery and a paradox.
No paradox. One way to make more money is to work more.
>One way to make more money is to work more.
In these discussions it's worth remembering the second order effects of hours worked on pay. The first order effect is that an hourly rate multiplied by more hours is a higher number. But if you're hourly, working long hours puts more of your time in overtime in any official hourly sort of situation. More importantly, it means that you're getting good at your job at an uncommonly high rate, and you're the person who's always around, who knows more and is getting things done. It's hard to promote someone else in this scenario. And for the person working, it's hard to not quickly outgrow the job in this way.
Finally, an analogy: my brother spends way more of his time playing basketball than I do. It's not that I can get all the basketball I need done in 20 minutes a week whereas it takes him 5 hours. I just suck at basketball, so I don't care to play.
Not if you can't get schedules for more hours which is the situation millions of people are in also a lot of people can't pay others to do their chores and such for them so they have to do that themselves which can take a lot of time.
Many of the problems of the past have been widely solved, and those solutions have brought new problems. Discounting todays solutions based on todays problems misses the historical context this article is addressing.
“The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for — greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society: but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems”
() https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/09/too-much-fre...
> Once again, the researchers found that higher levels of free time were significantly associated with higher levels of well-being, but only up to a point. After that, excess free time was not associated with greater well-being.
The point made is more similar to wealth correlating to happiness up to a point. The article concludes that it's a sense of purpose that matters to people, not work. Your comment is a bit obfuscating.
Consider the general behavior of people on social media in that light.
I discovered that going for a run, doing a physical project, and socializing took more effort to start, but was vastly more relaxing and recharging.
If you live in a free country, how can you have a concept of excess free time?
Surely the goal for free people is to maximise time free to do as they please? Otherwise they’re by some definition not free.
At full employment.
Another way to put this is that every billionaire is a policy failure.
A quote that is often mentioned in this area is [1]:
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
I'm reminded of a scene from The Sting where Robert Redford and Paul Newman's character are debating whether someone they've decided to con will take the bait [2]:
> "We had him 10 years ago when he decided to be somebody."
All the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" in the US have so successfully been propagandized with that view so that Bezos can have $130B instead of $120B.
Americans should ahve more leisure time. They should have more satisfaction in life. And they should have a greater share in the properity they are fundamental in creating.
But none of that will happen until people realize that being divided on social issues is a tool used for manipulation. It's to stop working people from having class solidarity. You know who has class solidarity? Billionaires.
This isn't even a party issue. The billionaires have bought all sides.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
[2]: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/022e79f6-49e9-4dd1-b73a-7d1d130...
My feeling is that most of my coworkers felt somewhat exploited and envious, but they didn't buy into ideological propaganda. They just don't go socialist, either because they think it's hopeless, or because they want to distinguish themselves from the low-status welfare recipients just below them. It's more ideological people, like me, who absorb the propaganda and actually believe Jeff Bezos deserves it.
That's literally the same concept as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Its all class warfare and the distinction you make is useless in the grand scheme
* whether people invite you to social events
* how people treat you when you ask for help
* what kind of sex partners you have access to
* your own perception of yourself as worthy and accomplished
It's not an economic class thing, it's a social class thing and would exist even if everyone had the exact same income.
Meanwhile reaching for millionaire status when you don't really have it is stressful. Other people will push you back down and you have to fake a lot of behaviors you don't really know how to use. So people generally accept their level instead of identifying with a higher class. This is true in theory and also when you actually talk to them.
And if you thing poverty is the worst thing about the Commies just remember that people are not allowed to leave Communist countries. Think about, people who don't like America or feel "oppressed" have _always_ been free to move to a country they liked better. In USSR and the European countries occupied by it, Cuba, North Korea people were shot and survivors imprisoned for trying.
Grandparents also still go to work, do no help on that front either.
If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like!
I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. (If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem)
It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society.
You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.
In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up.
So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.
I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else.
I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great.
[0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.
Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.
This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?
Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.
The goal should not be for everyone to do no work.
The goal should not be for everyone to work full time and fear unemployment.
The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.
Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.
Medical and educational costs have risen in the US, I would argue for the same reason.
And some adversarial work has expanded for no reason- look at all the effort spent in high frequency trading that could be replaced by venues running auctions every 100ms instead of having competitions for fractions of a microsecond.
It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.)
It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population.
[0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.
Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.
Citations required
I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible
If you traveled a bit around the world, maybe you could see that nothing is binary, and neither is this topic.
Elites always exist in some form, yes. They do not always have to be so disproportionally distanced from rest of population like in US, not in democracies, not so untouchable. There are tons of countries, ie in Europe who are managing this in much better way.
The wider problem/situation I see is that US is much more everybody-for-themselves-and-fuck-the-rest because it maximizes direct incomes of few (ignoring how much they will spend on ie healthcare or education of their kids, these 2 can easily wipe out aby gains for middle/upper middle class), rather than living in actual modern society.
The logic of 'contributing back and improving place you live actually comes back to you too and creates something better for future of you/your kids' somehow didn't click in US that much. I saw first hand rather primitive knee-jerk reactions in ie bible belt in US that equate well working society with socialism, (I guess phonetical step not too big, logical though much bigger) and well that's communism and you should be deported/jailed/shot on spot.
Don’t forget "rising living standards" which in Western cultures is an euphemism for "extravagant consumption".
How about we don't succumb to the desire to pull strawmen and focus on simple things to accomplish such as being able to make a honest living that leaves you with disposable income after covering all your cost of living with a simple 9-to-5 job?
Where does this need to create the illusion that there is possibly no grey area between a homeless slacker and a glorious millionaire investor?
Is it too much to ask the most prosperous economy in the history of the world to allow workers to actually live a modest life with your salary? Otherwise, why would those workers continue to support that absurd society?
Yes, or alternatively, you can live in a society which uses coups, death squads, and puppet dictators to keep Honduran labor cheap.
This way or another the main equation never changes. That is, the resources we consume are below the resources we produce. Left or right, communists or capitalist or other kind of ideologues are just different groups of people who have different ideas on how to distribute the roles.
US foreign policy and actions of private companies have absolutely decimated other countries, cultures, and economies so now those countries are reliant on the income from rich US capitalists exploiting their populace's dire straights. That we placed them in.
The retirees in your example, with great probability, either have to rely on outside support (be it children or social security), or they will die with lots of wealth left over (aka inheritance). I hate to sound like a crummy communist, but this is a distribution problem, first and foremost.
This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all.
The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.
This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.
The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.
On a personal level, I can say my managers try to be good people, although the may not always do the best thing. In my case, my wife has stage 4 cancer and they have been tremendously supportive.
Edit: I should probably mention for full transparency I work at Amazon as it is sited in the article.
That’s an opinion.
A manager's goal is to enforce submission.
When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it.
My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.
A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential.
Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.
Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.
(If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)
/short version.
The “Protestant work ethic” has played a role in shaping American social views about work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write.
As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do.
Or as Bukowski wrote:
"if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire."
In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.
Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?
As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy.
I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.
This is categorically untrue for much (I'd hazard to say most) of the population. It's certainly untrue for me. I don't like feeling full, and I don't really gain weight when I eat whatever I want.
I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something.
It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.
It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.
People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it.
All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving.
Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.
I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not.
We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.
This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.
Do we even know what it is to be human anymore?
>but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.
Debatable and only part of the problem. Education is a terrible example for you to bring up, as evidenced by the absurdly low salaries they receive combined with the broad expectations of their job (therapy, education, tutoring, crisis intervention, nutrition, baby sitting, special needs identification, the list goes on).
Have you seen the turnover rates in education? It’s in an appalling state. No resources, garbage pay, and now they’re being asked to shoot back at school shooters as their schools are redesigned to look like prisons, all while politicians play tug of war with their curriculum as a proxy battle for social policies.
The sad fact is we don’t value educators in the US. Hell we don’t value caregivers much either.
Your view is manifestly incorrect. There are so many groups of people that are looked down upon, what you describe is just a tiny tiny subset of these. If you are grasping to find an example, that shows a great deal about your position in life.
(If you still struggling, start with sex workers, people working in waste management, and people with physical disabilities, aka 'hookers' and 'trash people' and 'cripples'. Yeah, they definitely not looked down upon. LOL. I could literally write 10 pages of further examples.)
> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon *for not working a typically job.*, and rightfully so
Really you should try to avoid taking things intentionally out of context and getting yourself worked up over, it's not healthy.
Is producing cigarettes, making apps more addictives, making food superpalatable, synthetizing pernicious drugs and so on more valuable than producing documentaries, studying ancient languages and civilazations, studying exoterical physics topics?
Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.
All the things you mentioned provide at least short term tangible benefits to the consumers. How will the average person benefit from the study of ancient languages and civilizations or esoteric physics? People already pay for documentaries they're interested in, there's a reason they're produced. Why do you think academia for academia's sake is inherently beneficial for the rest of society? I see this notion of expressed here and elsewhere that if something is academically challenging or interesting, it must therefore be good to spend time studying.
Honestly all of these threads could be distilled into this simple point. Way more concise than what I wrote that’s for sure haha.
Also, do you think documentaries are valuable? Because the vast majority do not have investors and do not make much money. Frankly without grants we’d barely have any.
If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".
There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable.
The alternative is depression.
They still do. They always did. It’s just so that now you are the proletariat.
I mean, how can we really consider ourselves being the proletariat when our clothes are sewed by children in Pakistan?
— Spock, Star Trek, season 2, eposode 17, Wolf in the Fold (1967)
But we should recognize that humans are sometimes happier having some clear directions to follow and tasks to perform. Depends on the person and the situation, of course.
But it's also human nature that everyone wants to be the one giving the directions, even if it makes them unhappy.
Well, as long as the only reachable consequence is not "too bad, you are going to be exploited by someone else and then you die".
Is itself a theory of human nature, and I think, probably amongst the implausible.
We're a species of greater ape, a vast amount can be said straightforwardly.