Einstein was a patent office clerk. Gregor Mendel was a monk. Sergei Brin had a scholarship. The myth that struggle breeds success is just a narrative intended to keep working class folks grinding.
You need to be able to let the subconcious do its thing, for which it needs peace, quiet and freedom from stress. Difficult to do the step back otherwise.
The stress returns, when things then get traction, so i guess the truth is - alternation between stress free "creative" periods and stressy "realization" periods?
No idea what the optimal sinus is.
This idea that x person worked a little harder than the rest and therefore he is successful is laughable. There is a range, say 5% or 15% or even 50% ‘worked more than the rest’, ok so what? Do you think you are within 5% or 50% of working x hours more per day before you become the next tech billionaire? You are not. It’s not that easy.
Oh and then there are the struggling artists of the renaissance which all came from the illiterate peasantry struggling to feed themselves.
And the media common folk of today, who come up because they struggle therefore they act, and everyone we see in TV was a nobody before their first big role and just worked really hard right?
Or the government families which somehow if you are the son of a governor your chance of being in government and a high ranking official far outweighs any other factor.
Or if your parents are rich chances of you being rich far outweigh anything else…
But no, alas I’ll let everyone know we gotta push just a little harder and we’ll all be rich.
Struggle breeds stress, which intern breeds health issues. If we didn’t struggle the world would not end, innovation would not stop, WALL-E is just a cartoon.
Einstein was able to always study and Sergei Brin was able to work like a maniac precisely because they were able to remove the restrictions of paid technical labour that drains your brain before you even get to the interesting stuff.
Programming is no different. Other developers code in their free time. If your low energy maybe you need to fix that part?
Struggle implies unsuccessful efforts. These men were not bound to busy work, crying for help. They had comfortable settings and could focus on what mattered to them. OP wants just that.
Arguing that "get out of comfort zone, grind, struggle" is the way to advance society is disingenuous at best.
A full time phycisist already tends to work a lot of overtime hours to get anything done, while already doing that as their main fulltime job activity, so with 100% certainty Einstein grinded like a madman in afterwork hours to do his actual research. This is also why he quit that patent office job as soon as he was able to.
Not to criticize your approach. genuine 0.1x programmers allow 10x (aka 1x) programmers to exist and get a lot of money doing a normal job.
You should not conflate focus and effort with physical busy work. Grind means literally to wear down physically. Theoretical physicists don't 'grind' by any stretch of the imagination.
People should absolutely be allowed to be comfortable, free of immediate concerns with acquiring resources to survive. As OP puts it, 'freed from societies expectations of sweat, tears and busy work'
Arguing against this right is drinking the elite's cool aid. If you don't profit from exploiting the working class, you shouldn't see a problem with setting them free.