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Comment by riebschlager | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't the promise of technology always been the automation of labor to free us up to enjoy lives of leisure? Instead it seems we are hyper-concentrated on speeding up the treadmill of productivity. The invention that comes right after the "next" button is a tool to analyze your nexts-per-hour trends.

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What does leisure look like to you? To me it's highly technological and expensive. Computing, transport, comfort, energy, food. The things I do for leisure now are sometimes only possible because of the rich society I live in - a product of high productivity.

It's an important question. Leisure to me is to be freed of the obligations of productivity. I think framing it as "what do you DO for leisure" transforms leisure into consumption.

I don't agree that high productivity is the price of leisure. If that were the case, when do we get to cash that check? We've achieved record levels of productivity, so when do we get record levels of leisure?

I'm writing this as an American workaholic. So I'm in it as much as anybody. I'm just getting old and starting to ask a lot of questions. :)

We don't get to cash that check, the next generation does. Just like how we cashed it from our parents, and our parents cashed it from their parents.

We have far more leisure time than our parents did, and way more than our grandparents. Our kids will have far more leisure time than us.

And haven't we already partially cashed it? We have so much free time on our hands, we need Netflix and countless other things to fill it. #NotAll, of course, but if the average can spend 3 hours per day watching TV & Netflix, and an additional 2.5 hours on social media, then they must have that time.

My mother and father also both had the ability to spend 6+ hours a day watching TV or doing other hobbies in their working years. They're currently in their 80's, and my dad did blue-collar work as a telephone lineman.

Having leisure time isn't new to our generation (any of them).

This is an interesting article, because I "feel" like my leisure time is less than my parents and grandparents. This is in part because they retired at earlier ages than my current age, with pensions for my grandfather, and better financial situations overall. I feel like I have less leisure time than say people in the 1950s, up to 2000 maybe. But where is the data? This article says for the US, hours worked are around 40/week from 1960 through to 1988 (+/- 1 hour), table 5 https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

It's hard to compare in part because there are very different lifestyles. As a member of the fortunate "programmer class" I have high pay, health insurance, easy job portability. This leads to pretty reasonable vacation schedules, good lifespan. Overwork expectations and stress are the downsides, but these are within my control somewhat and I can just get another job.

This research paper says leisure time increased noticeably from 1965 to 2003 - an increase of 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w12082. This is a surprise to me and goes against my intuition. Maybe we always feel like we are getting a bad deal.

Don't forget the sizable number of lower hourly wage Americans where some people work many hours at low pay and barely support themselves. Americans seem to work significantly more than our European peers https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product....

Just because someone is paid for 40hrs doesn't mean they are actually doing 40hrs of work. We are both posting on HN during a weekday after all

Hey, I'm compiling! I guess we need a new 2023 joke/true statement. How about "I am taking a break because chatGPT seems to be down". I can't translate that code from Java to Rust by myself.

>We have far more leisure time than our parents did

I dunno. When my parents got home from work, they were done with work except for rare exceptions.

Now a lot of people have to deal with working with technology that is supposed to have 100% uptime but of course that never happens so random freakout fix something. And even if you don't work directly in tech, everyone wants to be able to get ahold of you because nothing can possibly wait. We deal with things around the world timezones way more than in the past so that just increases the chance that someone needs to get ahold of you because something in another country where it's the work hours need something.

So I'm not really sure about your theory that we have more leisure time.. maybe(?) we have a little more time, but it's certainly not true disconnecting. I can't go on vacation without having to worry I will have to work or check in on things. Even it's only a little bit, it's still there.

> so when do we get record levels of leisure

"The children have inherited a world their ancestors could only dream of. A more equitable and luxurious existence. But the problems of the past have widely been forgotten, and their solutions have brought about new classes of problems."

Going to take America for example, since that is the culture I grew up in.

Children don't work in factories or sweep chimneys anymore. Childhood is now free of labor. School is broken but conflating that gulag with labor isn't fair.

Prime working age is 18-65. Mid-to-late 20's with extra school. Compare that to a few hundred years ago and 50% of humans were dead before the age of 5, and 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30. You lived to work and you worked until you died.

The amount of time we spend on food prep, house hold maintenance, etc. is down significantly. The "hours worked per unit X" for consumption is down substantially, meaning you work less to accumulate the same standard of living compared to 100 years ago. The 40 hour work week is also relatively novel.

Life generally sucked for our ancestors. Our world is a utopia in contrast and we take it for granted.

From video games, to TV, to art, to resteraunts, to climate control, etc. Luxury is everywhere. Luxury is more abundant. We just moved the goal posts.

> 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30

Not really, most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

> most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years...if a person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years" [1][a].

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

[a] http://sirguillaume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Old_Age-H...

>What does leisure look like to you?

Not having to worry about anything related to work. To be able to truly disconnect. Something that is nearly impossible for a massive chunk of workers.

We have easier and safer jobs than anyone in history, and the highest quality of material life.

If you wanted to live the quality of life of a regularl worker in 1900 you can probably do it driving Uber 2 hours a day. We work more hours because we want the improving lifestyle

Where can you rent on ~$50 a day, and still have money left over for food and car payments (necessary for that job), let alone things that a regular worker could afford in 1900?

Pretty much most of northern England, outside London a lot of people get by on 18k a year salaries

You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900.

Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht...

Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.

I also recommend Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier for a report on workers in northern England in the 1930s and their living conditions (and the second part on why Socialism isn't being embraced in the UK, but that's a different topic). I'm pretty sure that's also easy to achieve today.

A regular worker hasn't seen a car in 1900 and lived in a tenament with 4 generations crammed into a room. You can afford that on 50 a day if you wanted to live that way. That's my point, we don't want to live that way so we work more.

You literally said "work as an Uber driver," which is why I said car payments. They're necessary for the job.

If you want to keep it in 1900's-speak, I could say "afford the payments on the overalls you need at the factory," but the idea would be ridiculous because the factory would provide the overalls.

Oh gotcha lol ok. Change that to "drive THREE hours Uber using someone else's car and give them a third of the pay for the use of the car" if that helps you connect to the idea better

The world is full of bullshit jobs and bullshit tasks that are unproductive. The next button sending that email for you will balloon the growing pile of bullshit, but look like productivity to passive analysis. So yes our lifestyles have improved, but our work on bullshit is not responsible for those improvements.

Now I'm just picturing AI generating and sending emails so another AI can craft and send a response back.

I keep hearing this but I never had a bs job, don't know anyone who's hired for one (also it doesn't make sense.)

What is your job that you do?

You should read the book on this if you’re really interested but here’s a review. https://www.mudamasters.com/en/personal-growth/bullshit-jobs...

I work in consulting so a large part of my job is acting as a box ticker or task master to use Graeber’s definition.

I recently worked for a company that I ultimately realized by the time I was leaving that the whole thing was a BS job. I was doing real, good work, but the entire org was so dysfunctional that the project was doomed to failure. And I'm not entirely sure that ultimately this wasn't known somehow from the top; idk, I really feel like the CIO who was running it had some significant problems, she did a lot of magical thinking/was delusional.

Wow, this exactly describes my work in a dysfunctional startup. We set impossible time goals and don't make them. We are making progress on our software project. The goal of this is a faster something, but our only demonstrated and tested scenarios were extremely optimized by us. I don't see us actually being useful in general cases. In such a situation, I am just trying to hang on until my options vest and then move on.

Ah. Well, if its that dysfunctional, will the options be worth anything?

I have thought about that. It's hard to estimate the value of unlikely to succeed company options. The answer of course is do your own startup, so you can be the one making foolish decisions and causing chaotic development, instead of someone else.

1900 is not the era I would choose. It's peak wealth disparity. How about the 15th century?

Ok lol 15th century it is...

What was the typical job? What was life expectancy? How warm was a typical home in the winter? How many books did an average person see (much less, read) in the lives? What was travel like?

Also wealth disparity is a stupid metric. If you and I are homeless under the bridge, it does me no good that we are equal. If I have a house and you have an even nicer house, I am fine. (though I'd rather have the nicer house)

Wealth disparity is important, because it also means power disparity.

I hear people who are pro-capitalism say “the poorest people in the US have it better than kings did 500 years ago”, which is only true if you’re considering the stuff those people have. If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

I don’t think things are worse now than ever before, but that doesn’t excuse the concentration of power we have today.

// If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

What does that mean? 500 years ago, did one have ability to speak to like-minded people globally? Could they travel as they wish? Could they pick their religion? Could they choose where to live? Could they pick a wife from another culture? Could they read about any topic they want? Did they have a shot at starting a business and having it grow into real wealth?

If you think you are more powerless than a serf 500 years ago because Bezos has more money then you, then you are the one who gave away your power for no reason

> If you think you are more powerless than a serf 500 years ago because Bezos has more money then you, then you are the one who gave away your power for no reason

That's not at all what GP was saying - I quote, with emphasis added:

> I hear people who are pro-capitalism say “the poorest people in the US have it better than kings did 500 years ago”, which is only true if you’re considering the stuff those people have. If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

What is self actualization, aside from the part of my comment didn't quote?

> 500 years ago, did one have ability to speak to like-minded people globally? Could they travel as they wish? Could they pick their religion? Could they choose where to live? Could they pick a wife from another culture? Could they read about any topic they want? Did they have a shot at starting a business and having it grow into real wealth?

This is hindsight bias. Did they even care about these things? Or did they aspire to have the opposites?

That's a regular comment that's been written for many years already. But there's another aspect.. it might not be a simple graph, where zero work and 100% leisure is great. Maybe we need both but of better quality and balance.

There is this ideal that say society should aim to become productive enough that everyone can do what they enjoy, give what they can miss, and take what they need.

Though this ideal is not as popular nowadays.

I really thing this idea of joy / leisure is a bit of a smoke screen though, people are not great at knowing what they need. I firmly believe that we vibe and bounce our feelings against society which gives us balance, it's just that most of the time society is in the wrong paradigm (consumerism + bs jobs)

„Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.“ —Paul Valery (as quoted by Walter Benjamin in “The Storyteller”)

> speeding up the treadmill of productivity

Productivity is for people with no leverage.

As an HN reader, you can likely escape that trap. Maybe not right away, but as a directional goal almost definitely.

There's no reason you couldn't use this "next button" idea to get work done quickly and then go hang out.

The reason that this won't work in the end is that they will reduce headcount once they understand the technology and then we'll be hanging out permanently. Factory workers didn't get extra time in the break room when robots were implemented to speed up the assembly line. They got replaced permanently.

That's potentially a good thing in the long run. People can do either higher-skill work and/or we'll reorganize society to account for less people working.

I think that's a little naive. We could do it now in the US but we don't. In countries like the US I expect widespread poverty after more jobs evaporate, because the wealthy won't want to just support those people, even if we can as a country. We won't need all those hourly workers to do basic things. But what will all those people who don't have a "real job" that does something a robot/ai can't perform do? The US will have chaos and maybe even actual fighting before the federal legislature approves UBI.

That is possible, but I feel like usually we take the middle-of-the-road approach later than we should. So it won't be an optimal transition but it will be OK. I'd advocate for figuring it out sooner and more generously though!

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