My remaining 13M minutes: Productivity, ambition, being realistic in older age
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Being compelled to do something on a boss's behalf sucks, no matter how interesting the work. I have hundreds of possible projects that I want to do, all categorized in priority order. I've done a number of them already, but the progress is glacial simply because the best hours of my days are taken up building someone else's product of dubious benefit to mankind.
I'm in countdown mode, counting the days until I can focus full time on my open source projects.
When I look at large companies that employ people, e.g. banks or insurance companies, I see employees that are much more relaxed than I was when I was a small company employer. The stability such large company jobs give you is amazing. At these companies I also see a fair number of freelancers but inevitably they are much more stressed than the regular employees due to having to deal with multiple clients and no illness income insurance by default.
So I can't recognize the "being compelled to do something on behalf of a boss", at all. As a boss, I was compelled to do all sorts of things in order to keep the company running and in order to be able to pay all my employees. Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
This is fascinating - if you don't mind me asking, where are you located?
I've had to hold down a full time job, so I've only managed small things like crash reporting, emulation, metalanguage syntax, and a generalized data format. But I have more ambitious projects to greatly improve the energy-efficiency, openness, and robustness of our communications systems, which I plan to leverage into some of my real-world projects going forward (once nice feature is that it will become harder for autocratic regimes to "shut down the internet").
What's your motivation and expectations? Do you have a moral principle or belief you can describe that forms the basis of your desire?
What's the origin of your beliefs - a lot of people here cite works of science fiction.
Where do you see humanity in the best case scenario? What's the best possible end game?
What's the end game for you - would this be some kind of immortality project? i.e. your name will stay around or so.
Sorry again if this comes of a bit off. I admire the resolve and understand the time spent working on meaningless stuff. Just genuinely curious about the belief system (myself I'mat the same point but I think of going other way, more small scale stuff).
If you're starting a business or just run something that barely gets profit yes. Else, after you have a cool few million in the bank, it's only stressful if you want it to be stressful and you're that type.
>Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
For billions of people around the world (including hundreds of million in the first world), employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights, do whatever BS the employeer asks them to, work to the bone for minimum wage, and so on, if they even want to put food on the table. And they don't end up with any equity, even if they did all the hard work, and the employer is just some trust fund baby with family connections who just had some hazy "ideas"...
> For billions of people around the world, employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights
Then call for your government to introduce better labor laws. You can't just blame all this on "the bosses" as a big homogenous groups. Here in the Netherlands, bosses in fact cannot expect employees to "just suck it up and work late nights": employees have to agree and get compensated. And if they don't agree, they cannot be fired for disagreeing.
Well, for billions of employees it never is, even after 30+ years of hard labor.
>Then call for your government to introduce better labor laws.
Yeah, I might also write to my senator while at it. As if laws get introduced by popular demand :)
This is not a good comparison. You are right that the answer is "never". But the other side of the coin is that, as a Dutch full-time employee, you enjoy incredible stability, something which employers don't have.
The employer might get rich after 10 years of hard work. Or the employer may (much more likely) go bankrupt.
As an employee you are not required to work more than the contracted 40h/week. Yes you will never get rich, but you also don't really have the risk of going bankrupt next month. You are not required to do more than 9-5. You don't have to work overly hard.
Heck even if you lose your job and you can't find a new one, the state will give you a minimum income. You aren't rich but it's also nearly impossible for you to end up in poverty.
If you want to have a shot at getting rich, then start your own company and take the risks of going bankrupt at any moment until you make it. Instead of complaining that you can't get rich while also enjoying stability.
This is also the position of the Dutch tax authority. I once once tried giving employees equity (while also giving salary). The tax authority was like: you can't give them equity for free, they have to buy it from you. I asked why, because I never bought my own stocks. They said: because they're carrying none of the risk, so it's not a fair business transaction if they get it for free; they must pay for it and also pay taxes over the transaction.
Perhaps, but if only the employer-employee relationship only happened in the Netherlands [1], and not in 120+ other countries. Because in most places "incredible stability" is less than a pipe dream.
([1] And in relatively recent Netherlands, because historically workers there didn't have it as good, and with new neoliberal laws passed and prior rights eroded, workers increasingly they don't have it as good as more "socialist" decades past).
App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc...
Source code: https://github.com/ethanmdavidson/DeathProgress
This isn't the first time I've shared these links, but I hope it doesn't come across as spammy because 1) I'm not selling anything and 2) articles like this keep getting posted, which implies this is a topic some people are just discovering
How many Sunday afternoons with my young children do I get? That's not even about death, just that they will grow up one day soon. How many of them do I want to spend getting paged about some bullshit database problem? Or scrolling mindlessly on my phone?
Sure, your employer will reward your commitment by laying you off once you're of age, but it doesn't take much to end up estranged from your adult kids despite a lifetime of effort expended there either.
Hold out for grandchildren. It's the fun part of parenting without the responsibilities.
Still not sure if I'll keep it, but like another commenter said, perhaps I'll embrace my percentage and just make the most out of what's left.
Cowardly (or cunningly?) I set the background to pure black like my regular wallpaper and the text to almost-black. So I think I'll forget about the wallpaper and every now and again, the percentage will jump at me late at night. Let's see :)
Thanks for this!
https://bernardol.com/100-years-calendar/about.html
For those close to NY metro area, Beacon DIA is a great museum worth visiting that houses some of Kawara's work.
https://vividmaps.com/male-female-population-dying-before-ag...
Tomorrow is not guaranteed - but that recognition doesn't have to be a morbid or depressing viewpoint, it can just as easily be a motivator to stop procrastinating.
But that’s privileged, and while you may be fortunate enough to find yourself in those situations, or even in one where you can chose whether you want to retire or not, that’s not really how life is for most people. I’m not sure how this article will read for people who don’t have the choice. If I could only get jobs that requires a lot of time-management in Atlassian, or whatever PM tools you use to torture developers, I’d burn out, not because I didn’t know what motivated me but because I had to earn money by dealing with what was available to me. I imagine it’s even worse for people who aren’t in a line of work that is a buyers market.
I’m all aboard the “don’t let age stop you” thing that the article also preaches, and I hope you and I get to be lucky enough to live the life where we can continue doing what we like well into our retirement ages, but realistically, a lot of us won’t.
Sometimes busyness is a blind that can be removed no other way.
There's nothing wrong with those things, but the more I watch people I know die, the more I realize that it doesn't make any difference how productive you were or if you maximally enjoyed how you spent your time. You die and the world moves on.
It's okay to try to improve your situation, but it's also okay to punch in at 8:00 and punch out at 5:00 and go home and watch the evening news.
While I largely agree with this statement, I've noticed that – even though I'm in my thirties and I don't feel old at all – I still catch myself saying "I'm too old for XYZ" occasionally, half jokingly, but also half seriously. I mean, sometimes it's not about age per se (as in: the number) but about the fact that you've "been there, done that". How do you maintain your excitement for something that you've done a bazillion times?
>How do you maintain your excitement for something that you've done a bazillion times?
For me it's two things: 1) With a few special people, it doesn't matter if I've done something a million times, the interaction is always extremely rewarding and we always get new insights about what we're doing and the world; the activity is not novel in itself but there's a sense of progress in either skill or understanding; 2) Very obvious in theory: try something you've never tried before.
The hardest in my experience is to find friends who want to keep up with this. I crave novelty and progress of some sort, the feeling that I am a better person today than I was yesterday. I don't have a hard time meeting people, but it's getting harder and harder to find (and keep) my tribe. I suspect a lot of us feel something similar – this craving for a community of people you can relate to, spending time together, learning together, working together towards some shared goal. It's hard to make this happen at work and I haven't found it in hobbies either. The closest I've been to fulfilling this itch is with occasional side projects with others, retreats of different kinds, slow travelling, etc. I'd love to figure this out and make it happen more often with more people.
But if I'm being honest, I stopped adapting sometime in the mid-2000s, also when smartphones arrived and Moore's law for CPUs ended with attention shifting to GPUs. I just haven't had passion for most tech since, because most of it looks derivative to me or even like a step backwards. I simply can't work the way that I'd like to with current technology. And the barriers to entry around stuff like semiconductor manufacturing are so high that I can't use my degree there. So in a very real sense, I can't do anything but wait for the stuff I daydreamed about back in the 90s, that I thought would be here by now.
Like how Paul Graham said we compress 40 years of work into 4 year working at startups:
http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years.
I've been trying to win the internet lottery for almost 25 years without success, so mentally I'm somewhere around 250 years old. At this age the mental fatigue is almost all-consuming. I'm just so tired. Working this hard for so long without an equivalent amount of rest or a win has kept me in near-continuous burnout for more than half my life now. Subjective time at 45 years old passes about 3 times faster than wall time (assuming 1:1 at 15). So I'm finally punctual, not by adding a time buffer, but by dividing the time before an appointment by 3. If I have an hour to be somewhere, I really only have 20 minutes.
I'm expecting that time compression to keep increasing at that rate as long as fundamental injustices in the world aren't addressed. Loosely that means that if we don't have UBI, true labor-saving AI, equal access to capital, etc etc etc so that we can pursue our life goals and feed our inner child, then I'll be compressed 9:1 by 65 and 27:1 by 85 (if the loss of social security finally eliminates retirement). At which point my mental clock won't be able to run fast enough to keep up with the churn of the modern world. The struggle will eventually come to dominate every facet of my life, while wealth inequality will have others sitting on lifetimes of money they could never spend. Somewhat ironically, I don't care how much money they have or what they do with it, only that I'm still under the yoke of forced labor as rents are artificially inflated well past the point of believability.
Rich boomers should try finding meaning in activities where they don't fuck every other generation that came after them.
If you really want to work, maybe you could do some non-profit stuff.
The increased public safety from your experienced relative could create other opportunities in the city, such as a thriving retail sector. Whereas without that standard of public safety, shoplifting or other petty criminal activity might drive retailers away.
You can claim that the overall demand for police officers would be one less in this scenario. However the demand for retail employment and the demand for those goods sold by retail shops might increase. Therefore, the overall size of the pie has increased. We can extrapolate a few levels from this point. A growing retail sector might necessitate further public or private security roles.
Of course as with any example, there are probably several approaches to produce gotcha counter arguments. This is only meant to illustrate the larger point and not argue the specifics of the example.
The employee could retire and collect 100% pension or they can continue to work and collect around the same amount of money as salary. If they don’t retire, then the budget hasn’t been freed up to hire the new person.
Which is the objective we seek, full employment regardless of productivity concerns or productive allocations of finite resources?
I'd suggest that productive allocations increase our living standards, which is the goal of employment itself. Full employment for the sake of employment trends towards make-work, drudgery, high costs and low quality.
Equality doesn't mean equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity is equity, which is a communist lie.
It seems like a lot of folks bought into the idea that we can somehow achieve equity in society. Unfortunately, the pursuit of equity leads to totalitarianism of one sort or another.