Tell HN: There's something deeply disturbing in the modern-world concept of jobs

For the Maui sirens, there’s actually an argument for not activating them. From my understanding, the sole purpose of the sirens is to warn residents of a tsunami. Residents are trained to run into the forest in the mountains when they hear the sirens… the exact spot where they needed to keep people away from because the fire was raging. If that’s accurate, it might have done more harm than good to use them. It also sounds like the mayor didn’t bother to answer a request for temporarily rerouting streams to let the fire department have enough water to respond. Because it wouldn’t be equitable to the other people on the island to let that small group have so much of the limited resource. I might be missing some details, but that’s what I got out of a quick news article yesterday. I’d apply the avoiding work argument here more than the sirens. First guy made a hard decision. Second guy sat on it until it didn’t matter anymore.

(Edited to fix a few words Siri felt should be changed after I typed them)

> It also sounds like the mayor didn’t bother to answer a request for temporarily rerouting streams to let the fire department have enough water to respond. Because it wouldn’t be equitable to the other people on the island to let that small group have so much of the limited resource.

That would be true if it really was about other people, but the water rights are tied up in multi-national agricultural and development interests.

Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/17/hawaii...

> Residents are trained to run into the forest in the mountains when they hear the sirens… the exact spot where they needed to keep people away from because the fire was raging. If that’s accurate, it might have done more harm than good to use them.

Even if people went in the wrong direction, at some point they're going to see the smoke and fire, come across someone who tells them what's happening, or otherwise sees a load of people going in the opposite direction to where they're going and figure it out. Having a chance is better than no chance at all which is what these people got.

> It feels like almost everyone in every position has this vague fog of do-nothing about them. This is in every part of society. Almost every post. I just find it baffling. The amount of getting things done is very low.

Working hard is no longer rewarded in current world anymore. Period.

If you observe carefully, most ambitious people at work are the busiest of people, and everyone knows that, to get something done, work should be delegated or connected to them. Hardwork has the habit of raising expectations and when you want to stop to breath, people will be bummed.

From my own experience of 10+ years of work in tech at least, the loud mouthed sloths who can play at office politics and rubs shoulders with management are highest paid and promoted and given raised more frequently than head-down-gets-things-done people. In fact, 100% of the time, the people I saw who got most done were least paid and were always piled on with most work. These folks are unfortunately honest and don't realize their value, so they are constantly exploited.

After seeing this for over a decade, I don't see any value in doing anything more than mere minimum. Only reward you get taking your work seriously is more stress, less recognition and more negative feedback(because you do 10x and now you are expected to perform at that pace or all hell breaks lose).

I think, most people who are not serious have also experienced this, so no wonder this is becoming prevalent. It is hard for me to see this change, unless rewards are correct. I mean, "back-in-days", my dad and grandpa used to talk about how they worked hard to go up the ladder quick, now, you work hard to signal that you are to be exploited more.

Isn't hard work sort of orthogonal to impact?

There's a theory, I think it's from the book Systemantics if I remember right but I might be wrong, that when a system reaches a given size it essentially splits into two - one half of the system dedicated to the original function of the system and the other half that exists solely to maintaining the systems existence, regardless of what it does, as well as their power over it. The second half of the theory is that the people in the second camp always have more power than the first. Engineers and people who actually want to get shit done tend to fall into the first camp and management and HR tend to fall into the latter. It goes someway to explaining why after a few decades, big companies can often end up in a field or selling a product completely different to the one they started out with.

Edit: It might have been Ackoff's F-Laws and not Systemantics, I'm struggling to remember, hopefully someone else can chime in if it rings a bell.

> no one wants to work [hard] anymore

Is the same quote as "the youth are all rude and don't respect their elders". In other words, always has been.

There are several groups of people who work hard:

1. people who must in order to survive - this exists less and less in successful "civilized" societies. It's never been easier to survive. you mostly see poorer folk or immigrants working hard

2. people who love what they do - there is always a subset of people who just love what they do. these people don't need anything else to work hard. Really good leaders can inspire others to love work they didn't before

3. people who have a compulsion that forces them to - and this is mostly from observation and talking to people - there are people who work very hard simply because their brains force them to. We can call it OCD or anxiety or workaholism or whatever, but the end result is these people must work or bad things happen to them

The rest of us don't give a hoot and just do what we can. There are some exceptions here and there like maybe societal or cultural obligations or learned behaviors - e.g. "my dad worked hard and I love my dad so I must work hard too"

But lots of people absolutely do still work hard. They go to the gym. Many people still want kids someday. They dream of living off grid on 40 acres.

What they don't do is work hard for society, or actually at all. They work to prove or better themselves, IMHO largely because in modern culture, "based" is the new "cool", and society is not seen as based enough.

People would rather be able to bench 220lbs, totally unpaid, with a huge amount of effort, than invent something that reduces data center energy consumption by a few percent and get a $20k bonus.

This sentiment you describe is probably more indicative of the distinct groups of people you hang out with. No one I know would be more interested in benching over making something actually useful. Also going to the gym isn’t what I would call hard work but I used to dig fence post holes in 100+ degree heat for 12 hours a day as a teen and that’s what I would consider hard. You want to see a lot of people working hard head over to your local farm and begin to realize how 99% of people will never work as a hard as farmer. Your next task will be to realize that even with working far more than others as a farmer you can still live a terrible life.

During most of human history, most of the humans have lived under an internal regime of self-deception, confusion, incoherence and foolishness within themselves.

The Chinese statesman, Han Fei, stated in 300 BC that if one searches through the whole of China of the day, one will find maybe 10 real scholars, 10 truly honest men. One cannot make a government out of 10 men. There are many jobs to do, therefore some sort of solution is needed, and the wiser heads come up with something... not optimal, but something that doesn't collapse (for the time being). The fools are many, the wise very few.

When Rickover tried to instil real responsibility into parts of the navy, the majority thinking turned against him and worked against him most of the time.

When Lee Kuan Yew tried to make something of Singapore, there were a thousands of obstacles in the form of natural habits of the common people. He gave them high rise buildings, they took their goats and cows right upto the tenth floor. He gave them elevators, they urinated on its floors, despite having detectors.

People are mostly embedded in popular culture, decorating themselves and their thoughts in superficial ways, but ultimately living mostly at the lower end of human potential. The habits of thought they carry are no better than the primitive man, except at the superficial levels.

The material advance of civilisation has not helped the state of affairs; it has made meaning far more difficult to attain than before, forcing simple people to live within a complex world totally incomprehensible to them.

Thankfully for the species, having 10 wise heads for millions of mostly foolish heads "still works" for the time being.

Humanity has somehow survived this long, so something must be going right, for this thing we call civilisation. One often wonders though, for how long?

I think you're falling into a trap of romanticizing the past. One way to avoid that is to look at data, most of which shows crime dropping and productivity increasing over the past few decades.

Additionally, we have access to large amounts of news and information now. If there were an incompetent police chief in a random town forty years ago few would hear about it. Now there are whole industries built around pushing outrage and it can get livestreamed to your brain 24/7 if you let it.

>There's something I find deeply disturbing in the modern world about the concept of jobs. When people say "no one wants to work [hard] anymore" I actually do think they're on to something.

You might be right or it might have always been this way. It might have always been this way but it might be more today. Some thoughts

  - Covid made people realize how delicate/short life can be.
  - There isn't really a concept of holiday in the US. From what I understand a month a year is typical in Europe.
  - Min-maxing profit has taken most fulfillment out of most jobs.
  - Spending your 20s until your 60s, 70s, or 80s grinding away at a job isn't attractive to people today.
  - Government regulations typically benefit corporations over workers, so may people feel the game is rigged from top to bottom.
  - Employees rarely get any type of incentive to work hard other than the threat of getting fired. (see Office Space).
  - Work culture is so transparently phony and that turns people off.

They didn't activate the warning sirens because those are for tsunamis, they tell people to move inland, which would have been the wrong advice in a fire.

> In municipal gov especially.

I wish. Although I guess this could be location dependent. But I think I know what you are talking about. I'm in Central Europe. Municipal workers are usually a bit better than workers in the private sphere. But people suck at their job, with almost no exception. They have no idea what they are doing, but if you point it out, than you will get burned. But of course, in the past decade or two the word "responsibility" has disappeared (or at least its meaning has changed significantly). As long as you do the very bare minimum, you will get a positive feedback, that reinforces that you are the master of not sucking (even though unfortunately it is not true).

I stopped caring about what others are doing. I do pay attention to it, but ultimately I concentrate on my own work, so I can be proud of it. It took a long time learning doing this, and sometimes I still mess up. But ultimately I don't think that there is any other way. Unfortunately.

It's the wealth gap, stagnate wages, housing shortage, collapse of family unit building. Why bother dealing with the stress of work when it doesn't pay enough to live? Burned out on consumerism, no family to support and provide for...or even if you do achieve that, it takes two full careers to pay for it. It's really just a collapse in incentives. People have to work to survive, and they survive to work. At some point, it's not worth it anymore.

I agree totally and I've been thinking along this track lately too. I keep being surprised by the extent of this apathy -- it seems to show up in all industries and countries, though the degree varies a little. It feels totally alien to me -- I'd hate to be that indifferent to what I do, and if I got to that point I'd try to change jobs.

> film of careless inertia covering the whole world.

Great phrase, by the way.

I think this is basically just the default state of human beings, and it’s only the rare cultural movement that manages to align action, rewards, and values in a way that actually gets stuff done, whether that be “conquer the world on horseback” or “build a rocket that goes to the moon.”

Follow the money. When you find out there actually is no money you realize why people don't want to work hard.

> I don't know if its an inability to do anything or a lack of imagination about what is to be done, or what.

It is the fact that our lives are ruled by money, and we are inherently selfish creatures. What do you think late-stage capitalism looks like? Everyone starts working harder so we can all die faster and make more money for our boss?

If you want to solve it, hire better workers and pay them better. That's the capitalist solution anyways; bugger to you if that guy is solely motivated by money too. And their replacement is probably financially-motivated too, so don't bother trusting them to hold the door for you.

You want something "deeply disturbing" to think about? This site is the one that demands marginal returns for their angel investments. Half the users here are either an investor or a builder, each one looking to swindle the other. That is what the opposite of work looks like, not apathy. These people are creating the illusion of a job well done to appease their shareholders and force their customers to stay-put. Then they have the gall to blame operational failures on Joe Shmoe in accounting, when their problem is obviously executive malfunction.

It's because we have set up a society that rewards deception and exploitation of laws and regulations and has little consequences the higher up the chain of power you go. CEOs literally bankrupt a company, leave with massive bonuses and then walk into a chairman job. Venture capitalists take over companies, extract all the assets and then leave them dead. People do things that are plainly against the spirit of the law, then get off scot free in court because technically they're still within the letter of the law.

The law needs to be extended to include the intent and reasoning behind the creation of the law and then when people are on trial and evaluated in contentious circumstances, the intention of the law is taken into account when passing judgement. You can't create a law that covers all contentious circumstances, it's equivalent to writing code and endlessly adding if statements to the function or using a switch statement with no end. It's ends up being bad, hard to read code which creates more bureaucracy for people trying to both understand it or exploit it, which is why the legal system is so bloated.

The alternative is to have the written law (function), the intent of the law (ticket requirements), and then you can evaluate:

- did the person break the law? yes, strong punishment.

- did the person break the spirit of the law? yes, give punishment. governments free to amend law if deemed necessary to deter future offenders.

- did the person break the law or the spirit of the law? no, no punishment. then at next policy review governments can look to adjust and rewrite if unintended consequences are happening.

There are no consequences for these people any more, it has been clear as day since the financial crisis. Now on top of that add a move away from religion as a collective morality system and a move away from centralised media to niche media and the collective consciousness and social contract is eroded in favour of the Nietzchian ubermensch who defines his own morality which of course might end up being whatever fits his own self-interest at the detriment of others. Which is pretty much hard coded in to capitalism because a company's only responsibility is to it's shareholders.

The solution to the capitalism problem, is handing everyone on their 18th birthday, x amount of shares in an index fund of the national stock market with the proviso that they cannot be sold outright for cash, only exchanged for other shares. Dividends can be paid to the person so they see the benefits of stock ownership but they are free to move their stocks into whatever companies they wish, thus they are allowed to move their stock into companies that align with their own personal moral values. If they're an environmentalist and it turns out the company has been a heavy polluter they're free to move their stock. If the company moves all their manufacturing out of the country, they're free to move their stock. This way EVERYONE is a shareholder and everyone has power, rather than just the wealthy with capital to invest. And no-one can exploit the system by just cashing out their stocks.

This is a late stage capitalism phenomenon. You couldn’t say this 1000 years ago when everyone worked the land so we had enough food to survive or 200 years ago before the Industrial Revolution.

We are living in psychedelic times because the useful jobs (food, housing, consumer goods) have been industrialised to a point that a low percentage of the human population (10%?) can provide for the entirety of the other 90%.

Under normal circumstances you might say we have a distributive problem. But instead of opening that conversation we’ve maintained a now increasingly less useful economic system (it was useful for increasing the productivity of physical goods, but it’s not doing a good job with the post-materialist economy) and we say “automation does not destroy jobs” only because we’ve built fragile post industrial economies where there are lawyers and baristas (having lived in the UK this was one extreme post-industrial economy).

Effectively - we’ve automated meaningful labour so that the remaining labour is not meaningful. But because the current economic system insists you “have to have a job” then we keep making what David Graeber nicknamed bullshit jobs.

However this process does not solve climate change, poverty, crime, etc.

Instead of accepting and adopting the post-scarcity post-industrial world, we’ve molded it to our expectations of a capitalist society. Thus lies the origin of your impressions and the seeds of all our troubles.

I think you're projecting your own personal issues and insecurities on the whole world and of course find evidence to support them (as you'd find for any POV).

This is a dangerous mistake people like doing these days — to generalize and over simplify extremely complex matters.

In my perspective, I find today as much stupidity and lack of professionalism, attitude towards any job as it was 20 years ago. With some fluctuations in specific areas, niches presumably correlated to covid, wars, economy issues and other general sources of chaos.

Most mature take on the whole thread.

Have you seen the DEI industrial complex? Here is University of Michigan’s DEI admins list and their yearly salary totaling up to $13M: https://x.com/monitoringbias/status/1610728541070426126

What are these people doing?

My fear is that at some point the pressure will release in the form of a revolution if we don’t cure the lazy government and fix it.