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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

The number of days we work has nearly nothing to do with the technology available to us and everything to do with the relative power between labour and capital.

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Exactly, landlords will be working 0.5 days and renters will be working 5-6 days. So I guess they were actually right if they meant 3.5 days on average.

I rent a very basic one bedroom in an awful location which costs more than half my after tax salary, and a round trip to my office in Toronto takes 3 hours and $45 of public transit. The price of this unit has also increased by more than my salary every year for the past 3 years.

I've met multiple people this week who recently relocated from Toronto. Rent is expensive everywhere, but it seems like TO is especially bad

Yep, relevant discussion if you haven't seen it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37446790

Here's hoping I get to be one of those people who can relocate from Toronto next.

If this were true, rich people (ie, those with capital) would stop working. In most cases they don't.

Keeping up with the joneses is a big driver of long work weeks. Globalization also drives it. Scale drives it. Boredom drives it. It's complicated.

Historia Civilis made a pretty good video on the nature of hours worked since time immemorial[0].

The takeaway message is: yes, the capital class are and have always been the main drivers of longer hours.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37737663

If you're rich and still working long hours you're not working because of the money. If you can be the CEO of multiple companies, those companies are not getting a full-time workweek and that person very likely isn't doing it for the money.

I don’t think this is true at all. It’s not luxuries that are getting more and more expensive, it’s the basics.

If you chose to live like someone 100 years ago, you could probably get away with working 3.5 hours/week, or fewer.

But if you want to live like someone from 30 years ago, you would need to work 100 hours/week. I don't think I'll ever be able to afford a home even half as good as the one I grew up in (in Canada).

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