After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.
When they grew into the corporate world you were expected to be there before your boss and stay until after your boss left, finishing any last minute work before the next morning. Weekend work and long travel days were common.
Going back even further, I heard stories and saw photos about my ancestors struggling to secure enough food to eat every year. Black and white photos of what was left of their dirt-floored houses. Every day was work and worry about securing basics for survival of the family farm.
So if your job is a clean 8 hours of desk work with some meetings and e-mails mixed in, I’d say it’s actually less demanding than what was expected years ago.
The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job.
And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.
Almost every human group I've ever encountered has been prolific in the production of art. I think you may be confusing a certain conception of culture with culture itself, in a way that ensures certain social classes will seem more artistic than others, which I believe to be false.
A lot of those jobs remain unchanged, with a college degree now required as essentially an empty gatekeeping step.
> Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature.
This is simply untrue. Huge numbers of data entry and switchboard style jobs have disappeared due to automation. Just grab "9 to 5" and see how much paperwork went into jobs before computers.
TBF back into the 1970s most of the F500 company CEOs had only high school degrees.
I mean, you should also do this when you work a corporate job. I work as a team lead in my org, and outside office hours unless something is actively on fire, I am not responding to anything. If I see a Slack notification, I'll check it, and if it's something that absolutely 100% needs me and I'm able and not already committed, sure, I'll jump on. But anything short of that, nope. 9AM Monday I'm on it.
> And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Also this is categorically not true. In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been. Academia too. Administrative jobs have been growing for decades now, absolutely ballooning in corporate America. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber covers this in hilarious and tragic detail.
That's already a mental tax that previous generations never had.
> In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been.
Consider the qualifications needed to land those jobs today. The amount of posturing, scrapping, backstabbing, and drama that goes into them. Bullshit jobs surely drain cognitive surplus.
Personally, I'll never willingly enter an on call channel ever again. Nearly every night there was some thing i had to read and understand while i was in the middle of deep thought or creativity. Sometimes when they start they'll ping endlessly for hours. It's as if this dead claw of work is reaching in and eating away at my brain.
Why? Are you on-call?
It takes me no effort to ignore work Slack notifications, because I don't open my work laptop until it's time to work. This seems obvious to me, yet many people complain about being distracted by their notifications, so I wonder what they are doing differently, and why.
I know some people do the work phone thing and more power to them, but for me, I found it grating and irritating to have to have two handsets on me.
That being said, while my email and Slack access are shared to my personal phone, again, unless something is actively on fire, I don't answer, and, in those rare instances, it's always appreciated by my leadership is a favor I'm doing them, not an expected/demanded part of my job. I don't think that's an unreasonable way to do things.
Also, there is lots of research showing that subsistence farmers actually worked both fewer days, as well as fewer hours, compared to the modern standard.
8+ hours workdays are not natural in any way, they were introduced through the industrial revolution.
This is true, those social expectations are in place. But I think it's worth noting that it generally doesn't happen this way in practice. Even though women have entered education and the work force, often in higher numbers than men, they are still doing much more additional unpaid labour than men in every country in the world [0].
Would it be fair to say that women have experienced the effects we're talking about to a greater degree?
0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Edit: changed is to was because it's no longer grey.
So one downvote is enough, it seems.
And the points on a post are not displayed to anyone but the one who posted the comment.
It's easy to misinterpret because posts that attract heavy downvoting also tend to attract flagging.
But almost all of that author's recent comments are dead, so maybe what I'm seeing instead is someone who's shadowbanned.
So all the grey means is that someone downvoted it, once, before anyone upvoted it. That happens - someone reads it (or misreads it), decides it's wrong or offensive or whatever, and downvotes. That happens rather often, even to completely innocent posts. Usually it self-corrects after a bit, as others decide that there's no reason for the post to be downvoted and therefore upvote it.