Comment by EtCepeyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EtCepeyd | Hacker News Reader

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Yours has got to be one of the best comments that I've ever read on hacker news.

> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of

What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)

Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.

Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.

And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.

Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.

My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."

Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.

If someone’s ‘story’ improves in notability, attractiveness, attention grabbingness, etc… wouldn’t someone else’s ‘story’ have to decrease in the same?

As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?

"Stories" are not a finite resource. In the book, Yul tortured his friends (and whoever was the audience) with his adventures and was a rather poor listener himself, but for Jesry and other avout (monks-scientists) it was always mutual – discussing their research, sharing findings, seeking out help, etc.

Your story is something intrinsic; you can decide how you want to share it with others.

Sharing requires actual time…? Certainly more than zero.

I appreciate the kind words!

The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:

- Less communication overhead due to fewer people

- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)

- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes

- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)

- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for

Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.

Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work

- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)

Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.

The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.

The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.

But beside all that,

> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:

It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.

> You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary.

Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.

Huh, in tech companies?

Yah, France as well. My boss was at 30h / week.

Switzerland too. It's pretty common for parents to work 80% or 60%.

Is that typically shorter days or fewer days?

Fewer days.

It's not only common you can in many instances force your employer to lower your hours and keep you on.

Absolutely. Totally normal in the Netherlands. I do this (28 hours). My wife too (32 hours). We've got a kid to raise and a house to look after. We earn more than we need, so why work more hours?

That’s awesome. I chose Japan as my place to live, but NL was a close second. I’ll have to think about it again next time I move.

Wow, amazing. Super progressive.

As I believe Deadpool said in the most recent Deadpool and Wolverine movie - ‘The Dutch are never going to the moon, but damn do they know how to live.’

Belgium and Germany too.

Think I'm starting to see why so many people immigrate to Europe. European labor laws and lifestyles are so reasonable. No wonder American life expectancy is so bad.

Totally agree with this.

The thing is, there are at least four major factors that lead to the energy depletion of burnout:

- physical (i'm unhealthy, don't sleep, eat or exercise well)

- mental (i'm distracted and interrupted constantly or don't let my brain rest)

- emotional (i work in a culture of terror with people who trigger me)

- meaning - (i simply don't care about what i'm doing and neither do my colleagues)

all of these are necessary, and none are sufficient. most orgs and people are breaking along more than one of these dimensions, and the co-morbidity makes it hard to diagnose the cause of burnout.

You can't expect 62.5% for 5/8 hours, you have other costs to them for benefits etc.

I think it’s assumed that in a society that would allow for such things benefits wouldn’t be handled at the level of the employer.

Quite the opposite. Employees under 28 hours a week don’t have to be provided health benefits at all, and typically aren’t in industries like retail that mostly employ front line workers on a part time basis.

Part time help is cheap.

Those might not be proportial, disregarding fixed costs, on some places those costs/deductions are usually based on a percentage of the given salary or hours worked (Not so in the US, as I'm given to understan)

I was so surprised when I realized stat holidays were paid as a % of the previous 30 days salary in canada.

Productivity per hour increases though, so it compensates.

I could see it going down if you do something like more work or work like hobbies in the other time instead of more leisure.

That is entirely independent of working shorter hours though.

I'm a contractor because I work remotely for a foreign company, and they denied me paid holidays with this argument. The cost of vacation is proportional to worked hours. There's a lot of questionable math in HR land though.

I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.

Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?

> What you just described (so vividly) is meaning

In line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.

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