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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

This is a sad state of affairs. We all should be working 40 hours weeks and take the honest time off for the remaining 128 hours in that week.

(The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)

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I know plenty of people who refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks. They'll never be renowned for their research, and they're not likely to get rich.

If someone wants to become "great", it almost always comes at some expense to their personal lives; if this is a trade-off they're willing to make, all the power to them.

As far as children go, I'm not concerned with the typical number of hours they go through (in the U.S.) in their education. You really think it's too much? Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things.

I don't think so. We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great. And we can't have everyone sacrifice their life. It makes no sense if you look at it from this standpoint.

"Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things."

That's because education doesn't work. You can make them "study" 80 hours weeks and they will not know or understand anything. They don't have time for that! They have to study.

The only way to understand something is to relax and see the big picture. You can't see the larger picture from inside the treadmill.

> We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great.

I don't think you are actually expressing a coherent desire. To paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles: "If everyone's great, no one is."

I disagree. Suppose you increase the baseline “greatness” of humanity on the whole, so that the average person compares to the greats of the past, and the greats of the present are greater still.

Do you think hyper-specialization could enable this?

I believe making everything simple, accessible and easy to understand can enable this. As opposed to knowledge enclosed in arcane tomes in the library only accessible to those in the inner circle.

You really think it's too much? Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things.

You know, I don't think that's an issue with how much time they are or aren't spending studying, at least from a nationwide perspective.

This is horseshit.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. All the grad students I've known tend to find plenty of time to socialize, if they want to. They just think about schedules in different terms than most people with jobs. A grad student will have some sort of deadline (a paper to submit, a conference to prepare for, etc) and won't hesitate to spend an entire holiday working on it. But then when it's done, they'll throw a party or go camping or whatever, and they'll still take out time here or there for dinner/movie/exercise/etc. along the way.

A friend was telling me that his kids' school (his kids are 5 and 7) has decided to give out extra homework for all students, a minimum of 4 hours per night, to help them get used to the workload as the progress through their education. I fail to see how this sort of practice helps create productive citizens. A lot of people I know were burnt out on anything that required reading, science or math before they even graduated/left high school. Education as we know it is no longer pushing society forward, it is holding us back in a very serious way.

some people would honestly rather be thinking about advancing the sum of human knowledge. for those people, an academic career is an outlet.

> (The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)

I'm sure you want to hire the people who spent all their time slacking off?

Some things just take a lot of work. Almost no one is born into the world with an intuitive understanding of everything. If you want someone to have this understanding, those people are going to work their asses off. If they enjoy it, why are you judging?

I don't hire children. Neither should you. Children should be playing and reading and slacking off. That's what they are supposed to do.

You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off. It doesn't work that way. Working your ass off is like writing code by copy-paste. You save some time, and then boom!

> You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off

Maybe this is true if you're a savant. I'm not a savant. Everything that I really understand has thousands to tens of thousands of hours of practice and study behind it.

I'm not sure if I'm a savant/genius or if I just disagree. I've never managed to really grasp anything except by getting an intuitive grip on it, and all my research comes from that level. Yes, there's a lot of hard work involved, but there's also a diminishing returns curve where you slope off to the pub and try to just casually think about what X really is underneath all the math and abstractions.

you might be a genius! usually with me, there is an afternoon of "oh, okay, that's the idea I get it" followed by a day of happy implementation. then, a sad day of "wait, what's going on, what's wrong with my intuition" followed by perhaps a month of slog.

sort of like when I'm learning from a textbook. you read a section, say "oh huh cool okay", do one or two of the sample problems at the end of the section and say "neat". then, you flip to the chapter exercises and spend the next few days asking "oh god why".

I still have to put in all the hard work, but I actually manage to get an intuition from it.

>If they enjoy it

That's a big "if."

I take issue with the position that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Especially the notion that school should be set up such that students cannot have leisure time and be successful. If someone wants to make that sacrifice, more power to them. But it shouldn't be required or expected just to achieve/maintain a comfortable life.

I'm not saying that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Do you want leisure time? Take it! Do whatever you want.

Many people don't want it though. They would rather be working. Don't be angry when they have more success than you! They work more than you do.

I consider the "run the treadmill by choice", "want leisure time - take it, loser" attitude is actively poisonous to quality of your life in the long run.

The median result - you'll end up alone and not very much successful.

The problem with we all have slightly different or even evolving meaning behind words like "occupation", "life" and "time off".

I have had time off when I wished I was working on something awesome.

I have been working when I wished I had a life.

I have been in a place when I thought I had a life but I remained perpetually unsatisfied and even unhappy.

I have had an occupation when I saw it as my life and enjoyed it more than the traditional meaning of "time off".

All this is okay because by nature, we seem to be chasing different things at different times of time. I just think your post takes a bit too simplistic view of life.

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