The Labors of Leisure
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
I spend much of my own free time designing, writing and tinkering with things that I find interesting. To many of my coworkers, it appears that I am working, but to me it's working on something I enjoy—and more importantly things that other people may one day enjoy.
The challenge is to get more people to pick up an instrument, work on a new project, learn something new in their free time instead of starting at a television.
Let me be clear that this isn't an attack on those who find so much passion in their work that they spend the great majority of their waking hours at it. I applaud them, and wish that more people could find that passion. But every time someone comes along and proposes something like basic income (or heaven forbid, affordable health care) that would make the path towards true passion in work and leisure, they get shouted down.
Panem et circenses. Hardly a new trick, and truer now than ever.
This is indeed an interesting challenge and one I've tackled for myself over the past year or so. For me the primary distractions are games and Reddit (although I've definitely gotten quite a bit of education and professional insights from Reddit so its not all bad).
As a huge gamer growing up, I didn't think anything about unwinding by playing video games. I never in a million years thought I'd see a day where they lost a lot of their appeal, but the F2P shift has definitely accelerated that. I think it stems from the fact that I'm now significantly aware of the various hooks that go into a game to extract more money or keep me playing longer. It just killed some of the appeal. Of course, I still sunk 3-4 hours into Mount & Blade: Warband multiplayer last night, and find that round-based multiplayer games without microtransactions still hold great appeal to me.
Ultimately though, as I grow older I find myself saying "it's ok if I want to play a game now to relax, but I need to be aware that it is a conscious tradeoff between doing something fun and mindless, and doing something less fun and productive." Trying to teach myself how to code is hard work, and so it is a real mental battle for me to make myself do that sometimes, but will pay dividends down the line as I develop a new skill and gain more technical knowledge.
At the end of the day, the only one who can make me spend time doing something is myself, and once you realize your battle is with yourself and not with gaming, or TV, or any other distraction/vice, that is the first step to improvement.
Why do you think this is an important goal? If we really could have a world in which machines could do all the work, would it really be that bad if some people sat around and watched TV all day?
I certainly don't buy the argument that society would stagnate if this happened. There are many people - you and me are probably in that group - who probably wouldn't be able to sit around and do nothing all day. It just seems so boring. And if you look back in history, for example imperial England, a lot of the "idle rich" did take up the pursuit of art, science and technology.
I also really don't care what other people do with their time. First, there's a moral issue, it's not for me to decide how other people should be spending their time. And if some people want to sit around and watch TV all day, well, good for them. It's no skin off my nose.
I also know a lot of people who seem think that somehow "work" is noble and is worth pursuing as an end in itself and I really don't like this idea. It seems very analogous to management that values effort over results. And more importantly, if we dislike the idea of people being idle as a sort of moral hazard, then why isn't there a big backlash against the millionaires who've inherited their wealth, the royalty, the sheikhs of the middle east, the reality TV stars and so forth. A lot of these people seem to have money vastly disproportionate to their net contribution to society and they're able to sit around doing basically nothing. And yet it's only when the possibility of us plebs being idle comes up that we start here these cliches about hard work and dedication and so forth and everyone gets all worked up about it. Something to think about, I'd say.
The purpose of banding together in communities is to provide better lives for those who join. At the most basic level, communities provide protection against predators (and other communities!). A more sophisticated benefit comes later with specialization of labor. Recently (the last 500 years or so) significant economic advantages have been had by members of larger communities.
So if physical needs are satisfied, why shouldn't a community concern itself with other ways to make its members happier and live more fulfilled lives? That might might include finding ways to encourage members to, as the OP says, learn instruments, languages, etc.
That requires us to assert that some things (art, music, kayaking) are better than others (reality TV, talk radio). I'm OK with that.
But I'm not OK with your opinions of what activities are better than others and so I don't think it's fair for you to force it on others.
I'll take talk radio and TV over kayaking any day. You'll never get people to agree with all your thoughts. That's why we need to be free to form our own communities.
Television is much less fun than other things people can do with their free time.
Well... you know, as a journalist-type piece, did you consider going out there and, you know, asking someone?
Because all the answers that leap to mind based on what I've seen out in the world in my circle of acquaintance, which (as I don't live in the valley) is not full of computer programmers, pretty much make the piece an entire waste of time because it fundamentally misses the mark. The people complaining about not having jobs and getting their hours cut are not people who are all well-to-do and just working because "what the heck else are they going to do?".
It also boggles my mind that one could write an article like this without examining the question of marginal value of time... if one is in the "leisure class" and has a job that pays $200/hour, when examining how much the person chooses to work one can't miss the fact that they have an option to make $200/hour. It shouldn't be that surprising that one might choose to work a bit more at that valuation.
I don't think this is fair. From the original article:
> [...] the Affordable Care Act might result in millions of workers’ scaling back from full-time to part-time jobs.
The implication is that millions of workers would be voluntarily cutting back their hours, since they no longer need to be employed full-time to get health care -- not that these workers would be having their hours cut. It's people like Rand Paul and talk-show hosts who are complaining complaining that other people might start choosing to work less hours overall ("adding insult to injury").
If people who are currently fully employed choose to reduce their hours, that means more work is available for those who are interested in working more -- there's no conflict of interest here.
That said, the employer mandate has been delayed until 2015 for companies with >100 employees, and until 2016 for companies with 50-99 employees.
> Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back. [0]
I don't mean to take a position on how the changes in health care law will affect employment; but I think it's clear that the article is talking just about the forecast of voluntary reductions, along with the corresponding press.
[0]: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/jobs-leisure-...
From the OP article:
> In February he published an article in Politico celebrating a projection that the Affordable Care Act might result in millions of workers’ scaling back from full-time to part-time jobs.
From the article referenced by that passage (and linked directly from it):
> This week, America’s political class has been consumed by an intense, vitriolic debate over a single number: 2.5 million. That’s the amount by which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s signature health care law will effectively reduce the U.S. work force over the next decade. The initial Republican reaction was predictable: Pundits filled the airwaves, Cassandra-like, to paint Obamacare as the ultimate job killer. Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back.
Progress in technology is now fueled by capitalism and better productivity rather that original goal and it's sad that people have forgotten that goal.... Society needs to continue push the chnage and accept to progressively give up their jobs to machines.
No, that's actually propaganda.
The goal was always to show those pesky, skillful, artisans their true place in society. The means was to embed as much as possible of their tacit knowledge either in machines or in soft, human, procedures/standards/rules/policies. Then, the owner class would go back to control all the means of production and have the destinies of their faithful serfs on their hands.
The fact that this process brought unprecedented prosperity was a happy side effect that nobody gave much thought at the time. Then the whole process was rationalized on those bases when the social sensitivities of the serfs became too self conscious.
I'm all for it, if we can figure out some solutions to these issues!
I'm curious what gave you that impression? If you have links/references, I'm all ears.
I find this argument to be false in that I don't think people work long hours because they can't think of anything they would rather be doing.
I wonder if "work" hours are not shorter because culture dictates it, so many people shift their habits to surf the web (i.e. leisure activities) while at work. Not that they wouldn't rather meet with friends, paint a picture or whatever, but they can surf facebook from their cube.
I think you're right and this is similar to what David Graeber wrote somewhere. In former communist countries, the working class people actually had more leisure at work, except they had to pretend they don't. This was probably part of the reason why these systems were so economically inefficient, compared to first world countries.
This would be great if it was voluntary! But if it's the result of employers purposefully reducing hours for their employees with the goal of dodging providing benefits, then it's a lot less awesome. Because that means that people are going to both make less money (reduced hours) AND have to pay for health insurance out of pocket (in the exchanges). It's a double-whammy that might cause people to forego coverage; the exact opposite effect of what was intended.
There's a saying that 90% of work exists to correct other work. In software, that's certainly true. 90% of the work is maintenance, communication overhead, political positioning, and just plain cleaning up messes. 90% of the work is maintenance because almost none of the work is done right the first time.
We fill 8-10 hours, while little gets achieved, because we let The Business dictate terms (you have to use this language in which I could hire 50 mediocre developers tomorrow) and cause this arrangement in which most of the job is cleaning up crap.
So how have we compensated for the increase in productivity? Not by working less. Not by us workers being paid more more (which would, in the long term, given them leverage). Instead, the ones in charge spend this surplus on letting workplaces get monstrously inefficient. Perversely, this isn't great for shareholders but it gives a lot of power to the executives (principal-agent problem). By making work unnecessarily unpleasant, they get status and power over people, which they can use to advance their own causes, and take the lion's share of the profits from the past 35 years of technical growth.
I've enjoyed your rants, by the way :-)