How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays | Hacker News Reader

How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays

nytimes.com

64 pointsup_and_up71 comments

Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's pretty troubling to me that 27% of the surveyed men were watching TV at 2 in the afternoon. I'm intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and especially the effect that it could have on allowing people to pursue risky or creative projects. I'm very much not intrigued by a quarter of the population watching daytime TV.

1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not have a primary activity of looking for a new job.

2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.

>U6

Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D

http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

> 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't.

Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post.

There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work.

There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history).

Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work.

I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness.

This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...

>There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness.

And there are also people with crippling depression, fibromyalgia, and/or pain disorders.

>I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness.

Maybe it's better in the UK, but in many countries, employers simply don't want to hire someone with a history of chronic semi-disability. This can be particularly bad in the United States, where disability and health insurances are provided by the employer instead of the state.

We do have social security disability provided by the state.

I myself have quite severe Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.

Among my symptoms are visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions (other than paranoid delusions), depression which can be suicidal, actual suicide attempts - no suicide completions so far :-D - a euphoric state known as mania, which can feel good to some extent but, when extreme, is far worse than all the other symptoms - sleep disturbances (at times insomnia, other times hypersomnia), catatonia and flat affect, that is, an inability to outwardly express my emotions. My flat affect makes it difficult to connect to other people, which itself can lead to depression.

However, the specific reason that I work as a coder, is that computer programming accomodates my illness in a way that physics does not. (My degree is in Physics, not Computer Science.)

I hated coding with a passion at my first full-time programming job, I wasn't any good at it, and fully intended to do just about anything else once I was able to find a "real job".

However I happened to notice that I could still write software even when I was floridly paranoid. I mean like that NAZIs having Panzer exercises in the office parking lot. I didn't see any soldiers or weaponry when I looked directly out the window but when I turned away I could feel their presence.

I decided to stick with programming in part because of that, as well as some other reasons.

These days I am contemplating going back to complete my Physics PhD. What I find these days is rampant age discrimination, as well as no one believing that my resume is for real.

I wrote my first computer program in 1976, in FORTRAN, with a pencil on a coding form, then typed it into a paper teletype terminal, where it ran on an IBM 360 mainframe. That box was so expensive that the University of Idaho had just that one computer for the entire campus to share. I'm pretty sure it had magnetic core memory.

Correction: There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work long term.

But I don't know what the numbers look like at any given point in time. I imagine someone who understands the U1-6 scale would probably have a slightly better view.

But my point was merely because a study that says overall people who don't have jobs watch tv shouldn't be taken as a statement of unemployed laziness until someone has actually taken demographic data of the people within that group, as "unemployed" is a huge group. I can think of numerous possibly-counted-as-unemployed groups where one of the few common denominator activities would be TV, like, say, students.

>we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness.

We do. In fact, many people who I personally know have gotten off social security and back into the workforce. People with mental illness. They even allow you to make a small amount of money while collecting social security to get some people slowly back in the workforce. In fact, I would say most people I know returned to the workforce. I'd like to see some stats on that.

It is a very complicated situation with a lot of variables. I think wage stagnation and a decrease in collective bargaining may be a part of it.

At the moment a quarter of the population spends their time watching TV and society has a costly bureaucratic infrastructure to funnel money around a variety of government agencies to and for these people. (I have some experience with the English system and that feels decidely sub-optimal.)

So, in the new system you'd still have a quarter of the population watching TV but you'd also have a bunch of bureaucrats and money free to spend on, say, healthcare and health promotion.

I accept that I am overly optimistic about this.

If someone's work has close to zero or negative value, who cares if they're watching TV as opposed to digging up holes and filling them in?

There's a saying: idle hands do the devil's work. Nobody here puts any stock in traditional experience and understandings, but I don't think the idea was conjured out of thin air.

Also, while I'm burning karma: the point at which 50% of men are awake is 39 minutes later than for women, and the point at which 50% of each sex are asleep is only 13 minutes earlier for women. I.e. men are sleeping substantially longer, in addition to watching a lot more TV and doing a lot less housework, shopping, and child/elder-care. Says a lot about how our culture coddles men.

Coddles some men. You know statistics better than this.

Care to poll a coal mine or oil rig?

The fact that men overall are coddled does not mean that every man is coddled.

The societal expectation is that men do hard/dangerous work, while women do housework and childcare. Technology has automated away most of the former jobs, such that only a tiny minority of men are working in a coal mine or oil rig. Technology has yet to do much to automate childcare. The result has been a windfall for men--they have five more hours of leisure time per week than women.[1] Judging by these statistics of the non-employed, I imagine such trends will only be magnified with increased automation, and under policies like guaranteed minimum income.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...

Did you read your own link? It adds up paid work, housework and child care, and shows that the total is 45.6 hours for men and 45.2 hours for women. It doesn't say what women are doing in those five hours they don't spend on leisure (personal care? sleeping?), but we do know that it is not childcare or housework, which invalidates your entire argument.

If you click through to the Pew study and look at the definitions of the categories, housework + childcare isn't all-inclusive of things that women do disproportionately. E.g. it doesn't include shopping, which shows up in the un-employed article significantly, and among working class people is mostly a chore (grocery shopping, kids' clothes, etc). The definition of "childcare" also doesn't include "the kid is sleeping, but I can't leave a toddler in the house alone and have lunch with my friends."

Indeed, if you add up work + leisure, and subtract out 8 hours a day of sleep, there's 32 hours a week left over for men, and 38 left over for women. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this time precludes leisure activities because of the "on call" nature of being the primary care-giver.

Moreover, simply adding up housework + childcare time doesn't quite capture the situation. Spending a day taking care of a kid is much more exhausting than working at a typical white-collar job. It's blue-collar work that cuts across the economic classes in a world where most men aren't doing blue-collar work. Last year I had a 9-5, while my wife had a busier schedule. So I'd cook and watch our daughter until she got home. At 8:00 when my wife got home, she had much more energy for leisure activity. I'm a guy who regularly works 70-80 hour weeks, but a day taking care of our toddler puts me right out.

Is daytime tv really worse than hacker news?

It's no worse than reddit, but it is a marker of low class status.

Right on the money.

Many factors can be the cause of this:

You're not really free to pursue long term projects since you have to be available to work/look for a job. You are also stressed because the future is very uncertain. You do not earn money so you have to do activities that are really cheap. You are looking for a job, but a lot of that is just waiting for replies on resumes you have sent out. There is also some social isolation because of the negative stigma that comes with being unemployed.

An example: It's hard to start a business with no money, that you might have to give up next week because you might have a job then and won't have the time for it. It's not making any money yet and you need to pay the bills! You need to focus on looking for a job. Meeting the right people would help get it started, only you're socially isolated and most people are working during the week. You can't think of all that right now. Your mind is preoccupied with job and money related worries. You watch some TV while you wait for replies from companies, it's free and stops your mind from worrying.

This is why wage subsidy (or, related, a job guarantee) is way better than a guaranteed income.

If you only hang out with over-achievers, you might be able to convince yourself that, once freed from the need to earn income, people will become super productive. (Although my own experience at MIT, over-achievers all, was that many people will stop working if they can.)

And once you have defined the ground-floor as people sitting around watching TV and playing video games, what kind of lifestyle do you have for the people manning the fast food restaurants being patronized by those video game players?

My impression is that the proponents of guaranteed minimum income would blame the current system on all that TV watching.

People right now would sometimes be discouraged from earning a little money if it reduces benefits. What else can be done? Volunteering, experimenting, even education (if not 100% applicable for job-hunt) is not encouraged or regarded highly as people are under pressure to find work. Finally, being unemployed is automatically a failure on some level, and if that persists, hopelessness and maybe a mild depression might set in.

So the idea would be to remove that pressure and see if people are really intrinsically lazy, or in general let's see if that changes society in a cool way.

Maybe some stable, smaller country could go ahead and try it out?

The penalty for riding the TriMet MAX light rail without a ticket is a $170.00 citation.

I ride without paying all the time. I just dress respectably. Like today I'm wearing a dress shirt and silk necktie.

I've never been cited. I got caught red-handed once by a cop; when I told him I was on my way to see my doctor, he pulled a transit pass out of his pocket, popped it in the validation machine, handed it to me then requested I pay for my future train rides.

The main reason I do ride around the trains without paying, is that I am more effective at looking for a job when I take the train to downtown Portland. Most of the places I've lived around here haven't been so conducive to my work productivity.

To be clear, I do pay when I can. Just today I bought a two-week pass.

When I get some steady work, I'm going to send a big fat check to the TriMet board, along with a letter of apology.

Hacker News -> Reddit -> Stack Overflow -> Repeat

Don't forget Kuro5hin!

I had the idea I'd be able to attract some consulting clients if I answered lots of questions at StackOverflow.

I expect that would work well were I to keep it up, but after just one day of devoted overflowing, I came to the conclusion that my brain would explode were I to persist.

Does this work for anyone other than the top few posters?

I have quietly accumulated 13k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I don't think it's much use to me.

I have been contacted by several (!) recruiters of Google after answering some very specific questions about a distributed consensus protocol (Paxos). I can imagine they rather search for specific topics / keywords than reputation, using the logic "if he can get the accepted answer on these topics, he might be worth checking out".

I myself once scored a firewire consulting contract as a direct result of answering question's on Apple's firewire developer list.

However that contract came several years after I answered the question.

To the extent I do stuff like post to stackoverflow, I don't expect it to pay off soon.

My observation after just one day of very determined SO posting, was that if I persisted like that for about a week, I would be the #1 poster for that week.

I expect that I could stay in the top ten over a long period of time with far less sustained effort.

The reason I didn't persist was that I wasn't able to get anything else done.

When StackOverflow first arrived on the scene, I spent a bunch of time trying to catch Jon Skeet. I found that answering the questions was a great way of procrastinating, and in some ways, good therapy for dealing with a tedious work environment. While I found it satisfying to start with, eventually I realized that it was just an impedance on my work day and there were many more interesting endeavors to pour my energy into.

Stackoverflow makes it difficult to hire people. (I've tried and given up.) There is no way to send somebody a private message saying "You obviously know what you are doing here. Can I pay you a lot of money to do that for me?"

Isn't that the point of careers.stackexchange.com?

Your post made me sad, as I was momentarily reminded of K5, and needed to check it out to make sure it was still dead. And then of course I went on to try Memepool as well, but that site doesn't even respond anymore.

I'm too young to feel this nostalgic about websites.

Just yesterday I got some spam from fark. My ex was heavily into fark back in the day.

It's not so much that I was nostalgic for fark. Finding its spam in my inbox, reminded me of the love Bonita and I once had.

"But employers might want to look at your SO score when you apply for a job!"

This seems to be the bad result of people turning gamification into real world results: you encourage people to pour lots of resources into a metric to get the real world result, which might be a complete waste of time.

A better recruiting tactic would be to find someone who answered so much as one question, then examine the quality of their answer.

Suppose someone posted Fermat's Last Conjecture to Stackoverflow, in hopes of getting advice as to how to prove it. Were someone to produce that proof, they would be demonstrating their superiority to three hundred years of the world's very finest mathematicians.

But yes, my experience is completely correct - to the extent someone looks for stuff like stackoverflow at all, all they want to know is that I've answered something, even if my answer was stupid.

My pet peeve is that online application forms commonly as for my "github". How about my sourceforge? How about the repository that I host myself?

I expect that most of those who request my github don't really know the difference between a github and a hubcap.

What chart API is it used in the article? Highcharts?

http://d3js.org/

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Edit : this was actually a rendering issue on my browser as pointed out by desdiv.

It's 5:18 AM here on the Left Coast. I haven't slept yet, despite that I have two telephone interviews this afternoon.

Do you, perhaps subconsciously, prefer the night hours to the day? Can you hypothesize why?

When you have kids, you'll understand. I do my best engineering after bedtime, not exactly voluntarily. (edited to add, and after they are old enough for school)

I suppose for people who aren't "into" computers, they'll do whatever floats their boat after kids bedtime.

Have a look at http://www.circadiandisorders.org/

I do indeed prefer the night hours, however I am often up during the day. I enjoy the mornings, but only when I've been up all night. I don't enjoy the morning if I've slept then gotten up early.

I'm pretty sure I have quite an advanced case of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. DSPS is an endocrine condition that has to do with when the pineal gland secretes melatonin, or does not. Melatonin production is cyclic, with the cycle being mostly but not all the way synchronized by exposure to light.

In my case my sleeping and waking hours are so irregular that I may actually have "free-running non-24-hour delayed sleep phase syndrome". However that particular kind is thought to occur only among those who are profoundly blind. Most blind people can sense the presence or absence of light, but a very few have no perception of it at all.

My preference for the night, I expect, has mostly to do with it being the time that I have the most peace of mind. There is something about daylight that makes me anxious. I can't really explain why.

Eh? The clinical classification for the majority of blind people(clinical blindness not legal blindness) is NLP which stands for NO LIGHT PERCEPTION. I also find this whole syndrome a bit funny, i sometimes flip my day also you know why? because i can send the GF to bed and watch my shit in peace then realize it's 4am and sleep till 11-12 (after programming the mail client to send couple of emails in the morning as in pretending to be working from home). Besides being lazy and a bit of a bad boyfriend i don't really see this as a clinical syndrome.

People can sense some light using their skin, which the prompts production of vitamin D and melanin.

Thats nonsense melanin and vitamin D production is not promoted by exposure to "light". Melanogenesis happens when skin cells are exposed to UV light which the human eye cannot see in the first place. UV light exposure only happens when you are outside as glass blocks UV light. This is like saying blind people can see light because they can feel the warmth of the sun. Even if blind people could sense melanin being generated (which they obviously can't) you would have to expose them to so much UV light that they will feel it by being burnt and not by sensing it on some mystical cellular level. And Vitamin D? that's even more far fetched than the melanin theory...

Some clinically blind people with no eye damage do maintain the ability to distinguish between light and dark, that's due to certain cells in the cornea which are light sensitive and still maintain a neural connection to the brain.

People who are legally blind say a really bad case of cataract sill have light vision and usually can identify shapes and see a very very blurry and narrow image of their environment but those are not clinically blind.

> My preference for the night, I expect, has mostly to do with it being the time that I have the most peace of mind. There is something about daylight that makes me anxious. I can't really explain why.

This is what I expected, actually. At night you know that nothing is going to happen, nobody is going to call, and nobody is waiting for you to do anything, because they are sleeping. I wonder if this connection between anxiety and sleep patterns has been explored; not the usual "anxiety keeps you up at night", where you're lying in bed worrying, but "anxiety makes you want to stay up at night", where you're staying up and finally relaxing.

I have at various times in my life enjoyed an unrestricted schedule and each time reverted to a just-before-dawn bedtime. This preference is an enormous factor in my daily life, since, obviously, such an arrangement is impossible in most careers. So I'm never, ever tired when I should be, frequently sleepy when it's inconvenient, and always, always, always, fighting against my body's inclinations.

When you don't have to wake up early in the morning, it's easy to let your sleep routine slip.

You're seeing a rendering error. This is what the graph is supposed to look like: http://i.imgur.com/xLEu0yM.png

The error on my browser (Firefox 34) made it look like 80% of the people were asleep by 9PM, hilariously enough. This is the erroneous rendering on my end: http://i.imgur.com/dOEWFkP.png

You're right, the graph looks ok for a few split seconds and then have a weird offset to the right.

Where do you see that?

Hanging out at Hacker News.

Would that count as Education or Leisure ?

Addiction.

It is readily apparent to me that Hacker News has been a serious problem for me for several weeks now.

There are so very many fascinating articles and essays, you see. The result is that I experience persistent headaches, no amount of sleep makes me feel rested, and I haven't been submitting any resumes.

I love HN, I really do, but if I keep hanging out here, if I don't actually have a brain hemorrhage I'm going to starve to death in the cold.

I'm not kidding about this.

I have lots of real life experience with people who were addicted to cocaine, crack, alcohol even heroin.

My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs.

> My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs.

Except the fact that you can just stop doing it at any time with literally zero physical side-effects.

Don't understand why you're being downvoted; that's exactly right. This is not like cocaine, heroin, or crystal. If anything, it's more like weed.

The psychological craving may be similar, sure. It's habit forming, not physically addictive.

Habit-forming things can definitely be harmful to one's life, and can be extremely hard to stop for some people without external aid. Just because it doesn't outright physically hurt you ("only" psychologically for a while) doesn't mean it is not an issue that requires attention.

HN, along with soylent news, kuro5hin, some mailing lists, reddit from time to time, all together are quite definitely physically hurting me.

It's not so much that I don't get enough sleep as that it is so irregular, and that I don't find sleep to be restful. Also I get persistent headaches; analgesics don't help, I just blew through a whole bottle.

My friend, if you seriously feel this way, try asking people in your direct surroundings for help. If you have family or close friends, you can let them know you need ("would like", "could use", "wanna try", "see if maybe it would work", ...) their help getting rid of an addiction. No shame, especially not with a drug as light as this one.

"What is it?" - "Internet forums, they take up all my time and I can't stop, " + the real life problems you're experiencing.

If you can't think of someone right now, feel free to shoot me an e-mail (in profile). I won't be able to make you do stuff, but we can talk.

I don't mean to make light of your personal issues, but I don't think the Hacker News comment section for this article is the appropriate place to be discussing them. I wish you luck in dealing with your affliction, and suggest that speaking to a mental health professional would be a better outlet for you. If you really needed to talk to people here about it, then I'd recommend making a new thread, perhaps linking to blog post or something of that matter you wrote describing your addiction, rather than hijacking the comments section here, which I think is being a bit disrespectful to the rest of the HN userbase.

I'd like to ask you to reconsider your approach to people who talk about psychological problems. I understand what you're saying, and from the looks of the upvotes, you're not alone.

However, a common thought for people who experience issues like these is that they bother other people. Their problem is not important, they are being a burden onto others, &c. This leads them to reach out only very late, sometimes not at all. That's why suicide hotlines (just an example, clearly not the case for op) are so adamant about their "we'll just listen, feel free to talk, we won't call the cops" policy.

So, to the OP, and to anyone else with similar issues reading this: feel free to reach out, please do, it's no burden.

To anyone else: yes, it's a hijack, but please consider ignoring it and just letting it sit naturally at the 1 point bottom of the thread. Downvoting and explicitly mentioning how these cries for help are "inappropriate" or otherwise negative, while conforming to the guidelines, can have a bad effect. Both on the poster, and other readers who identify. I'd posit it's worth it to just ignore, in this case.

Thanks.

Most drugs are not strongly physically addictive. Most drggs have short risk-free withdrawal times. Alcohol is rare in being a drug that has a risky withdrawal that needs medical supervision - and even that's for people who are on the very heavy end of the drinkijg spectrum. (A litre of spirits with an ABV of 40% per day is what you need to get a medically supervised withdrawal in England. That's about 33 US fluid ounces per day). People can be having serious problems with drink and mot reach that threshold.

Saying "you can just quit" ignores the severe trouble that a few people find themselves in with things that are not physically addicting.

Telling someone with a gambling addiction that they could just stop is an over-simplification. It's such an over-simplification that it's dumb, and thus it's not surprising a few people felt it needed a downvote.

There is a reason those who work in addiction medicine (and addicts themselves) call the 3-10 days of physical withdrawal the easy part. We can probably achieve 100% success with it. A few days of pain and discomfort and you're done with the physical part...forever. Real addiction, neurological addiction, is a totally different story. It's totally understandable that many people have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, because addiction is a bizarre brain disorder...like Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran case study bizarre. All your intuitive notions on the brain are forced to go out the window if you honestly investigate it acedemically.

Please though, blow your mind by reading about it...not experiencing it.

Immediately after college I quit drinking coffee. For fourteen years afterward I always had a feeling of incompleteness, something felt missing whenever I was in a relaxed state, like there was something I was missing/needed to do, but could not put my finger on the cause. I often considered the source of this phantom yearning and speculated whether I was exposed to crack in one of the roach apartments I afforded in college; perhaps my mom was more of a hippy while I was gestating than has been shared; perhaps I was a junky in a former life...

All of these thoughts were immediately vanquished when I was visiting Hawaii and somebody convinced me I had to try their delicious Kona coffee. Within a few seconds of the first sip I felt like I had been waiting for that sip my entire life. It felt as if an unfulfillable hole in my soul had been filled. T^hank god it's legal, I guess.

Don't even get me started on the 24 hours of absolute misery after giving up sugar AND caffeine on that fateful day in 1994...

Have you tried turning on "noprocrast" in your user settings? (and possibly fiddling with the related values below it) Works for me.

I never noticed that. Thanks, I'll go turn it on.

  127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
  127.0.0.1 reddit.com

etc.

Or maybe even socialising?

Or, if you're employed, "working"!

I apologize for hijacking the thread, that was very, very off-topic of me.

After I take a phone call I'm expecting, I'm going to head home, catch some ZZZs, as well as call my shrink. I'm not sure if I'll call her before I sleep, or tomorrow.

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