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Comment by vox_mollis | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as very odd.

For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually rose with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.

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EDIT: The sub-thread poster kind of hit on similar issues to mine - just a different take, then:

Most posters below conflate or ignore two major aspects in their examples:

1. Physical vs. intellectual work. I had a few almost-sleepless nights over the length of my career, worrying whether my proposed (being implemented) architecture/solution would scale. Long-term mentall stress like this can lead to psychological issues, even depression. I am not saying physical work is a bed of roses, but when you stop working, you don' take your work to bed with you. And when you are physically tired, you actually sleep better.

2. Working for yourself vs. making someone else richer through your (unpaid) sacrifice. Working on a farm is never ending, yes, but you own the farm and all the extra work benefits YOU.

Some argue our hunter-gatherer ancestors had far more leisure time than us. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

There is an insidious survivorship bias here: all that leisure time was only enjoyed by the ones who survived.

A society where the mean lifetime is 35 that works 20 hours per week gives people significantly less total leisure time than a society where the mean lifetime is 85 that works 50 hours per week.

Or in other words: all those dead infants got no leisure time at all.

In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer. If you're a farmer, woodworker, etc. you still need a separate place of work from where you live, be it a workshop or the fields. In the evening when the farmer returns to his house to rest, there is no question he's done for the day, and he can fully relax and sleep.

The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.

what about the mending of things around the house or the keeping of animals?

Done for the day? Relax and sleep? Ha ha, I can tell you've never taken care of farm animals. What happens when they get sick, or have babies, or get loose, or a storm suddenly blows in, etc?

* farmer ... separate place of work from where you live*

For quite a lot of human history, and still in some countries, farm animals were kept at home. The "done for the day" was enforced as much by the lack of electric lighting as anything else.

In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer.

Software development is not a special occupational snowflake, and I'm going to guess that you've never been within the property boundaries of an actual farm, let alone actually done farm work. Your job is interwoven into your live so much because you choose to allow it, and don't know when to say "no" to your boss. Close your laptop. There, work's over. Farm work? Yeah, well, those fences aren't going to mend themselves.

You don't live at the office, do you? Not metaphorically, I mean literally sleep there. No? Guess where the farmer sleeps? At work. Every day. Extrapolate from there.

At the same time, you probably own the farm if you're living on it. Someone who's doing unpaid overtime for their company isn't getting any benefits from it.

I can't help but think that the key here isn't Software vs everything else, but level of abstraction. It really seems the with software, and much computer driven work, your work as well as your products exist as purely abstracted projects. Woodworking requires abstract thinking, but the end result is usually something made out of wood, or the conclusion that you can't make what you were thinking about out of wood.

I do plenty of woodworking, including woodworking with CNC/Software. But, I do know when I'm done with a project because the abstractions are over, the plans are drawn and implemented, and the project is built. Then, its done.

Almost any work in history had and 'end', i.e. you could finish it. You can almost never finish a software project, you can always work more. That makes a huge psychological difference.

There's nothing special about software. There are tons of finished software projects, many of which I worked on. There are probably more finished software projects out there than projects currently under development.

"Almost any work in history had and 'end', i.e. you could finish it."

I'm unsuccessfully trying to think of any examples. Fine arts painting, maybe?

"gather eggs from the chickens"?

Oh, you'll get another batch in almost exactly one day. There's lots of mythology about the chicken cycle (as if theres only one "chicken") being 25 or 27 hours vs our wall time clock, and chickens don't live forever, but...

Same line of thinking WRT military, farming, etc.

On a very small scale I'll never type that specific line of code again, probably.

There are very few ways to earn a living that don't terminate the procedure with "repeat from beginning of procedure"

No, that's not what we're talking about. You gather eggs until there are no more eggs in the coop. That task has an end, and then you are finished. You may begin a similar task again at a later period.

If you were asking about a job where you do it once and it stays done permanently forever, that's silly, and it's not what the guy you replied to was referring to.

PhD research?

And you never finish gathering food. As soon as you do, you eat it and you need more.

You can certainly finish gathering food for the day/week/month/season. Knowing that you're gathing at X bushels per time period and you need Y bushels to finish out the season, it's pretty easy to figure out when work is over for the day, even if there is "technically" more to do (there's always more to do everywhere in every business that isn't bankrupt and closed, that doesn't mean every hour of every employees day requires more contributions of labor)

There was no food preservation though.

There was all manner of food preservation. Smoke it, salt it, pickle it, ferment it, dry it, thresh it and bag it up in cold storage.

Well that might be true, but when you're at home you have more choices of what you can be doing at any one moment, and too much choice can be stressful. Also when you're at work you have more external pressure from your peers to get busy, while at home you need to be more self-motivated, which is more mentally difficult.

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