Comment by Noumenon72 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Noumenon72 | Hacker News Reader

I never had a career, but I took a break anyway after 14 years as a plastics factory worker. Mine stretched to 2.5 years since I could afford it. I'm now in my second month as a junior Java developer. This makes more sense than the sabbatical, since I had no skills or connections to get stale.

I have to say the benefits really did make me a better deal as an employee. I basically went from someone who did things because he had to, just fitting everything in around work, to someone who pursued his own goals. Now that I'm back at work, I don't constantly lose sleep till I have to rush to work at the last minute; I schedule things so I don't have to, and I got my sleep habits under control. I don't bike to work just because I need some way to keep from getting fat; I sought out active, fun hobbies I can still engage in, like ice skating. I don't beat myself up all the time for being lazy; I have my own strategies now for getting myself to put in time on the right projects and not let things slip away. I also used to have trouble just getting basic things done like phone calls and finding a tailor; with my time off, I got things done and gained confidence that I could get any errand done.

I also feel so much more independent now. Google Maps plus free time to explore means I found so many wilderness sites and activities. Internet reading about joints plus time to work on the exercises mean any ache or pain that comes up is something I can solve. Compared to the time I tore a back muscle falling into a railcar, when all I could do is try to reduce the activities that caused me nerve damage and hope I got better, I'm so much better equipped to take care of my own health.

tl;dr Having full responsibility for yourself is great. I did a lot of things it would have been too late for in retirement, and the best part is the habits I learned when I had time are now ingrained enough I can do them even while working full time.

Are you also getting paid more in your new job? If so, how much of the change in your life is due to this. E.g. you might be able to buy time with money when previously you just had to rush.

It's a shame that we have built a society where time is something you have to buy instead of a plentiful resource that everyone shares in. (I suppose you could say the same for food, shelter, and clean water.)

The price for having time as a plentiful resource is to starve periodically for lack of food, watch helplessly as loved ones die for causes you don't understand, and in general consider impossible anything that can't be achieved with sticks, stones, ropes, animal tendons and leather.

Do you really believe that if a society would prioritize time over "work-is-life" and/or materialism it would lead to some kind of a stone age society, or are you just provokingly dogmatic?

Yes, I do think that somehow we've been screwed starting from agriculture, and that societies where people have lots of free time are basically hunters and gatherers societies.

This doesn't mean that we won't get that again in the future thanks to some technological advancement. But that opens a completely different kind of issues.

Do you have anything to back this theory up? If our working time hasn't changed throughout the productivity gains during the 20th century there are other forces at play, namely political.

No. And I guess the same could be said for the opposite theory.

But just look around you: everything that is man made has taken an enormous amount of effort and accumulated knowledge. It's not been made by people who worked three hours per day devoting the rest to socialisation and a painting lessons. The people who invented antibiotics worked their asses off in university and laboratories to find a way for other people to survive infections. All the tools that they were using have been invented by people literally living in their shops and laboratories, and mass produced in factories, keeping their availability high and their price low. If you take any situation or object in your life and follow backwards the chain of work and invention that has been needed to design it, produce it and keep it working, you realise that this chain has required an enormous amount of effort by everybody involved.

This might be the relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1741/

You seem to be confusing free time with unproductive time and at the same time singing the gospel of hard work as a virtue.

Reading this I'm surprised that you're not more worried about the thousands of great minds lost having to work hard their whole lives.

Sorry, I hadn't seen the second part of your comment.

Our working time hasn't changed throughout the enormous productivity gains of the 20th century. But the amount and quality of available products has. It's hugely superior.

Maybe you could work one hour per day in our present time and have the same products available that you had in the year 1900. But would you? Or would you end up asking someone to work just that one more hour when it's for a good cause - some life to save, some impressive machine to build, someone waiting in a queue, having fresh bread on Sundays or bringing you to some holiday destination in August?

My underlying point is that work is not an end in itself. Reducing coerced work, be it political, social or economical coercion, means more time to follow whatever passions one has, even if some of those passions may be things that you consider unproductive. For others, that extra time could mean another Einstein instead of a patent clerk with a less lenient boss than were the case.

Teenagers generally have plentiful time, what percentage of them spend it working productively (without coercion)?

Do they really? Most countries have a quite elaborate schooling system in place to keep teenagers busy. Or do you think that one should be "productive" throughout the day otherwise it's a vice?

Lots of holidays though, and no overtime.

Except in this case, it means a salaried worker who guarantees a certain amount of labor for a certain amount of pay, "buying" back their labor commitment by returning some of that salary.

Why is it a shame that food, shelter and clean water have to be bought? They are cheap (well, shelter can differ) isn't that enough?

It can mean that, but I primarily meant other things: you can buy back your time by hiring a house cleaner, or eating out more often, or buying labour saving gadgets, and probably in various other ways.

Because it means that the amount of free time people have (for mental or physical relaxation, spending with loved ones, personal [non-employment-related] study) depends on how easily you can part with some of your money. If you believe, as I do, that the amount of wealth people enjoy is in many cases a result of luck -- luck in who raised you and where, luck in the stock market, luck in genetics -- then it starts to seem wrong to distribute "time" in exchange for money.

That's a feature of physics, not vague notions around what "we" have built. Time is and can never be "plentiful" nor "shared in". Everybody has a limited amount of time which is theirs and theirs alone, and what you do with it matters - it's called opportunity cost. When you spend a large amount of time on something, it's not unreasonable to consider whether it was worth it (although that worth can reasonably be measured along other axes than money).

I doubt time has ever been a plentiful resource for humans.

Numerous studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies only had to spend a few hours a day getting food and shelter.

The rest was leisure time.

But under those societies the world only supported a few million people.

Feature!

Under those societies it could. And there was little endogenous reason why that might suddenly change.

We've retained all the same exogenous risks, and added considerably more endogenous ones to boot.

Also, life was brutal and short.

You're not wrong to ask if my new time use comes from my new living situation. It's inherently easier to work out and do errands when you're not working 12-hour night shifts. B Also I've just got more motivation while building a new life.

It's true that I buy time with money now when I never used to (I made 25-35% less but saved enough to cover the years off without touching my retirement). I think it's temporary while I have such extreme studying/shopping demands from the new job, and I will eventually have time to shop around again.

One change is that I spend less time on video games because I realized while I had two years off that I was not getting around to them not because I didn't have time, but because they weren't my favorite thing to do in reality.

> One change is that I spend less time on video games because I realized while I had two years off that I was not getting around to them not because I didn't have time, but because they weren't my favorite thing to do in reality.

Wow, this really clicked with me.

Games had always been a big part of my down time, often as a platform to stay in touch with friends from my home town after moving away.

My interest and enjoyment came in waves, based on what we were playing, outside life and a bunch of other factors. I did notice though, that the amount of time I spent didn't really relate to how much I actually enjoyed the games (or gaming in general).

I realised I didn't actually like playing games as much as I thought. I started pulling apart exactly what I _did_ enjoy, and what was actually tied to gaming (vs something I can achieve / obtain elsewhere).

First, I stopped buying single player games. The social side was a big part of why I liked games, and most single player games I do play, I don't finish. They're generally from a friend's recommendation, so I've started borrowing games from them once they've finished. It seems to avoid the hype train too. ("No Man's Sky was fun for a few hours, but you'll get bored. Try this instead.")

I love the aesthetics and creativity of games, and a lot of my enjoyment comes from just experiencing and absorbing that. I'm sure the SEGA and Nintendo sound chips constantly chirping from my TV set up the brain pathways that make me enjoy repetitive Techno so much now.

I've gone from playing guitar, to a stable of synthesizers and samplers. When an old NES tune pops into my head, I'll start jamming rather than fire up a game I've finished a dozen times.

I don't know if there was a point to that ramble, I just thought I'd share.

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