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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

This article makes me think of the time I spent several hours discussing with my grandparents, on how they survived in the 50s, 60s in the UK.

At first I was shocked about how my grandfather could finish up his work as a joiner, and then spend another week going around shipyards, factories and other places looking for work.

When my granny had my mum she only took two weeks off to look after her. Then started working part time as a seamstress.

I asked them if they ever felt sad or depressed and they flat out said no. They said they didn't have the time to be like that.

I wonder if I would have been the same if I time travelled back to that era.

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I've heard this line of reasoning before, and it glosses over a lot of the traditional downsides of this lifestyle - things like extremely heavy drinking and public or domestic violence. You got a "tighter" community at the expense of extreme conformism socially enforced.

This is a very good point.

I think another factor is the type of Jobs. Joiner and Seamstress are jobs which create something useful.

Many jobs today do not create such obvious value, people see numbers on a system change and are in constant competition with their peers - opposed to "enough work for everyone.

I write code for a college and manage their MIS - there are days that are great where I see the value I am providing and problem solving.

Then there are days where I feel so powerless and trapped by the system and I can do nothing about the issues I have with this job (lazy co-workers, managers not including target audience in the development, no technical specs/generic wire frames I need to fill out to an entire project, project manager having 0 technical proficiency) all because this place is a minefield of regulation over performance.

Indeed. This is part of the whole "bullshit jobs" line of inquiry; also "emotional labour".

> trapped by the system and I can do nothing about the issues I have with this job

You've been given just enough autonomy to take psychological responsibility for how the thing turns out, but not enough autonomy to actually make it happen. A common route to misery and self-blame.

If you'd grown up in that environment, then yes, of course you would be the same as them back then. Genetics certainly hasn't changed much in two generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

I don't think memetics is applicable in this case since the idea assumed he was born and raised back when his grandparents were. (Same sperm and egg, different culture.) Maybe you're right about epigenetics though, I don't know enough about that.

It's poorly understood and not a given in the sense that we don't know that it would be different.

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