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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.

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Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).

Because nearly everyone wants to feel they're contributing to society in some way. I think we agree here. I'm not saying you need a horrendous office job.

I think people care less about contributing to society and more about having something meaningful to do.

Many jobs are quite meaningless, and the only reason people work them is because they have bills to pay.

On the other hand, creative people will find something meaningful to do that may or may not ever be a contribution to society.

Work is important but labor is not, so to speak.

Work is important because we value a high quality of life. Things like comfort and shelter and medicine and protection from violence and all of the other trappings of civilization never mind luxuries like cars, Internet, cell phones, etc. These things have never existed apart from work. I keep hearing about how awful capitalism is and how absurd and morally wrong it is for humans to need to work, but no one has offered a better solution (certainly nothing that bears up to a layman’s understanding of economics). Substantiate your claims about how “absurd” things are—articulate a system that can appropriately channel resources “where they really should go” (e.g., caregivers) better than capitalism (specifically what imbues your system with more moral authority than a market? If your system depends on a majority of voters feeling the same way as you, what happens when you can’t guarantee that invariant? What happens when you realize that voters and their representatives are even less efficient at allocating resources efficiently than a market? And how does your system guard against corruption better than capitalism?).

change netflix to gaming and you might be onto something

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