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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The whole ‘we should work less’ meme strikes me as more about the meaninglessness of modern work, moreso than our desire to have more leisure time. In other words: people want more meaningful work, not merely to have less meaningless work. Maybe this is an American-centric idea, wherein your work is strongly tied to your purpose and identity, but I don’t see how you can simply brush away an activity that takes up 1/3 of your time.

The example in the article (Amazon packing plants) is perhaps the most pointless Kafkasque job one can imagine: packing boxes of mostly unnecessary consumeristic products.

Speaking only personally, but I want to be working so much that I have little leisure time, but only because the work I’m doing is fulfilling and fundamentally important. I have no desire to have more leisure time to consume content (which is what most people do: look up the hours spent watching TV/video per person, or social media usage), as I don’t think consumption activities are ultimately fulfilling.

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The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

-- Bertrand Russell, 1932 http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

People have a lot of leisure time today, so much so that Americans, on average, watch about 4 hours of television/video per day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption

I really don’t think working a 40-hour a week job is the hold up here.

> People have a lot of leisure time today, so much so that Americans, on average, watch about 4 hours of television/video per day.

You have a fundamentally different view of leisure time than what Bertrand Russel is talking about. In his view, leisure is something in which one has to be actively engaged in. Modern television, however, outsources much of this: laugh tracks are a prime example, but another example would be the BBC's Sherlock series which doesn't make it possible for the viewer to figure out "who done it", it only has Sherlock swoop in and connect dots that were never shown.

I think we are talking past each other. I interpreted the quote to mean, “if people had more time, they would be more involved in leisure activities, not simply consuming.”

As I said, I don’t think the issue is one of time. It’s more that there is a massive industrial complex pushing you to consume, click, engage, etc., while cultural movements that encourage creating things and active engagement are niche at best.

I think you misinterpreted the quote. You counter by saying people have 4 hours of time to spend watching TV.

But the quote never mentioned insufficient time, only insufficient energy.

> This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work;

This lack of energy makes people passively consume, e.g. listen to the radio (as the quote mentions), or watch TV (as you mention). Rather it's the notion that people's energy's are so drained from (often seemingly meaningless) work, that they have no desire to do anything but just consume idly. I don't know if that's true or not, but I personally do feel it is. When I'm doing 40-60 hour workweeks, I've got no desire to do anything that isn't largely passive. Whereas when I worked 20 hours at most, I was always busy teaching myself something or building something.

> Rather it's the notion that people's energy's are so drained from (often seemingly meaningless) work, that they have no desire to do anything but just consume idly. I don't know if that's true or not, but I personally do feel it is. When I'm doing 40-60 hour workweeks, I've got no desire to do anything that isn't largely passive. Whereas when I worked 20 hours at most, I was always busy teaching myself something or building something.

I've always felt like forty hours is less than ideal, but I don't see the connection with meaninglessness. During the period in my life when I had an unchallenging job[1], I found myself ravenous for active mental work after-hours: I'd learn new things in my field, read econ papers constantly[2], and it was probably the most productive adult period of my music-learning life. Now that I have an intense, very intellectually challenging job, I understand for the first time in my life why people might want to watch TV, especially at the regularity that most do it.

[1] I wouldn't describe it as meaningless, but it wasn't intellectually challenging at all

[2] I have a minor in econ, so enough to understand many papers at a relatively superficial level

> BBC's Sherlock series which doesn't make it possible for the viewer to figure out "who done it", it only has Sherlock swoop in and connect dots that were never shown

I realize this is a little off-topic, but this is something that the original Holmes did as well. Almost every story was solved because Holmes had already spent time "off-camera" doing things, or already happened to know about obscure poisons, etc. It all feels very deus-ex-machina.

It wasn't until the Agatha Christie era when it became customary for mysteries to show all of the clues that the Detective encounters to be also given to the Reader, so that the reader can try to figure it out before the detective exposes things.

>>This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work

from the previous comment

I suspect it's what media consumption does to people, along the lines of David Foster Wallace, who famously threw his TV out.

It makes it easy to experience perfection without doing anything. You can feel the perfect romance of beautiful people, and take a perfect vacation - without actively doing anything yourself.

But that raises your expectations for everything. So you don't do anything yourself anymore, you just consume.

That, combined with a meaningless work, or rather a busyness fetish (dont want to be seen as lazy even though you're not productive), creates the mordern life.

No, thank you. I take imperfection and less neuroticism (and less work hours) any day over this.

We had a rapid check of this hypothesis with unemployment high in the US. People were sitting at home with nothing to do.

Perhaps the massive jump in active leisure will suddenly manifest but so far no such thing has come to be.

I don't think people being unemployed and staying at home due to a global pandemic is remotely comparable to a situation where people were financially stable but worked less.

Go on then, tell us what factors break down. We can use other similar events to correct for them.

The fact that people don't feel free to enjoy leisure activities when their future is uncertain.

Imagine a person with health conditions that fit the high risk population of COVID mortality. Now, imagine those people with other health conditions (let's say obesity or heart disease) having a small accident that isn't life threatening but does require a trip to the hospital where they have a higher likelihood of contracting COVID.

If I'm one of those at risk people, my "active" activities are going to lean to the safer options I can find like walking or jogging. No mountain climbing, kayaking, skiing, and so forth.

I explained this to my parents who have a few existing health conditions that have a high correlation with COVID mortality rates based on the data I've seen. They don't need to go into the hospital for a cut or injured finger if they can avoid the accident in the first place. Obviously if a real emergency arrives you need to weigh the risks of contracting COVID vs the emergency (an admittedly nearly impossible task) but you should try to minimize risks for the time being where you can to try and avoid that situation completely.

Basically you need to be a little more risk averse than you may normally be under the assumption a minor injury is manageable if you're potentially susceptible to COVID right now.

I can tell you that in the musician communities I participate in, there was a surge of new members who are either returning to a hobby or starting fresh.

It seems to have receded already though.

I made my first 2 tracks in over 10 years

Tell that to the bike shops in my area, which have seen unprecedented business and have trouble keeping things in stock.

> Perhaps the massive jump in active leisure will suddenly manifest but so far no such thing has come to be.

Have you tried to buy exercise equipment lately? What about hiking backpacks? Have you been to Lowe's? Have you heard that there are protests happening across the country?

It seems to me like there has been a massive jump in active leisure.

Seems more likely to me that the people that were previously going to the gym decided to buy their own equipment. There's also something to be said about the quantity of exercise equipment inventory available at any given time.

Possibly, which is why I included three other examples.

Perhaps in part, but bicycle sales are also through the roof producing significant back orders.

This is a good point. I accept this. Especially because I paid an exorbitant $700 for a set of 260 lbs from FringeSport because only their tacticool "MILSPEC" bumper plates were available.

Among my friends who are laid off from the virus, I've seen a great deal more of them painting and recording music; they're not aspiring to "make it," they're just doing more of their creative projects. Very small sample size but it makes me sad how it took a global pandemic to give them the time to do their things.

Even for employed people that have been relieved of the grind of commute and unnecessary hours the office, everyone I know is creating more - art (paintings, photography, writing, music) or exercising more, or focusing on their own programming projects or whatever

I bought a bike because I have at least 6-7 hours additional each week to do something new instead of commute, although as suspected, work is already attempting to steal from me.

Quarantining outside a big city has opened my eyes to how much urban life is purely consumptive activity. Living in a low density area, just having space and a vehicle to transport supplies I was able to grow vegetables, restore an old motorcycle, build a computer from components, cook and cure meat etc. In my small city apartment all of this activity would've either been impossible or required spending lots of money- turning what was either a fun hobby or a value generating activity into just consumption.

My father recently described this phenomenon to me as, "buying one's lifestyle." I'd never heard the phrase before but I think it perfectly describes what so many of us do in urban areas once we've established a foothold financially.

I have actually done all the things you list living in Brooklyn, NY over the past seven years. But it hasn't come easy. I grew the vegetables at a community garden, which took years for me to get into. I had to work on the motorcycle in the alley way of my building, which due to recent crime increases in the area is now untenable. I cook and cure my own meats on occasion but due to the high costs associated with getting good meat, the tiny kitchen I have to work with, and the vegan next-door neighbors who roll their eyes at me any time they smell a steak cooking, I obviously don't do it as much as I'd like.

The value of the city for me, as someone who both grew up here and then returned after school to pursue work, has been all of the metropolitan values: living so near so many interesting, distinct, and different kinds of people. I work in tech and media but I really tend to enjoy the company of those who work in other fields - I enjoyed the diversity of interests, talents, and values here in NYC. But every place has a point where things become too oppressive and expensive to yield any further cultural benefits - and we clearly hit that mark here even before quarantine.

Now, with quarantine in effect, the one thing I really cherished and held onto over the years - being near people - has become a major detractor living in NYC. Without a magnificent amount of reversals, I will be looking to buy property in a state where I am not paying an entire paycheck in taxes to my city government.

We moved to a small town some years ago and I agree with you. A lot of our "leisure" time is taken up with our somewhat massive garden and food processing in general, which we enjoy. We are also building a new greenhouse, fixing fences, etc. and we've converted our garage to a combination gym/woodworking shop, which makes for the occasionally dusty workout.

If I worked at my job less, I'd have more time for these productive activities and I certainly wouldn't pine away searching for "meaning" in my day job, that's for sure.

Well part of that has to do with a significant amount of the value add of a dense area like a city is doing things that involve lots of people, especially people who are somewhat strangers. This isn't exactly possible when there's a plague.

That doesn't make those activities consumerist though.

Really much of the "consumerism" is a fundamental of civilization and complexity - specialization yields benefits. Production is geared to what they are "best" at economically for better yields. Consumption still occurs even when DYIed paired with production. It may even be more wasteful ironically. To go a bit anti-Nilhist meaning is what you make it - one can reasonably find both labor and consumption to fufill requirements meaningless.

I wanted to post the link exactly to the same essay "In praise of Idleness". Glad to see this essay resonates with other people.

> the meaninglessness of modern work

Compound that with the insistence that you interview for your job sometimes as often as every day (if you do daily standups): even if there's nothing visibly productive to do, you have to conjure something that somebody else can observe the effects of. Programmers, for example, ought to be able to spend time - lots of it - investigating new technologies in preparation for future tasks, but with the tyranny of JIRA, we're expected to do something that somebody else can easily check on at least every day if not more often. And this is a job that requires years of self-study just to qualify to do.

I think there is probably an organisation out there that's a better fit for you.

I've seen orgs run 'agile' like a military operation - Jira rules everything, with timesheet plugins so that everyone can account for every part of their day down to 15 minute intervals. Where there is a reprimand for choosing the wrong category of meeting ticket to assign an hour to.

I have seen teams pre-Agile where you were left alone, sometimes for months at a time, to produce... hopefully. Maybe.

But in the middle I've worked for a number of organisations where a status report in the morning scrum of "I'm reading up about X and evaluating Y in preparation for big feature Z next month" is perfectly acceptable.

> in preparation for big feature Z next month

You actually know about big features months in advance? Now I'm jealous.

Oh, I always know about the big features they specify too vaguely to actually implement and then change their minds about wanting at the last minute months in advance.

Haha, sometimes I know about them before the product owner because I've bothered to read the standard and legal requirements around what we're trying to implement...

I was going to write a quick sentence, then it turned into a rant, then decided against it and will let your words stand. I couldn't agree more.

> fundamentally important.

Don't you think that because of the way we have set up our economies (service economy, high productivity low compensation, high inequality) there aren't enough fundamentally important works that need doing or people with enough resources that they can make their own important work? If more than half of all individual people in America are trapped making $<31,000 a year working full time at a fundamentally unimportant job I simply don't see a way out.

Half the country simply doesn't have the resources in time or money or opportunity to find that fulfilling work or make fulfilling work for themselves.

System seems opposed to human happiness and fulfillment.

It is definitely a structural problem with the modern Western post-industrial economy. I don’t pretend to have a solution, but it seems to me that people will tolerate rough working conditions or boring jobs if there is an overall mission or purpose; compare WW2 factory workers to contemporary Amazon workers.

I think that's a much harder comparison than you're giving it credit for. Amazon workers don't all despise their job, and WW2 factory workers who did despise their job would have been a lot less likely to get a platform. Who knows which fraction is really higher?

Most work is not fulfilling. You do not even need "Bullshit Jobs" questionnaire responses to show that, ever increasing record number of people needing psychiatric medication to get through their day should be proof enough that something is fundamentally wrong.

Let us not kid each other. For most people their "work" is not a choice. The system is set up so that it is either you take whatever job you can to survive, or it is homelessness and no health benefits for you and your kids.

And no, pointing out that nobody should 'need' to work 2 full time shit jobs to merely put food on the table and meet rent isn't "Marxism". We are producing more "wealth" per capita than at any point in history (at the cost of destroying the planet btw), but still we require burned out elderly workers to keep at it until they literally die.

We used to have, at least in Europe, capitalism combined with a strong social security in healthcare, schooling and basic provisions for those at the bottom, financed through a progressive taxation regime at the top end. This worked fairly well for all. Yes, there were huge differences in lifestyle affordance between the poor and the very rich, but nobody needed to be homeless or without healthcare. While ofc tax-evasion was a thing, it wasn't ultra-weaponized like it is today.

If you think of extreme communism as a horizontal line and extreme capitalism as a vertical line, the old model was more like a sigmoid on the contribution/reward plane. Moderation is best in all things.

> Let us not kid each other. For most people their "work" is not a choice. The system is set up so that it is either you take whatever job you can to survive, or it is homelessness and no health benefits for you and your kids.

I'm not about to complain about my software development job in the US, but if not for job insecurity I'd rather clerk (not even own) at some small retail shop in Europe. And yes I've done "menial" jobs—take away the stresses of US healthcare and retirement systems and worries about your kids' ability to pay for school, add European amounts of time-off, and lots of those jobs are pretty damn great, actually, job-insecurity aside (which is not a trivial thing, I grant—point is about what's "fulfilling" or satisfying in a job).

Never heard being a clerk is a desirable job, I'd be interested to hear why you think that? I really have no idea what clerks do, I previously thought it was just paper pushing

As in sales clerk. Ring up sales, stock shelves, putter about and put things in order. Read a book or knock out some pushups if it's a really slow day, everything's in order, and the owner's not a dick. That kind of thing.

[EDIT] sense 5 in Webster's 1913. Apparently it is, or at least was, a US usage.

5. An assistant in a shop or store. [U. S.]

I'll second this person's opinion. I used to work in a small town computer shop many years ago as a sales/support "clerk". I spent all day helping people directly, many repeat customers. The job was pretty chill and there was a somewhat new problem to solve every day. I worked fixed hours and when I went home I could completely focus on whatever I wanted to do now that I wasn't working. The wage sucked, slightly above minimum wage isn't great, but it was enough for me at the time.

Contrast that with my FAANG job I have now. The pay is phenomenal. But it basically swallows my life. Between the long hours, weekend on-calls, constant churn, all for a customer I've only spoken to indirectly via a project manager. It's hard to feel like the work you're putting out is really making a difference in anyone's life. With covid and the lack of direct human contact as well, I'd go so far as to say I'm practically pushing commits into a void everyday and getting paid for it, there's very little if any feedback for my work. First-world problems, I know. But if you took away the pay differences, I know which job I'd choose in a heartbeat.

I agree. I think most people want to do something with their lives, something fulfilling. Like raise a family, fix up their house, paint, make music, and so on. Some people want to build businesses.

Point is, a lot of people find their jobs tedious, tiring, and depressing. They have no energy to do the things they want to do after work and so they switch off in front of the TV or whatever.

We have not really come all that far from 150 years ago. The work is safer, more comfortable perhaps, but for many people it's soul sucking tedium.

> no desire to have more leisure time to consume content

I have noticed this over the last year too.

Since I have started climbing, playing league soccer and doing (incredibly amateur) jam sessions, I have found it impossible to watch TV shows/ movies or waste too much time mindlessly surfing on reddit/social media.

I will however, call all of them leisure. They are important to me, and I do put in serious effort to consistently improve in all of them, but there is something fundamentally leisurely to the nature of it.

> In other words: people want more meaningful work, not merely to have less meaningless work.

The truly frustrating thing about this is sometimes all that takes is keeping your employees informed. My current job's work feels very empty because management simply will not update us on the state of negotiations and sales unless we do something just short of cornering them while holding socks stuffed with soap. Meanwhile, they've promised more transparency multiple times.

This is only a five person company, so it's not like we're asking for much (or, really, anything at all -- this should be a normal and expected feature of a small startup).

It seems like such an easy way to keep your employees knowledgeable about what their work is actually going towards and without that, it's just a purposeless slog. I need a new job.

> but I don’t see how you can simply brush away an activity that takes up 1/3 of your time.

But if you've cut down on that, it doesn't.

> I have no desire to have more leisure time to consume content

Other people do. But they also want more leisure time to do up the house, see family, see the world, join a local sports club, pick up a hobby, enjoy life. It's harder to do that around a full time job, especially one with a long commute attached.

Tibor Scitovsky once remarked that the most rewarding leisure tends to be skilled leisure: playing a musical instrument, sports, drawing and painting and so on. and that as people start to work less, they will increasingly need to learn how to spend their free time in a way that doesn't make them miserable or bored. Reminds me a lot of the maker ethos as well: production is more satisfying than consumption.

Long work hours are also harmful when they make it hard to spend time with your kids, time to resolve personal issues or wind down after a stressful period, time to study. For a lot of people, weekends are stuffed so full of errands, appointments and grocery shopping that there's very little time left to actually recover from the work week.

Point taken, though, the quality of work often matters more for wellbeing than the quantity.

How much percent of the population have a job and how much have a career?

...an activity that takes up 1/3 of your time.

Averaged over the year standard work hours in my country, 37.5h/week, is less than 1/5 of your time.

Factor in commuting. When I commuted to London I spent 4 hours in transit. Get up at 7am, at my desk at 9am. Leave work at 5:30p and get home at 7:30pm. Many people do this. Their whole week is spent working, eating, and sleeping for two exhausted days off at the weekend and a barrage of unattended tasks, chores, neglected relationships deferred during work hours.

Edit: I am not sure how you got to 1/5th. By my calculation of the waking hours in a week 37.5hrs is ~1/3rd of 112hrs.

Many people do this.

Yes but average is lower. First Google hit:

Value for the US (Minutes): 26.6:

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/a...

Ok, well in the UK the average is 59 minutes. Being an average it means many people are having longer commutes than that. I'd like to see the mean number.

https://news.sky.com/story/average-commute-to-work-now-takes...

It’s comparable, US number is one way. With one hour commute per work day it’s a little over 1/5 then. With four hour daily commute you are over 1/4 but not close to 1/3 of your time.

As I said, there are around 112 waking hours in a week, spending 37.5 of them working is not 1/5th of your week, it's close to 1/3.

They don't link to the study but they say 221 hours per year and since there is about 220 working days per year, I think the 59 minutes figure is per day, not for each way to/from work. So about 30 minutes one-way. The US study saying 26.6 minutes is also one-way. So basically they are fairly similar and reasonable.

A 2-hour one-way commute just seems crazy to me, I know it exists but I think it's very extreme.

Highkey why I decided to move out of my parent's place after almost 2 years of a similar 4-hour commute day. I had no life, no friends, and it actually drove my relationship at the time into the shitter.

Doesn't help that rent in my metro area ain't cheap but I was able to score a relatively cheap apartment that makes my commute 35-40 mins each way. I suppose since I work remote I'm not getting my money's worth but this is still a better way for me to live.

My dad did this commute for around 11 years, got laid off, got a job a half hour drive away and his QoL is drastically improved. If housing were more accessible where jobs were (or if public infrastructure was improved to drastically increase throughput/efficiency) we would probably be much happier- we'd probably be even happier if we just bit the bullet and went as remote as possible or chose 4 day workweeks, and to be quite honest it's probably easier at a macro level to force that kind of change than to figure out a way to fit more sardines into electric cars in tubes.

Are you factoring in sleep?

37.5 work hours times 45 work weeks

divided by

365 days times 24 hours.

Ok, so you're not. 8 hours of our day aren't really "ours" to do with as we please. We can for a while, but it catches up to us.

Ah yes, the creative accounting of it! The bullshit we like to buy into.

7.5 hours of official "work", 30 min lunch break with which you cant do anything, 2x 30 min commute. 9 hours gone! You need to sleep 4.5 hours to be able to do it. 13.5 hours gone! It seems like you would have 10.5 hours for yourself but there of course are the standard chores, shopping, cleaning, cooking, eating, open the mail, pay your bills, interact with friends and family. We are told (cultural) this is all totally recreational!

Can you show up at work at 8:00 sharp? I think more usual is 7:45 to start at 8:00. The 30 min commute means you have to leave at 7:15. The average morning routine is 30 to 90 min. We do this to get to work and getting up at 6:15 is rather unfunny. (Plenty of jobs start at 7:00 or even earlier)

You finish at 16:00 but before you are out of the building 15 min are gone. 16:45 you get home. Why cant I park any place? humm, its 16:55 now. You might need to shower and/or change cloths, oh its 17:30 already? Quick to the store! 2x20 min drive, 10 min strolling around, 10 min to park again. Oh its 18:30? wtf? quick do some cooking. 37 min of cooking 19:07. A short hour to eat 20:00.

And then you have to spend 2 hours not doing anything useful or you wont be fit for work the next day. (note the contradiction in terms) After 5 days of that you also really need to spend the entire weekend relaxing or you eventually wont be able to work. Of course reality wont allow for that so people still burn out.

Slaves? uhm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMEuyhBkRo

This is why working from home is so much better for one's quality of life and mental health.

Wake up when your body has rested enough. 0-minute commute. No dead time where you fake-work or time where you are not working anymore but can't yet do personal projects. In fact it's sometimes the other way around: you can multiplex activities by doing chores without breaking your work-related train of thought (I have solved multiple bugs while hanging clothes on the drier rack). When you are done with your task (even if it took less time than anticipated) it's a 0-minute context-switch to your personal life. No social pressure to eat at specific hours (much easier if you are into intermittent fasting for example).

This conflates different problems. Notwithstanding how meaningful work is, we'd benefit from reduced hours and more leisure time.

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