
Why do we work so hard? - wslh
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/why-do-we-work-so-hard
======
burgessaccount
This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way, but I think this
relates to our general lack of clear values as a society. With religion absent
in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack and say
"what really matters is being a good person" or "what really matters is
wisdom" or "what really matters is family". So we're left with the messages we
ARE getting, which are from a combination of advertising (what really matters
is having a lot of money/nice things), Hollywood (what really matters is being
good at shit) and the news cycle (which focuses on careers and especially
major careers). "Mom gets home from work and has a fun late afternoon with her
kids, spending no money and getting nothing much done" isn't a story we ever
see upheld as a great, positive way to spend our time. So we pursue the things
we do see people praising and talking about - promotions, money, milestones,
important-ness.

~~~
nostrademons
Nah, it's that folks who get their values from other folks are the only ones
who bother to tell other folks how well they're doing at achieving their
externally-gifted values. If your goal is to make a lot of money but you
decided that was just _your_ goal, why bother to tell anyone you've achieved
it? (Indeed, it can be very counterproductive to tell other people.) If your
goal is to be a good husband & father, then what does it matter what anyone
besides your wife & kids think of you?

As a result, external discourse is filled with people crowing about how well
they achieved this or that milestone, all of which is desirable only because
other people think it's desirable. But then, the only people who _care_ are
the ones looking to others for their values.

There are plenty of people whose values are plenty clear, arrived at through
some deep reflection about what _they personally_ want. But then, since it's
what they personally want, why would anyone else care?

~~~
kyllo
Because there's a bit of a feedback loop with success. If others see you as
being successful or impressive (on whatever axis they care about), this
attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social power
and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances of
success in your future efforts.

This also explains patio11's formula for career success, which is basically:

10 Make something awesome

20 Tell people about it

30 GOTO 10

~~~
elevenfist
Dude, this doesn't sound like fun at all. "Social power and influence" to what
end? With whom are you getting this power and influence? Are these
relationships even genuine?

> "this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social
> power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances
> of success in your future efforts."

Reminds me of those "social climber" jokes about kids in high school. I guess
if you've taken measure of yourself and found it matches up with the company
you keep, there's nothing for anyone else to say.

~~~
kyllo
Perhaps my explanation didn't adequately convey the subtlety of this
phenomenon.

I am not saying that successful people are all social climbers. I am just
saying that successful people naturally attract the support of people who want
to learn from and take part in their success, and this greater popularity in
turn increases their chances for future success. It's what you might call a
virtuous cycle, or a snowball effect.

If you are successful at something, it is perfectly rational to want others to
know it.

~~~
elevenfist
This isn't a secret, most people are aware of people whose "friends" are
simply those who have skills or knowledge they want. In the context of what's
important in life though, this drive for status and financial success might
require examination. Especially when the people around you will disappear when
there is nothing left to gain. If those are the majority of relationships in
your life, it would be easy to lose sight of all the other awesome things in
life aside from status and money. More importantly, you might realize the age-
old problems with solely pursuing those things.

"You can't get everyone to genuinely like you, unless you're a snake, but then
it's just an illusion. If you're lucky, (in this day and age) those you don't
get along with will be polite.

Having all the money in the world is pointless if no one else has anything
left to trade.

------
buf
I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my
time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me.

I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra
hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years.

I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month
later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addiction continued.
Eventually I found myself back in SF. I'm on my 3rd CTO role now. We're about
to raise a series B.

More than I'd like to admit, I want to stop this madness and just enjoy life.
Hang out with my family. Perhaps move to Denver or Austin to maintain some
semblance of tech life, but get out of the madness. I've been looking at
houses in Denver for over a year. And it depresses me.

I know that it can't happen. I know that I'll be working like this until my
health prohibits me.

~~~
jasonkester
There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I
wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work
insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours.

I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy
young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I
could just drop everything and go traveling for months on end like you do" and
then just sort of trailing off. "But You Can!!!" I always wanted to shout
back. You just don't actually want to do that. Or you would. What that person
really wanted was what they had: a stable comfortable job and a nice car and
apartment, practicing for the day when they had a wife, kids, lease & mortgage
to solidify that reality of "can't go traveling". Sounds pretty comfy,
actually. If only they could come to grips with what they wanted and be happy
with it.

It might be worth stepping back and looking at what you actually want. You
just might find it's what you already have.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
"Revealed preferences" used to be called "unconscious compulsions."

The phrasing is revealing, because "revealed preferences" suggests that your
actions are somehow in alignment with your true core values, while
"unconscious compulsions" suggests that your actions are destructive to your
true core values, and you could consider doing some psychological work to
realign them.

Psychology suggests the latter view is more realistic, especially if you're
not getting any genuine fulfilment from a situation.

It also suggests that unconscious compulsions can be the result of external
influences, particularly in childhood, and may not be true preferences at all.

------
lquist
You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I
forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard;
I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

-Dickens

~~~
nether
“I think that New York [City] is the new model for the New Concentration Camp
where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves where the inmates ARE
the guards and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built
their own prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are
both guards and prisoners and as a result, they no longer have – having been
lobotomized – the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it
as a prison.” \- My Dinner With Andre

~~~
mseebach
If you remove literally every single property that makes a prison a prison,
then New York is _just like_ a prison. Got it.

If you need to model large numbers of other people as suffering from severe
mental health issues to make your world view fit, chances are it's your world
view that's wrong. But that's no fun.

~~~
1812Overture
Reminds me of Wonko The Sane from a Douglas Adams book. He built his house as
an inside out asylum to contain the entire outside world.

------
madengr
I enjoy designing RF/Microwave hardware and I am paid well to do it. I plan on
doing it till I keel over. I have a state of the art lab at work, and a nice
lab at home. I'm passionate about electronics and really wouldn't know what
else to do.

~~~
jotux
RF/Microwave hardware isn't work, it's sorcery. You just enjoy being a wizard.

~~~
madengr
All those professors in undergrad brushed it off as "black magic".

All really boils down to problem solving and intellectual stimulation. I
suppose any job that has that is good.

~~~
jjoonathan
And expensive equipment :-)

You said "state of the art," too, so I fully expect that the price is well
into "call us" territory. Speaking of which, I need to go enter my name into
today's Agilent drawing...

~~~
madengr
Spherical near field antenna scanner, mm wave equipment, Keysight 50 GHz PNA
with pulsed X-parameters, Keysight UXA spectrum analyzer, load pull tuners,
etc; all good stuff.

~~~
justinjlynn
You have just described what is easily fifty thousand USD worth of equipment.

~~~
zendotech
I think you mean 500K$ usd, used.

~~~
justinjlynn
At that point, there isn't much difference in terms of affordability for your
average person.

~~~
jjoonathan
I think you underestimate how much those of us struck RF fever (a lifelong
affliction with no cure) are willing to spend on the hobby. Some common price
points I've seen in home labs: $15k oscilloscopes, $10k signal generators, $6k
logic analyzers, etc. $50k would be a high-end home lab, but home-lab
territory nonetheless. It's affordable on an engineer's salary -- many of us
semi-regularly spend more on things like nice cars and "living in SF."

$500k, OTOH, isn't, unless you're particularly well off for an engineer. So
you need to find an employer to purchase the toys for you. Looks like madengr
has done well on that front :-)

~~~
justinjlynn
Fair enough. Just sour grapes I suppose. Heh. I would love to have such a well
equipped lab... as is I have to make do with simulation.

------
iokevins
Excellent article; at 3,860 words, it's a bit long, but recommended.

Here's a much shorter response, with more pathos:

"Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit
suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with
her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go
home and kiss your wife and kids."

\-- Linds Redding, "A Short Lesson in Perspective"

Read the whole thing: [http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-
lesson-in-p...](http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-
perspective/)

~~~
cossatot
It's too long because he likes to write, lives to write, and writes to live.

~~~
TheTrotters
All the more reason it should have been shorter.

~~~
majewsky
Reminds me of the famous Blaise Pascal quote: "I would have written a shorter
letter, but I did not have the time." (also attributed to Mark Twain, T.S.
Eliot and others)

------
Animats
Competition. It's not that we really have to work that hard to produce a
product or service. It's that we have to work really hard to beat the other
people trying to do the same thing.

Increased productivity doesn't help, because everybody is still running flat
out to compete, at a higher level.

~~~
cossatot
Don't you like rabbit holes? Chasing the weird or subtle or ill-defined
phenomena that no one else cares about and will probably lead nowhere but
_just smells so damn good_?

~~~
stevedonovan
Many of us are like Jack Russells in that way ;)

------
itsAllTrue
The only reason I work hard is to surround myself with people I respect.

When I find myself pushed into situations where irritating people have crept
into the mix, and no one seems to be willing or able to do anything about
that, I look for an exit.

Boss' nephews. Obnoxious assholes who constantly talk about getting laid.
Bitchy careerist ladies who constantly demand bullshit, and seem to foment
panic with every breath they can muster. Narcissistic retards dumb as a bag of
hammers, but smug to the core about everything they do, which usually turns
out to be sitting on their asses all day, looking up trivia about sports.
Weirdos who can't seem to bathe themselves, even though they're like 40 years
old?

I work hard to separate myself from these people.

~~~
baby
Yeah, I really can't understand this point of view. I find most people
interesting, however different they may be. I'm lucky to be surrounded by
talented people but I don't see it as a new stratum of goodness, people are
shitty or great on every level.

On the contrary I dislike negative people who can't see anything good in what
surround them and have a cynical view of the world. I don't think I would have
liked working with you.

~~~
itsAllTrue
Things are always more bearable when not forced. The same is true for having
to stand in the presence of awful people who are saddled with awful
circumstances, and suffer both them and the circumstantial misery
simultaneously.

Jail, and places similar to jail, where presence and schedule are compulsory,
are neither fun nor interesting. Such places bring out the worst in people. I
don't feel a shred of guilt or shame for being negative.

------
iopq
I wish I wanted to work a lot. I just kind of force myself to do it, even if
it's something I'm excited about.

~~~
ambicapter
Same. Then again, I'm not where I want to be. Looking at all the workaholics
in this thread I'm simultaneously intrigued and weirded out.

~~~
henrikschroder
I'm also weirded out. Who wants to work? How can you _not_ have as a life goal
to not work? It sucks for the most part!

As for Marx and Keynes and others, thinking about what people will do if
they're freed of labour, have you SEEN youtube? People are not lacking ideas
on things to do, quite the opposite!

~~~
icelancer
My work is my life's dream. I did it for years as a hobby making no $ (losing
money really) and worked terrible tech jobs I hated until I could switch the
two.

Now I work 80 hours per week but it feels like 5. So it's not work to me.

~~~
id
So I guess your profile hasn't been updated in a while?

And what is it that you're are doing now? Must be really awesome if it's still
enjoyable after 80 hours.

~~~
icelancer
It sure as hell isn't Data Science. Well I guess I do some of that at my job.
But now it's for fun.

I work in sports science now. It's great.

------
gedy
> "Of all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse it was
> always advertised to be by our remote ancestors... The necessity to work is
> a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make oneself feel
> valuable even though there is no particular need for one’s working."

— C. B. Chisholm

------
yason
Work is a good excuse around which to build your life. The excuse approaches
perfection in occupations such as programming which is getting paid for what
would basically be your hobby. And―as any excuse―it is, as lovingly ever-
favoured by your mind, easily used to avoid facing things in life, and edges
in yourself. Staying busy is the opposite of having enough. It is doing versus
being. When you do, you're trying to achieve something. When you be, you're
liable to realise that you aren't missing anything, and that the keys to your
life are found within yourself. People need both flavours but work rarely
offers the latter.

------
arca_vorago
Because in a poor economy the most job desperate set ceilings for themselves
they dare not touch. I know people who produce millions in profit a year, on
50-60k salary with any bonus over 3k for xmas is unheard of. Disparate power
between employee and employer. I personally the problem is people dont
understand the correct process of negotiating a contract.

In essence, making people desperate makes robots that are handy, but the lack
of reward incentive creates demonstratably worse worke product.

------
jensen123
What about getting laid? It's no secret that women tend to find rich men
attractive. Or men with a high social status. I wonder how many men work hard
because of this?

~~~
a-l-c-o
Voila. This and securing food. Both being delayed or sublimed.

------
pasbesoin
I worked hard -- or, long -- because I had a shit personal life and neighbors
who made it miserable to be at home. And, I was taught early and thoroughly
that there was nothing I could do about such things.

Let me tell you, it is a terrible way to live.

Working _hard_ and _smartly_ and _with fun_ , which I occasionally got to do,
was something different and immensely satisfying.

But, if you are "working hard" because life sucks. Get your life in order. The
sooner the better, not just for you, but ultimately, for your career.

Anyone who says you can't. Or that you have to "pay some sort of dues"? Fuck
them.

As I overheard in the cafe, the other day -- my paraphrase may not be as
snappy as the original: There's one choice where the outcome is 100% certain:
Not choosing. Making no choice, taking no action, no chance.

The young-ish fellow was advising another young fellow on whether to ask a
girl out.

As someone who's ended up spending his life alone -- and, is that "not by
choice", or, per the above, precisely by choice. Let me tell you, there is no
more important choice.

Family, friends, lovers, work and interests that matter (however, and, big or
small). There is no more important choice. "Work hard" on those.

------
bikamonki
It really depends. Most times you just need the money. Sometimes you have
nothing better to do. Many times you just keep doing it because you are used
to doing it. A few times is your dream job and you just can't stop doing it.
Work is more than economics, is not a function of money. Work is action. My
father is a 73 'retired' professional and scholar, now serving as a
congressman, and already thinking what to do next. Action is life and you
should never stop it: work til you drop.

Another question would be: why do we keep working so hard for money when
technology could already solve many of our needs?

------
bitmapbrother
Whenever I read topics like this I always think of Office Space.

Bob Porter: Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.

Peter Gibbons: I wouldn't say I've been _missing_ it, Bob.

~~~
rvense
Don't you wanna express yourself?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyCK70BTUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyCK70BTUs)

------
Tempest1981
Some people thrive on "solving puzzles", which is sort of what engineering is.

For better or worse, there are an infinite number of puzzles to solve.

~~~
cesarbs
The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that
most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non-
problems.

When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was
presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to
think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it
actually required solving or if a more pragmatic solution was at hand and
would lead to the same outcome.

Now that I have some years of experience in the industry, I realize that 80%
of the "puzzles" I face at work are bullshit. They are usually complicated
situations generated by organic and uncontrolled growth in codebase complexity
that lead to horrible scenarios requiring a lot of brain power to solve. The
thing is, if things had been more properly thought out, those situations would
have not occurred in the first place, because the code would have a lot more
sound architecture. But because it was allowed to grow without thought and
refactoring, it now offers many "puzzles" that the younger people in the team
don't even question at a more fundamental level.

Sorry for the cynicism but it's honestly the way I feel about most of the work
I do these days. Too much in terms of stability, maintainability and soundness
is sacrificed for performance and for pushing things out the door asap.

~~~
reledi
Every line of code added needs to be maintained and makes adding future code
more difficult. As our job is to build software, we are too eager to increase
technical debt without knowing it. Always ask "how can we avoid building it?"

When you realize it really does need to be built and it is the highest
priority, think about how it can be built while keeping cruft down. You can
still be fast while keeping the codebase clean but it requires constant
refactoring and review and a common understanding between team members.

~~~
cesarbs
That's pretty much my personal approach to writing code (with special devotion
to the "how can we avoid building it" part). I wish everyone I worked with had
the same attitude.

------
esfandia
This is what I've realized lately about job satisfaction:

Purpose, autonomy, work/life balance: pick 2

~~~
stevedonovan
Classic engineering trade-off. I'm by nature a back room boy so I trade some
autonomy.

------
DrNuke
Earth is a small rocky ball among billions in the void. We don't know why we
are here and what happens next. Stick your head into a mission (work,
religion, family, whatever you like) and don't think about that.

------
ACow_Adonis
There's several issues intertwined here. The easy ones are those market forces
I experienced at the relative bottom of the pay-scale and at the smaller end
of the company scale: you're asked to work harder and more hours because it
makes more money/profits for your employer to get you to work as long as
possible for as little as possible.

However, I think there's two more aspects I think I can contribute.

Firstly: some kind of social identity. I've worked in a fair number of fields
and a fair number of jobs, so being attached to a job or thinking of "myself
as a particular profession" seems quite alien. But a fair number of my
colleagues saw/see themselves as possessing a particular identity, and
work/professions defined that for them. We have a very powerful social
indoctrination that you are your job: we have titles, little boxes for
"profession" on forms, and many people have internalized the messages that
"you are what you are employed as", and that you need this external
direction/identity to tell you what to do (I don't want to retire, what would
I do with myself?!), and that their social identity is formed through their
work/networks. Its a bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, because as we move
away from community oriented networks, people's social networks do become
defined by where they work. Even if you manage to get out of the ratrace, you
discover that your friends are still in it, so they don't have time to spend
with you and you can't identify with some of their everyday struggles if you
aren't going through it also. I should also note that people who gained this
identity through work took retrenchment and change the hardest
psychologically, and its easy upon reflection to understand why.

The second aspect though is this: generating the impression of work. I don't
know whether its base human psychology (I think there are good arguments from
anthropology that it isn't) or a culture-bound phenomenon, but I believe two
things: that most humans still have a fundamentally reptilian-brain/cargo-cult
psychology that is pretty close to the marxian concept of a labor theory of
value, and that in modern large-scale professional life, metrics able to
easily tie a worker or professional's inputs to outputs/profits accurately
aren't commonly available.

So there is a social/cultural aspect here: how do most people judge how much
you're bringing to the workplace? If you're not working in a widget factory,
most people's have a heavily weighted proxy to just look at "how busy you
look".

Would any CEO, politician, or professional in our culture, ever, justify
themselves in taking their salaries by saying everything was running smoothly,
and their job was to sit there, like a good taoist-esque ruler, just sitting
and facing the horizon and not interrupt? The very idea is absurd, even though
we must admit, I think rationally, that in some situations at the very least,
that may be the most reasonable course of action. No, instead we justify such
by "hours work put in" because it seems to be both a good cultural proxy, and
I suspect because, even if its pretty bad, at least its a good cultural value
to motivate the lower-downs into being good workers.

But it is of course, on an intellectual level, obscene and ridiculous. And it
results in the promotion and workplace culture that I've experienced now at a
lot of firms and professional workplaces.

Fresh out of university (economics), I was under the belief that government
was generally wasteful. And I worked there, and I saw that it was, and it is,
and all was good :)

But I didn't know true waste until I worked for the larger private
corporations. We'd hire 15 men, 10 consultants, 4 managers, and support staff
to do in 2 years what I could probably do with a skilled team of 4 in my area
in government in 12 months. Am i being a little bit hyperbolic, maybe...

When I worked in government, the 2-3 staff would tell you something was
bullshit, bitch, take a long lunch break, but get something done...maybe not
everything, but something. They weren't salespeople.

In private sector professional firms, people will just lie and say everything
they do is productive and a success. Its a hustle, its a sale. They'll come in
to the office and rather than eat with their families at home, they'll eat
breakfast at work while still not doing anything. They'll go to conferences
and say "how great we are!". They'll come up with as many jobs and tasks as
they can, and the efficiency of what they do is totally irrelevant. They still
play solitaire on their computers. They get tonnes of people to proofread
documents n times with n meetings (before eventually switching back to the
original version). They'll restructure before restructuring back. They'll
fire. They'll hire. It doesn't matter, just do STUFF.

The philosophy is just spend all the money you have and get your staff to do
STUFF, expand your empire as much as possible, make everyone work, be seen to
work, take credit for everything good, disown everything bad.

To them, long hours wasn't/isn't inefficient or a sign of intellectual
failing, its a sign of how awesome you are, and you come in early and you stay
back late not because you're doing anything (indeed, amongst the honest ones,
there is a haunting realisation that your job, or at least the hours you're
putting into it, maybe isn't actually producing anything, or might even be
creating more work...), but because its a culturally-structurally reinforcing
meme.

I'm not saying that all this culture is universal amongst us, or our
workplaces, or our societies. But its there, and I think its all having a
pretty powerful impact on our relationship with work, labor, and status...

~~~
Draiken
I completely agree with you.

This notion that work is life sounds absolutely insane to me. I love
programming, but I also love spending time with my wife, playing games,
learning new things, traveling, writing and a whole lot of other things.

The worst part of the status quo is that it doesn't matter whether or not I'm
an workaholic, I have to work to do a little bit of what I love.

We don't have time to do everything. But we have to limit ourselves to love
our work only because there's almost no time to do anything else!

Some people think working 80/week is good, I don't mind them. But if I want to
travel, to afford even simple things, 40+ hours of week of work is inevitable

And the bottom line is, most of us only work to make the top 1% even richer

------
agentgt
It has been discussed many times why work makes us happy and the most
compelling is flow:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en)

It was also covered in the documentary "Happy".

I actually was thinking the article would discuss more in detail this or even
just put a citation (he cited Keynes and Marx) but instead it went on a long
personal anecdotal comparison after comparison.

I also was hoping the author would discuss the developing trend of people
working from home and how that relates but.. nope.

IMO the article was too long for my liking. A fairly disappointing read.

------
holri
The answer can be found in this excellent analysis of modern economics by E.F
Schumacher from 1973:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful)

------
binarycrusader
It's easy to spend a few hours on work (especially in the computing field) and
feel a sense of accomplishment; not so much with life.

Programming often feels like a series of little victories to me, and it's much
harder to achieve that outside of work.

------
mx4492
Alexis De Tocqueville had some thoughts relevant to this:
[https://youtu.be/Rzr3AOtFA8o](https://youtu.be/Rzr3AOtFA8o)

~~~
danieldisu
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

------
ezequiel-garzon
I'm curious: why did The Economist choose the name 1843 for its magazine? The
About page doesn't say. Anybody know the significance of that year? Thanks.

~~~
hv23
I imagine it's related to the fact that their first issue was published on 1
August 1843.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks! That must be it.

------
stegosaurus
I don't want to be a serf.

Working is the only way I know of for me to accumulate capital in order to
become financially independent.

The more I do, the faster I accumulate capital, the more years of my life I'll
spend able to do what I want to do.

It doesn't feel like a choice to me. The alternative is to live a mediocre
life and always have one eye on my "responsibility" towards my capitalist
overlords.

------
prirun
One thing that would help is if our governments, all governments, would stop
spending money they don't have, and therefore stop devaluing currencies. When
the Fed "buys" $4T in mortgages to relieve banks from holding any risk, where
do they get all that money? They don't - they just "print" it, by clicking on
a computer. And in the process, they devalue everyone's wealth.

Take a look at this chart: [http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief-
history-of...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief-history-of-u-
s-inflation-since-1775/)

Yes, things are not quite as volatile since 1930, but also note that there is
_only_ inflation, whereas before, there was deflation to balance out the
inflation. I know everyone says deflation is the devil. I'm not so sure about
that.

~~~
shorttime
Devil's advocate here, definitely not an economist either, but why is
devaluing everyone's wealth a bad thing?

Sure, individually it sucks for one's pile of money to be worth less than it
was yesterday but it incentivizes one to figure out solutions to inflation -
real-estate, stocks, bonds, assets, work more, etc. Also leads people to
produce more and not allow a resting-on-the-laurels situation. Overall, big
picture wise, the species needs to grow to survive - to obtain the technology
to expand outside of Earth. Stagnancy is a deadend death.

Note, I also did not agree with a bailout.

------
yugai
There are a lot of hard work being done that is personally rewarding (money
and fame) and either meaningless or destructive in a broader sense (ecological
destruction, social destruction, unethical activites, fraud). Lehman brothers
were very successful and was greatly rewarded before the financial crash.

------
tim333
Good article. I've moved a bit from the five-year-old daughter's position to
the "thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide
meaning and motivation" stuff. Still working on it.

------
wapapaloobop
PG noted that getting rich is largely about running errands. In fact most of
what society regards as 'work' is like this. What one needs is a _hard
problem_ to work on.

------
myth_drannon
Read more Bukowski books, who knows maybe slowly you will heal yourself from
this addiction. Also a great read How to Be Idle/Tom Hodgkinson

------
erikb
I like the explanation, but I don't like the idea of telling everybody that
things where different in the past. When most people were farmers they also
worked more than 12 hours a day, since you need to take care of such a big
place. When most people were factory workers people also worked more than 12
hours because the boss thought it would make him more money if you worked more
(and with simple, mechanical work that's actually true). The kind of work
changed, as well as the reason. But we always worked too much.

And there is one reason he didn't mention: When you don't work so much, you
need to figure out what to do with your time. You can't watch movies all day.
Nobody can do that for a long time. So you need to think hard about other
reasonable things to do. And thinking is painful and scary.

~~~
dood
Things were different in the past. Most people's lives involved far more
leisure than today, for long stretches of the medieval period. source:
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html)

~~~
erikb
You don't need to read papers. There are still preindustrial villages in many
countries on this planet. And I can tell you from being to some in China that
these people work more. Yes they have longer food breaks, but they also have
much shorter sleep breaks at least than I can physically manage (5-6 hours,
with 30 minutes for shower and going to work). And they don't have leasure
breaks like watching two hours of tv before going to bed. The tv is always
running in the background but only the elderly and little children sit
directly in front of it.

~~~
dood
The suggestion to ignore academic studies of the lives of people in medieval
Europe because they contradict your experience of villages in 21st century
China does not make sense.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)

------
vermooten
I don't. I stopped after I realised that with my skills and experience I can
get a job any time.

------
bronlund
They want to keep us busy!

------
rogersmith
"They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose
– the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life."

Wow, leaving aside the complete "first world problem" approach that makes this
relevant for like maybe 1% of the world population at best, this guy didn't
just drink the Kool Aid, he's literally douching with it.

------
normalist
Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the
laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a
long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine
tobacco. Modern notions of work involve McDramas taking place in every western
household where first world problems really are a truely despotic problem
indeed. Master slave relationships engender this and it leads to a domestic
tilling of the soil in the fields of suburbia, working for McJobs with a
McPay. The kind of _real_ work; that of some spiritual understanding, or
mastering the body, or doing shadow work of the mind; 'Dumping all your
ailments on a plate for those to ponder' is entirely absent in the west, where
it is assumed that only those more credentialed shall offer answers, and none
else. The East might have these problems just not as severe, and I worry about
the encroachment of americanisation into the Eastern mindset and rich
tradition and approach to existential crises.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the
laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a
long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine
tobacco.

You mean, tilled soil for endless hours in the spring, fall, and parts of
summer, in return for a glass of summer wine at the end, a 20 minute smoke of
tobacco (shorter than a lunch break), a broken back, regular starvation, and
infant mortality?

~~~
norea-armozel
Actually, by the medieval period farming was mostly till the soil at planting
and occasional de-weeding in the mix. The rest of the time was filled with
tending animals or doing something else like fixing the roof and the like.
It's why many labor saving devices were created in fact (water wheel for
running milling stones comes to mind). Farming wasn't all that hard until you
get into the beginnings of the industrial revolution since most farming was
subsistence prior to that. When the industrial revolution got kicked off in
the UK that's when the Lords started forcing more people into the cities, thus
making a massive labor shortage in agriculture which made it a hard job (few
vs many hands in the task). I'm not saying it wasn't labor intensive, but it
wasn't like the average peasant farming household was erecting Cheop's pyramid
every season.

