
How did we get so busy? - ust
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/05/26/140526crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all
======
nlawalker
Reminds me of this article, which was also here on HN ages ago:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-
tra...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-
trap/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)

"Busyness" is a social defense against other people making us do things we
don't really want to do and a mechanism for coping with feeling guilty about
things we know we should do, but don't. My intuition is that people have had
to project themselves as busier and busier over the last couple decades as
technology has made us more efficient in order for this strategy to continue
working.

If you're always "so busy!", your boss is less likely to give you more work;
your spouse is less likely to ask you to do more around the house; you're not
going to feel as guilty about only seeing grandma once a year or refusing to
help your friend move; you can feel a little better about yourself when a
friend lands an awesome new job or plans a cool vacation and you haven't
really done anything. When you haven't seen someone in a long time and they
ask how things are, you can give them the impression that things must be even
better than the last time you saw them, because you've clearly been so busy
improving your lot in life. Well, that's the idea, at least.

After I read that article I decided to try to be more honest with myself and
the people I know about how busy I really was (which is often "not very" \- I,
like the author, am the "laziest ambitious person I know."). It's a very hard
habit to break, and it forces you to be more honest about the things you
really _want_ to spend your time on and the things you're avoiding.

~~~
jpatokal
Came here to post this. I think this is the key bit:

 _It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed:
work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities
they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of
their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness
and dread what they might have to face in its absence._

There was another article (which I can't find now) that summarized this even
further to state that "I'm so busy" is actually code for "I'm a self-important
asshole"... and there's a grain of truth to do this. "Can you help me with X?
Can you do Y?" "Oh, I'd _love_ to help, but I'm _sooo busy_ doing other stuff
that's more important than you!"

~~~
NDizzle
As someone who works a 40 hr/week job and a 20 hr/week job, (and the extra
hours associated with learning various things that apply to each) while also
having 3 kids, sometimes people are actually busy.

I coach little league, too.

~~~
VonGuard
Yeah, I think it's deeper than just being a self-important asshole. It's more
about the fact that we are 1000 times more productive, as a species, than we
were just 20 years ago, and yet, we all still work just as hard. This, coupled
with always being connected means that our work and obligations never end,
they just follow us around.

~~~
josephjrobison
It all comes down to the yuppies (myself included) wanting to get ahead. The
dream of becoming a wealthy entrepreneur is what keeps me from being satisfied
working 40 hours a week and reading and relaxing after that, for better or for
worse! Also the dream of injecting wealth into my larger family for
generations to come.

~~~
gglitch
A lot of what's being written in this thread hits home for me, but especially
the 'wanting to get ahead' bit - part of the problem is job insecurity,
knowing that your present position may not last, and feeling compelled to use
leisure time to increase your marketability for future job applications. Even
when I'm not actually working on work-related skills, I feel like I should be,
which creates anxiety.

~~~
josephjrobison
I agree 100% with everything you said. Considering our savings rates these
days are atrocious, even a high paying job does not guarantee future job
security

------
zenogais
Or we could look to Marx, who predicted exactly this state of affairs
succinctly by showing that, at the most basic, there are three traditional
ways to increase competitive advantage:

1\. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8
hours most people normally work in the United States)

2\. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being
paid for a smaller proportion of your overall work. Today, this typically
involves creating a culture that incentivizes overwork and disincentivizes the
normal working day.

3\. Revolutionize the means of production thereby gaining an ephemeral
advantage over the competition. Think the Japanese in the 80s with just-in-
time production which allowed them to dominate the automotive industry.
Automating work would also fall under this category. Notice this can require
(1) or (2) as a pre-requisite to such innovation.

Under this analysis being busy would be a natural byproduct of the reigning
economic ordering of society.

~~~
001sky
Marx seems superflous--it's more (likely) the red-queen effect

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

~~~
ricardobeat
How is working longer hours an evolutionary trait towards survival?

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Organisms are not the only things that face evolutionary pressures. If bosses
spend enough energy on trying to employ only the hardest workers, the end
result is work hours increase until as many people quit over hours as join
over compensation.

~~~
VLM
Note that in white collar fields (most of us on HN) people are usually graded
on "hours in the office" not "hours of productivity" and rarely if ever quit
over hours, they just spend more time at amazon.com, facebook, HN, twitter,
that kind of thing. "He's demanding we go from 10 hour days to 12 hour days so
he can get a bigger bonus and we will get squat other than maybe a demand to
work 14 hour days next year, well F him, I'm going to increase my time playing
farmville on my phone and tweeting, from 4 hours to 7 hours per day" I've seen
this kind of thing with my own eyes. This is the genesis of the effect where a
bog standard boring off the shelf employee, when converted to "contractor"
suddenly gets three times as much work done in a mere six hours as an employee
required to be butt in seat for twelve hours can accomplish.

I think its a nearly universal truth amongst white collar employees that if
they only had to be at work while actually working, they'd probably only be at
work about four to six hours per day, but they'd get at least twice as much
work done. This is obviously a Fortune50 kind of observation more so than a
startup.

In the pre-internet era it was pointless meetings and teambuilding activities
and water cooler talk and especially smoke breaks. Oh and extended lunch at
desk, in addition to the actual lunch hour, plus extended breaks.

In the end, if not carried out to extremes, it works out for everyone. The
white collar workers experience something like a grade school playground or
perhaps kindergarten classroom experience where most of their time is spent
talking about their feelings, and who's in or out of such and such club,
gossip, and what they saw on TV last night, and the boss gets a promotion
because obviously he's more effective because he had butts in seats for 12
hours and his management competitors only had butts in seats for 10 hours and
that's all that matters because that's all that can be verifiably documented
and measured. Its not a bad life, as things go, as long as you don't mind
sitting around doing nothing in an office (literally) almost all day.

------
nnq
> _“There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend
> more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren,
> keep trucking.”_ \- Richard Freeman, of Harvard

...somebody shoot this guy. Please.

When will we realize that so many great thought were thought because _smart
people_ have had _free time_ to "let their minds wonder around". Think Darwin,
the leisure-class naturalist with lots of time to travel, and the _theory of
evolution._ Think Einstein, the underachiever working in a patent office with
too much free time to think and the _theory of relativity._ Who will have time
to integrate all the knowledge that we "mine" into useful theories, when we've
build a society where the smarter we are, the less time to think you have?!

This became obvious since the '30s, when Bertrand Russel realized the
direction we were heading
([http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)),
despite the fact that thinking about such things was not his job, and most
likely _because_ at that point in his life he had a lot of free time to think
around. As opposed to Keynes, whose job was to think at this, but was probably
to "busy" to see the big picture and totally ignore the "red queen effect" of
consumerism.

EDIT+: oops, I always forget that Americans can take any invitation to
violence seriously :) I toned it down _a bit._

~~~
hoggle
That was exactly what I needed at the moment, thanks for sharing "In Praise of
Idleness". Brainwashed as I am I keep thinking that I need to shake the slave
mentality and focus my life on leisure time _to ultimately become more
productive_ of course.

~~~
mmebane
Along the same lines, I would recommend Pieper's _Leisure, The Basis Of
Culture_. It's somewhat a religious work, but for the most part is broadly
applicable.

~~~
hoggle
Thanks, very much appreciated!

------
zach
We do have a lot more leisure, but it is distributed at the tails of our
lifespan, the times of lowest productivity. We sure don't start full-time work
at the age that kids on the farm do. And even a century ago, most kids outside
of big cities did live on a farm. On the other side of a career, many of us
will spend a decade or two in retirement and good health.

But inbetween... well, the typical young upper-middle-class couple (as usual,
the real point of fascination here) has committed themselves to huge
expenditures of interactive time with their kids. That's really where the time
went.

Today, highly-educated parents bring their kids home from soccer or tae kwon
do practice, pick up dinner on the way home and read to each of them for a
school-mandated half-hour after helping them with homework. This is crazy
different from a few generations ago. Ask even your grandparents how much time
your parents spent in a "play pen" as toddlers, or roamed their neighborhood
after school when they were older. Now there's a competitive cultural
expectation that you need to invest in your children's development daily, so
they become socially self-realized and not economic roadkill.

~~~
Dewie
> We do have a lot more leisure, but it is distributed at the tails of our
> lifespan, the times of lowest productivity.

That's fine, for retirement. But this viewpoint presupposes that kids'
education is not _productive_ , if not immediately and directly, but
eventually and indirectly (eventually as adults, indirectly as productive
members of society, which is more than being trained to do some specific job).
Kids spend, what, 10-13 years on elementary and high school (and equivalents).
And that is not even counting the ones who go into higher education.

Supposedly, this elementary education is necessary in order to be productive
in a lot of modern jobs, and in order to be a productive member of modern
society - society is certainly more complex than when your whole society
consisted of your family's farm and neighbouring farms and a nearby village.

The only thing which might be said is _unproductive_ with kids' childhood is
the long summer breaks. Which is, perhaps ironically, a remnant of the past
where kids needed to productive on their family's farm in the peak season
(though I have for that matter gone to elementary school with the kids of
farmers, who needed to be excused from school for some days because they
needed to herd their sheep down from their gracing areas).

~~~
VLM
"The only thing which might be said is unproductive with kids' childhood is
the long summer breaks"

That assumes that schooling is relevant to a kids future. My 4th grader
already operates at a numeracy and literacy level higher than adults "are
supposed to". You're not supposed to be able to calculate percentages and
figure out word problems, that will ruin the employment of tax preparers.
You're not supposed to be able to read Harry Potter, you're supposed to watch
TV. Achievement at or above a 4th grade level is strongly discouraged on a
mass cultural level, although obviously not here on HN. Vocational training is
useless because he won't be in the workforce for a decade or more making
"training" useless, and according to labor force participation rates the odds
are reasonable he will not be a participant in the labor force anyway,
especially as trends continue, making vocational "education" useless.
Depressingly, there are a lot of white collar jobs that boil down to adult day
care, fundamentally, where lack of productivity is probably a net societal
gain!

So... the true cost is free day care (aka school) is not available in the
summer. On the other hand educational costs aka property taxes are
microscopically lower. Obviously we are not going to permit teachers to
experience a 30% boost in standard of living were we to expand their workload
into the summer, so labor costs will not change but obviously energy costs to
keep the lights on, and probably air conditioning, would increase, along with
internet bandwidth use at the school, cleaning chemicals used, trash bags
filled, etc etc.

The reason why kids "need" ever more and more years of education for ever
simpler jobs (on a societal average...), is to keep them out of the labor
force, to reduce competition. Otherwise, if bright teens put all the adults
out of work, the adults wouldn't be able to afford children, which breaks the
cycle in about a generation. You need to keep the adults employed in their
breeding years long enough to squirt out the next generations kids, no need
for much more, and keeping younger adults / teens out of the workforce is a
social engineering technology to accomplish that. Its quite possible as
existing trends continue that we'll naturally assume no one would ever hire a
supermarket cashier or waitress without a PHD in something, perhaps
philosophy. That would serve a useful purpose of keeping as many people in
(profitable) schools as possible, maximization of student loan income, etc.

~~~
Dewie
> That assumes that schooling is relevant to a kids future.

Yes, that was one of the assumptions: "But this viewpoint presupposes that
kids' education is not productive, ".

That whole premise was beyond the scope of my post, though I strayed a little
bit into it.

------
charlespwd
Hi, I've been a lurker here for some time now. I rarely ever comment on
stories because, well, I have better things to do. But now, I really need to
broaden my perspective. I just don't get it.

*Disclaimer : I am young (23), broke but happy.

This past year, I spent four months in Asia travelling. I rock-climbed for a
while, tried bungee, canyon swing, diving, trekking and the motorcycle. I was
able to afford all that on my student's salary working and studying for my
degree. I met amazing people and I'm just excited about everything since.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the 80 hours work weeks and
quite frankly, I just don't get it! I did work 66 hours work weeks this past
fall for my honours thesis. I started getting anxiety attacks. It wasn't
healthy.

I don't mean to make a point. I want to hear some. I want to understand how
some of you do it, and, more importantly why. I keep thinking that "Hey I was
able to have this experience with less than 20k a year. Imagine what I could
do with the salary of a `real` job! (Or freelancing)"

Why do you do it?

~~~
chris_mahan
Because I have a 8 year-old boy, and a wife who takes care of him well.

I want him to have a great education, wide knowledge and experience, and be
ready to face life well, be kind to others, be equipped to work hard and make
good money, be a good husband and a good father.

That takes lots of time and money, and is completely worth it.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
So you work 80 hours a week, meaning that you have almost no time to enjoy
life with your kid... so that he can grow up to be like you and do the same
thing, and presumably educate their children to do the same as well.

So your ideal of how things should be is to have a saga of people working
their asses off, in theory for the good of the next generation, but in
practice for nothing because the next generation will work their asses off for
the good of the next one, etc.

Maybe it's culture shock (I'm a European) but honestly, how can anyone think
that is "worth it"?

~~~
chris_mahan
Well, I don't "work" 80 hours a week.

I work 40 hours a week.

I commute 8 hours a week.

I volunteer (he comes with me sometimes) 2 hours a week.

Lunch breaks: 5 hours.

(so far 50 hours)

Then I do all the routine stuff that needs to be done: Grocery shopping,
hardware store, car maintenance, etc.

Then I spend another 15 hours a week working on extra stuff (learning,
following the news, doing stuff for clients, coding).

Then there is the social events, the school events, church on Sunday,
basketball practice on Tuesday at 7 and games on Saturday at 1 or 2.

Then there is sleep, and making dinner, cleaning the house, etc.

In the end, there is about 10 hours a week for just me and him time (watch
movie, play games, go out and explore the world, park, read together, etc)

For me? I'm lucky if I get 2 hours a week for me. I'm even more lucky if
they're contiguous.

(No time for TV, you notice, and precious little for computer games.)

~~~
enjo
_I commute 8 hours a week._

There's an easy way to get a bunch of hours a week back.

~~~
chris_mahan
Except my boss isn't happy with that concept.

------
dredmorbius
By way of Andreas Schou at G+: Malthusianisms

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418)

 _Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete
problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for
a 9,000-mile one._

 _Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water?
Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were._

 _Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their
many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock
would become a Genghis Khan...._ [See Aldus Huxley's _Island_ for a
particularly depressing exploration of this concept.]

 _Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting
how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight
that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium. Clearly, then, I
haven’t yet gotten good enough at Malthusianizing my daily life—have you?_

------
brohoolio
"Suppose that a Walmart clerk and a hedge-fund manager both decide to take the
afternoon off to attend their kids’ baseball game. For the clerk, a half-day’s
forfeited pay could come to less than forty dollars. For the hedge-fund
manager, an afternoon’s worth of lost trades may cost millions, which is a lot
to give up to watch little Billy strike out looking."

This is bullshit. If you are working at Walmart you can't just take the day
off on a whim nor would you because you can't afford it.

This quote from the article pulled me out of whatever fantasy bullshit land
the authors are writing from.

People are busy because they want meaning in their lives. Doing things gives
you a sense of purpose.

~~~
joezydeco
That hedge-fund manager also has legions of analysts and traders that do the
manager's bidding. The idea that the manager is doing the actual button
pushing on a trading terminal is bullshit as well.

Friend of a friend owns a modest investment fund and hasn't set foot in the
office in a year. He directs his staff via smartphone from his boat.

~~~
ryan_123
Though I do not agree with th author, the author might be suggesting a
situation which warrents the presence of the manager, may be meeting with a
prospective client etc. Then there is a high probability someone else picked
up the prospect and he lost millions.

Yes, it is all conjecture.

------
jpb0104
I like this idea:

 _Change your language. Instead of saying "I don't have time" try saying "it's
not a priority," and see how that feels. Often, that's a perfectly adequate
explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don't want to. But other
things are harder. Try it: "I'm not going to edit your résumé, sweetie,
because it's not a priority." "I don't go to the doctor because my health is
not a priority." If these phrases don't sit well, that's the point. Changing
our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don't like how we're
spending an hour, we can choose differently._

src:
[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020335870...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203358704577237603853394654)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sometimes "I'm busy" is a way to say "I'm not going to edit your résumé,
sweetie, because it's not a priority" without pissing off your SO. We might
actually like how we're spending an hour, we just try to control the emotional
reactions of others.

------
ochs
I like the winner-take-all hypotheses best. A lot of people are employed in
advertising, marketing, PR, sales, lobbying, law, etc. and even those who are
not might be required as part of their job to do some of those things from
time to time.

The problem is that it's more lucrative to manipulate people to buy things
they don't need or to trick them to pay more. Note that there are industries
where marketing costs are outrageously high, sometimes higher than production
and/or R&D. A company that doesn't spend the same amount on marketing or
lobbying might make less profit (e.g. due to network effects, other scaling
effects, special protections or subsidies) and thus seem like a bad
investment.

This leads to a sort of arms race: everybody needs to hire more and more
marketers, patent lawyers, etc. and donate more to political campaigns.

Solution: Heavily regulate advertising and lobbying. Some kinds of advertising
could just be outlawed, and the rest could get (time or space) limits.
Anonymous electronic cash would also help to make internet publications
independent from corporate advertising money. Tax money could be used to
support independent institutes or publications that try to spread actually
helpful consumer advise.

I think some winner-take-all mechanics might also be at play on a personal
career level. Note that there are actually lots of people with nothing but
free time, though usually not by choice. Many governments deny those people a
decent standard of living (some even a home, food or medical care), forcing
them take shitty, low-paying, insecure jobs. The constant threat of losing
your income to someone else who will work harder or for less money kind of
naturally creates a situation where you either work long hours or not at all.

------
jhwhite
I don't understand how you can expect to work less hours in a capitalist
economy. Basically the whole point is to make money and if you're freeing up
time that means you're more productive for other work.

If my job is to do a, b, and c and using technology I make it so I only have
to spend time doing a, then an employer is going to find something for me to
do. Could be busy work, could be letting someone go and giving me their job to
save money.

If I don't they'll find someone else who will.

Technological advances that were suppose to help the employee work less, has
only helped business run at lower operating costs.

~~~
maerF0x0
Overtime the market (through price competition) ought to pass those savings
onto consumers (ie the employee) . That is a form of increased compensation --
when your paycheck buys you more of what you want.

------
zackmorris
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)

My hunch is that we're so busy because capitalism seeks to find local maxima
in the possible space of all profits, and because so many people are involved
in it, it works pretty well (as far as hill climbing algorithms go).

What keeps me up at night is knowing that there is a higher point that can
only be found by going down the descending side of the hill, potentially for
an extended period of time.

So here I am at the bottom, wondering if I should turn back or try another
hill. It was a lot more work walking downhill than I thought it would be. I
keep wondering if there’s some other search function I could employ that would
reveal where the peaks are or even transport me to them. Sometimes I picture
where a hill would be but nobody listens. They are too busy climbing their own
hills. Then it vanishes and reappears under someone else, and people admire
how hard that person climbed. Lately the best strategy seems to be doing as
little as possible and riding the hills as they grow around me. As someone
born and raised to climb, I don’t know what to make of this.

~~~
Infinitesimus
" Lately the best strategy seems to be doing as little as possible and riding
the hills as they grow around me"

I am not quite convinced that this solution is universal (which is a claim you
didn't make) or practical for a large set of people. What does it translate to
in more tangible terms? Refuse to go to school/seek a better job/invest in
something more worth one's time in wait for an unexpected propulsion to the
top of a hill?

I agree that the hills are rather unstable and various unaccounted for factors
can cause the searching algorithm to fail. Most often being that we fail to
account for all the other dimensions which also have hills that somehow need
attention. One dimension is profits and it is a very popular hill, but all of
a sudden you hit a point and realize that there exists a hill in health, and
relationship, and personal growth, etc.

What do we do as a response? Stop searching? I doubt it. It might be better to
instead, accept the fact that our algorithm will never provide the perfect
solution; that to optimize for one dimension (income, for example), we will
have to sacrifice optimizations in other dimensions (relationships, leisure
etc.) due to a finite resources and constraints outside our control, and in
doing that, define priorities.

The priorities need not be final values, but mutable based on environmental
conditions. Today, a 60hr week might be a reasonable priority in order to - or
at least, in the hopes of being able to - eventually drop that to 20hr weeks
and 40 hours with family and other interests.

[btw, great analogy]

------
king_jester
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned one of the key components of busy-ness
for the average worker: unemployment. Labor force participation is down even
though productivity for the average worker is historically way up. Owners of
capital get can more done with fewer workers today than ever before for many
different kinds of businesses, so it is not surprising that people work harder
and are busier while more folks are finding themselves unable to find work in
traditional ways.

------
jmzbond
I think it's a combination of many reasons, many of which the article cited,
but then from other articles I've read as well.

At least for myself, I've noticed that I have used busy-ness as an excuse to
not do something I dislike. A rapidly growing synonym by the way, is I'm
"tired."

As for why people stay "busy" beyond the excuse factor, I buy most into the
argument about keeping up with the Joneses. We live in a very consumption-
driven society and people are always scaling up their "needs" rather than
being happy with what they have. Consider the consultant that buys a house
upon making manager, and then a bigger house upon making partner. Were any of
those upgrades truly necessary for the 2-person couple? No, but they"felt"
necessary because that's what we do. We climb ladders and scale up.

I'm less inclined to buy the argument that people stay busy because working
provides meaning. It's not that I don't think work provides meaning, it's that
I don't think most people find meaning in their work today. Rather, work is
the tedium that you experience so that you can climb a ladder and get stuff,
and continue the up-and-to-the-right cycle.

------
klunger
I was surprised that the author did not include the Puritan American work
ethic as a possible explanation. That is, the idea that work = virtue.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic)

------
mey
Why are we busier?

Go here [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-
states/productivity](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-
states/productivity) change the start of the graph to 1959. I would argue that
technology has radically helped our productivity but at the end of the day,
people are always expected to get better.

Honestly I don't know if this is sustainable but the idea of always growing
from a gut check doesn't seem to be. The question could be what is the
breaking point and what will break?

[http://www.bls.gov/lpc/](http://www.bls.gov/lpc/)

~~~
psychometry
Gains in productivity don't help the working class much; they mostly help the
owners of companies. Those owners have no financial incentive to reduce
working hours to compensate for gains in productivity when they could rather
cut half their workforce and tell the remaining workers they need to work
harder/longer because there is more competition for their jobs now.

Those who predicted a "leisure society" back in the 1950s obviously didn't
realize Marx predicted the opposite would happen a century earlier.

~~~
mey
Exactly. To achieve a leisure society we would need to see GDP grow while the
productivity index either was flat or decreased.

If you use the same link and look at GDP per capita on that same graph, in
2008 area, productivity started to overtake GDP.

------
voteapathy
My guess is that we as humans tend to look at what we've missed out on rather
than what we've gained. During Keynes's time there wasn't quite as much
competition for one's time and attention, and whatever they had probably
wasn't as cheap. Now we just have so much entertainment at our disposal that
we can't feel satisfied with what we have.

I'll call it the _Deal or No Deal irrationality_. Essentially, if you go on
that show hoping to win $1,000,000 but end up with just $100, you probably
feel pretty disappointed. The $999,900 you didn't win ends up eclipsing the
fact that you won $100. $100! A free night out with your friends! A nice fancy
dinner! Who doesn't want that sort of bonus?!

[I might have accidentally stolen the above example from a Dan Ariely book. If
I did then I do apologize]

Now in our society we have competing forces of remaining sociable, watching
TV, browsing the Internet, maintaining hobbies, going on vacations, and (as
the article notes) trying to work and more more in the process. I mean, I've
had to _sacrifice_ watching TV and playing video games just because I need to
to have 'more productive leisure.' Board games, lifting weights, going out
with friends, and programming are things that I like to do, sure, but that
doesn't quite fill in the gap a video game may do in the same way. At the same
time I'd like to do more biking and get into other more artistic hobbies, but
the time cost to learning is so great and the ROI relative to what I already
have on my plate.

~~~
vacri
$100... for the hours of your time it takes to apply, get accepted, show up,
sit around in the green room, partake in the gameshow itself, and make your
way back home. It's not free money.

~~~
_archon_
And it's not even close to $100, after taxes.

------
eggnog
Why is there no consideration of unemployment in this exploration? In order
for leisure time to be evenly-distributed, in an anti-freeloader society, work
would have to be evenly-distributed as well. That means having two employees
working 20 hours, instead of one working 40. However, employers would need to
be able to supply the workers the same salary they now pay the 40-hour worker,
or else the workers would have to be willing to consume less.

------
tim333
I was reminded of something written by George Bernard Shaw, a contemporary of
Keynes and as well as a playwright, a co founder of the London School of
Economics, saying the harder he works the more he lives. Maybe people are busy
because, to some extent, they want to be. The finding mentioned in the article
that the richer people are the busier would fit with that. Quote below:

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself
as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little
clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote
itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the
whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I
can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the
more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to
me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and
I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future
generations."

------
greedyBrah
Awesome article. I don't have much to add, but it's interesting how "funny" we
are as a species in that we're never fully content. What we think of as a
"perfect life" today will be trivial in 100 years and that society 100 years
from now will yearn for their own perfect life.

~~~
herokusaki
An alternative that is not to be easily dismissed is that in 100 years we will
have learned to manipulate our contentment. If handled badly enough, this
could become our final discovery. Not that we would then care.

~~~
sizzle
reminds me of a previous front page submission:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lb/are_wireheads_happy/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lb/are_wireheads_happy/)

------
11thEarlOfMar
An evolution-based theory is that we are genetically programmed to ensure our
offspring's survival. This means that whatever tools, knowledge and experience
parents have picked up along the way are improved and applied to raising their
children. Parents will therefore observe and learn from other parents and
their own research for healthier foods, better education tracks, both
leadership and teamwork development activities, and whatever else we are
convinced will help.

That drive then gets co-mingled with the need for acceptance and
competitiveness (also evolution-based). The soccer mom satisfies all those
drives concurrently: Improved survival rate for offspring, need for acceptance
by a group, competitiveness for resources.

Thanks to evolution, we are pretty much spring-loaded to drive ourselves crazy
busy in our 21st century world.

------
bikamonki
Email+IMs+notifications, everywhere, anytime, that's how.

~~~
aestra
False sense of urgency.

------
nugget
I'm a naturally competitive individual and I like to out-compete my peers at
work - in other words, to win. I don't think this part of human nature will
ever lessen no matter how far technology advances.

~~~
malyk
You should re-calibrate your winning condition to "spends the most time
relaxing" instead of "makes the most money".

Really, you should do whatever you like, but part of the problem is that our
collective winning condition is based on a number that has, after a certain
point, little relation to happiness.

Personally, I try to optimize my happiness. I'm not doing that great a job
though because I still spend more than 40 hours working a week. I think my
ideal would be to spend 25-ish hours at work and the rest on "leisure"[1]
activities.

The nobel economist who invented the GNP (predecessor to GDP) even warned that
"the welfare of a nation can...scarcely be inferred from a measure of national
income"[2]. Yet here we are 80 some odd years later and it seems the only
thing that matters for a nation is GDP growth and the only thing that matters
for a person is salary.

Those are nice things to track, but they don't tell you anything about the
welfare and happiness of people. Trying to optimize GDP/earnings growth is
almost entirely the reason the US doesn't have universal health care, or a
higher minimum wage, or mandated child-care leave or vacation leave, etc.
We're too scared that it might impact a number without any regard to the
actual humans who have to slave away in misery* to attain it. We need to
recalibrate our winning conditions to something more, well, humane.

* - misery is mostly hyperbole, fwiw

[1] - leisure activities for me would be a side business, cycling, hiking,
gardening/farming, but they could really be anything. [2] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets)

~~~
vidarh
Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis" makes the point that very few
things actually long-term moves the needle when it comes to happiness:

Meditation does. As does therapy. And drugs.

These can move our "normal range" of happiness. Most other things, Haidt
argues, will temporarily bump our happiness up or down, but we quickly revert
to our normal range.

Some things that generally don't affect our happiness in the long term
according to Haidt: The amount of time we work or spend on leisure activities.
Major health problems that are not degenerative (heart attack, losing your
legs). Winning the lottery. Getting that big raise at work.

The reason, it seems, is that we _adapt_ very quickly. Winning the lottery
will make us very happy for a short while, but without a lot of discipline
we've shortly adapted to our new-found wealth and the needle goes back down to
our "normal range". Losing your legs will make you depressed for a while, but
soon we adapt and the needle springs back up. Getting a raise is great for a
month or three, but then we're used to it and looking forward to the next one.

As long as things are steadily getting better, we are mostly happy. If they
are steadily getting worse, we are mostly unhappy. Even seemingly earth-
shattering events that totally changes our lives only tends to affect most
people for a while.

This does explain some of the obsession with GDP: It is a proxy for growth,
and ongoing growth _is_ associated with happiness. But as point out,
optimizing for GDP can happen at the cost of negatively affecting other things
that are also associated with happiness, and the net result is not necessarily
all that great.

An interesting aspect of Haidt's claims is that we should not aim for a _too
rapid_ improvement if they make further improvements harder. That is, it's
better to get a steady 3% increase in salary, than 50% now, and then nothing
for many years. If you do get that 50% raise (or a huge exit), it is better
not just for your finances but for your _happiness_ to invest most of it, and
slowly increase your spending over time.

~~~
malyk
Interesting and seems to match my experience.

My guess is the freedom to try new things would be a way to maintain or
improve ones happiness. There are a ton of things I wish I had time to
do/learn/experience, but the general trend of society is to chase the dollar
through "steady" work.

------
pyrrhotech
You are only busy if you choose to be in this country. However, how you make
the choice is implicit by your level of consumption. I am happy to live on
30k/year even though I make almost 200k, because in 5-10 years, I don't want
to be so busy.

You can make the choice--either live an extravagent lifestyle and remain busy,
or live modestly for a decade or less and then do whatever the fuck you want
24 hours a day.

~~~
tgcordell
Doing 'whatever the fuck you want' costs money too, and its something you'll
have avoided due to the frugal life style. So, at the point you retire early,
either your frugal habits have become ingrained, or you quickly learn that
'fun' comes at a price. Its an interesting conundrum to say the least.

~~~
aestra
>Doing 'whatever the fuck you want' costs money too, and its something you'll
have avoided due to the frugal life style.

Hrm?

Going without a fancy car and electronics isn't the same thing as "doing
whatever the fuck I want."

For me, I consider myself frugal in a sense. I don't have hardly any material
wants and I try hard not to buy much of anything. I don't want a fancy car, I
went for a cheap efficient one. I basically don't have any wish to keep buying
"stuff." I don't care what anyone thinks of me because I don't have good
"stuff." I drove a beat up car FOREVER even when everyone made fun of me for
it.

What I do is I spend my money on fun. Taking weekend trips at least once a
month for example as something that costs money or going out with my friends.
I'm not frugal in that sense, but it is what I choose to spend my money on. I
try to do things cheap as possible. I have plenty of money and way more than I
need even with these expenditures because I don't acquire "stuff" or want or
need a big house for all my "stuff."

In all honesty from what I noticed just from the people I know that the "I'm
so busy" people are the same people who are running on the hedonistic
treadmill faster and faster.

------
whirlycott1
That "Overwhelmed" book is excellent. Halfway through it now and it's really
altered my perspective on everyday life.

------
rumcajz
One analogy to consider is that peoples with argiculture had much worse living
standard than hunters-gatherers. Yet, given that they were tied to a patch of
ground, they've drove the hunters-gatherers out of their traditional hunting-
gathering grounds and eventually took over the world.

The progress doesn't necessarily prefer better standard of living.

------
Kiro
Am I naive to believe that we're on a good way of fulfilling Kenyes's
prediction and that it's all thanks to capitalism? The world is a much better
place today than it was 100 years ago.

------
keithpeter
[http://idler.co.uk/](http://idler.co.uk/)

It is _possible_ to make a business out of being idle, although I suspect Tom
and Victoria are quite busy really.

------
wturner
tldr. I'm basing my below comment on the title of the article.

I think it's just an out growth of our evolution. I mean throughout human
history we've had to be 'busy' to survive. Now there is a small historical
ripple in that pattern where we empirically don't have to adhere to the same
ethic to survive, but it's still ingrained into us from our history.

------
jmnicolas
Why people need boolean logic as in "Keynes was right OR wrong" ?

Contrary to computer science you can be right AND wrong.

------
wycx
Usury. The only way money is generated is by debt. Debt, by definition is
encumbered by interest. Thus, the only way to generate money to cover the
interest is to generate more debt, this is a feedback cycle, requiring
accelerating borrowing just to stay where you are. I think this is a large
part of why we are so busy today. We are always behind the eight ball, at
every level.

~~~
tim333
> The only way money is generated is by debt

Huh? There are loads of other ways to make money. Write some software for
example. Or if you are the government then print some.

~~~
wycx
Educate yourself:
[http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q102.pdf)

------
marcosscriven
I really can't help but read the diaereses, they insist on using, as umlauts.

------
Mandatum
Offtopic, but the date on the article says 6 days from now..

~~~
mrbabbage
That's probably the day the article will appear in the print. It's very common
practice among websites of print publications, so that there's no discrepancy
in dates between the online and print editions.

~~~
wnoise
Close. Yes, they keep the same date, but the common use of the date is the
_last_ day it should be available for sale, so the day before the next issue
is out. This lets bookstores and newsstands throw out everything with a date
before today, no matter the frequency of publication. For weekly magazines, it
is thus six days in the future. Monthly magazine need give only the month, and
that does correspond to when it should be sold.

~~~
bluenose69
That's very interesting. Thanks for explaining it.

------
erikpukinskis
Greed.

------
michaelochurch
If you look at corporate employment (the situation of the lower classes is a
different matter) people _are_ doing about 5-10 hours of real work per week.
Real work is so rare that it's a political token allocated as a favor. If you
pay your dues and make your bosses happy, you _might get a real project_ after
a couple of years.

The rest of that time is spent acquiring and maintaining social status.

Under corporatism, you don't get a leisure society. You get total
disenfranchisement of those who lose in (increasingly noisy and degenerate,
over time) political tussles and end up with "the wrong kind" of resume, and a
frenetic but wasteful contest in which those who are still in contention beat
the piss out of each other to make themselves eligible for the (dwindling)
supply of real projects.

When you have such a large number of people with nothing better to do but
jockey for social status, you have a lot of cheap labor and it's easy to
assign pointless grunt work that doesn't need to be done, and that does little
for a person's career or general employability-- and people will do it.

That, above, is what happened. Also, read nlawalker's post, because (s?)he
nailed it.

------
chondos
How did we get we busy? (or did we?)

Average American watches 5 hours of TV per day:
[http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-
watch...](http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch..).

Perhaps people spend more time at work then they used to, but while not at
work they spend way less time working on things like mowing the lawn, cooking,
washing clothes, ETC.

Women blaming men for them being too busy need to weight their options IMO. If
you are too busy, quit your job and stay home. To maintain the quality of life
that existed while Keynes wrote this book, a single income is often adequate.
It's not worth killing yourself over.

I think what much of what explains the wealth gap is free trade and illegal
immigration. We import everything from China today. We would not allow these
sweat-shops in our country with children working in dangerous conditions for
pennies an hour. We wouldn't allow it here, but we do support it by buying
these products. This breaks the whole premise that Keynes was basing his
predictions on (Illegal immigrant employment as well). People can get rich
paying illegal workers almost nothing, or importing a product from China and
marking up it's price by 8-10x.

This throws things out of the balance that he envisioned.

~~~
navait
Or, you know, male significant others could take up an equal amount of
responsibility in the household.

~~~
lmm
Most of the "responsibility" is dumb things that don't actually need doing;
more equal households are generally more equal not because a man's doing more
but because a woman's doing less.

US employers make it hard for professionals to work part-time and hard for
those who do to get promoted, so it's probably better to have one partner
focus solely on gaining income and the other taking care of the household.
AIUI the evidence is that both men and women are happier when they adopt the
traditional roles than when they reverse or try to balance them.

------
maerF0x0
Of course they blame men. Never mind blaming misguided feminism, pushing women
to endlessly new heights of perfectionism, elitism and competition both within
and across their fairer sex.

And strangely its not OK that the man knows how to relax, minimizes extraneous
work and does a sufficient job...

Hits a nerve for me if you can't tell.

~~~
chondos
You sexist... How dare you challenge feminists, They have every right to fight
mother nature... So what if they are biologically and mentally a perfect fit
for taking care of children and domestic duties. So what if men are the
obvious natural choice as breadwinner. So what if this ruins countless
marriages and families, so what if kids are raised by day care providers who
don't give a lick about them, so what if it causes tens of thousands of
abortions by career women each year.

Taking the man who is biologically programmed (via evolution or creation) to
be the leader, head decision maker, and breadwinner essentially switching him
into the minority power role because he is not the primary breadwinner? How
could that ever hurt a marriage? How could that ever make his wife respect him
less?

Taking the women and putting her in roles of abstract logic and non emotional
decision making against her nature? how could that ever cause stress for her.
How could sending her kids off each day to be raised by a day care provider
ever cause her guilt or grief due partly to her in-built nurturing
instincts/programming? How could she avoid hating her husband for not being
the mother that he should be?

How could any of this negatively affect society today and for future
generations? That would be obscene. Just look at the positives of where we are
today... Emmm better get a microscope.

I don't blame feminists for their beliefs, I blame men (past and present). If
men would have respected and taken care of their wife's and daughters the way
they should have, they would have been happy, fulfilled, and never started
rebelling and trying to turn against men and even against nature itself.

~~~
wpietri
Dude, when you figured out you were banned, what maked you think that posting
the same comment under a new account is a good idea? Try taking a hint.

By the way, that's the naturalistic fallacy you're pushing, and it's
horseshit. Horseshit you have elaborated into a self-justifying worldview. You
might ask what's so wrong with your life that you need to spend your time like
this.

