
Why is everyone so busy? - Futurebot
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636612-time-poverty-problem-partly-perception-and-partly-distribution-why?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whyiseveryonesobusy
======
waylandsmithers
So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3
hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from
technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a
robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs.

On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour
task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours
also instead of going home at noon.

~~~
snird
I suggest the opposite.

The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money
for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real
value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to
people for votes and for statistics.

And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the
fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by
regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Name some examples of no-value governmental jobs? It's easy to say someone's
job is unnecessary from the outside.

~~~
kirk21
There are a lot of at random rules. Why do you need >100 senators when they
barely meet and have a lot of workers? Why do you need a lot of people in the
board of directors of gov co's when they never make any remark? Sometimes they
even get paid if they do not show up!

~~~
joosters
Be specific. _Which_ senator is not needed? Can everyone agree on how many
senators are required? How confident are you really that they aren't needed?

------
falcor84
I would like to provide another explanation for the longer hours at work:
reverse-telecommuting (doing personal stuff on company time).

Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that
we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal
finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc.
all the while coordinating with one's spouse.

The expectation to stay longer hours at work seems to have come with more
goodwill towards running personal errands and general slacking around at work,
such that though we work longer hours, the work itself is much less
concentrated.

~~~
patrickk
Superb, hilarious article on this topic:
[http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-
rule.htm](http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm)

------
StillBored
I blame my own personal loss of time partially on long commutes. Previously, I
lived about ~8 minutes away from where I worked. Now I live about ~40 minutes
(which is only about 12 miles) from work. So, that works out to ~5.3 extra
hours a week I lose sitting in my car. Or about 6.5 work weeks of time a year.
With that time, I could be teaching the kids something, learning a new skill,
exercising, working on my own projects, or just relaxing.

Think about how much work you can get done in 6 weeks at work. That is what is
being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects
near the bottom of the priority list.

~~~
simonh
And you're falling into exactly the trap the article is talking about.
Worrying about the cost of all that time spent in the car, when you could be
thanking your lucky stars you have that extra time to yourself.

My commute is 1 hour each way and it's wonderful. Having a busy job and 2 kids
means I have a lot to do at work and at home, but those 2 hors a day are
entirely my own.

Mostly I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also carry an iPad and read
on that when I get a seat on the train. It's a great opportunity to listen to
novels, history and science podcasts, comedy shows or read material I wouldn't
get a chance to otherwise. Podcasts and audiobooks are perfect for car
journeys too though.

~~~
izolate
> but those 2 hours a day are entirely my own.

You haven't tasted freedom, my friend. Commuting hours are enslaved hours. I
have the fortune of a 15 minute bike ride to work. The extra hours in my week
can be spent in any old direction, not just listening to podcasts. I can go to
the bank, sit in a coffee shop, play some guitar, whatever.

~~~
nickik
I commute more then 2h a day. Honstly I dont mind because it means I can live
where I want to live.

Its not lost time, I spend 1h on day on Hacker News and Reddit anyway. I would
do the exact same thing at home. Im writting this comment from the train. I
also have my personal media collection, a book, a kindle and my laptop.

~~~
rifung
I think you are fortunate to be able to do things you enjoy while commuting.
If you had to drive to work and sit through terrible traffic, things might not
be as nice unfortunately. I have more recently been taking the bus but I still
can't really read on it because I get dizzy..

------
tjradcliffe
"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough
priority for me to make time to do it."

While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money,
less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social
conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently.

There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently,
and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social
and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities.

Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every
day and ramping up from there.

Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate
telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting)
or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have
harmed European productivity ([http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-
united-states](http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states)).
That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is
really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient?

For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours
because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set
their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those
priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is
likely to make us happy: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-
dirksen/happiness-rese...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-
dirksen/happiness-research-ranks-_b_829591.html)

~~~
jamesaguilar
Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told
to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do
this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at
some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and
trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job.

In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my
productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world,
you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what
would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and,
surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with
their careers either.

By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for
these links. They are very interesting.

------
adamzerner
1) People seek purpose in their jobs. The jobs that provide this usually
require an investment of time.

2) People seek status. Status comes from relative wealth and intelligence,
which requires an investment of time.

3) People usually don't have the choice to trade money for time. You usually
can't say, "I'm going to work 5 hours less per week and in return take a
smaller salary". Hourly workers can (sort of) do this, but they're the ones
who usually can't afford to do this.

All that said, there still are plenty of opportunities to exchange money for
more time and people (IMO irrationally) pass these opportunities up. Ex.
paying for food instead of taking the time to cook, clean, shop. Ex. paying
someone to clean your house. I'm not really sure what the explanation for this
is.

~~~
Chronic30
People fail to correctly value (1) the cost of these time saving services and
(2) their own time.

It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on
gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make
multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant
time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy
a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.

~~~
adamzerner
I think it's clear that people don't value these things properly. The
interesting question is why. What are the underlying heuristics and biases?
I'm posing the question, but I don't have a great answer to it.

~~~
pm90
Because most people don't think that deeply about these things. And while
money can be easily quantified, its not the case with time. I think pg has an
essay on this.

------
DanielBMarkham
Being a Star Trek fan, I was watching TOS (The Original Series) yesterday with
my son. As was the norm for that show, in every episode Kirk somehow managed
to find an alien planet with a beautiful woman on it that needed some sort of
help. [insert long discussion about misogyny in 1960s TV shows]. I'm a bit of
a movie buff, so I started using IMDB to look up some of these actresses to
see what they're doing now.

Dang. They're either dead or in their 80s.

We are becoming the first generation to have a multi-media reminder of how
short life is. In previous generations once grandpa died, you might have a
painting and/or some family stories to share. Perhaps a tombstone to visit.
Over time the memory faded away. In this generation and future ones, when
grandpa dies? Hell, he might still be online, a bot posting his musings for
the next 50 years. I don't see a reason grandpa can't send the grandkids a
"Happy Birthday! Now you're 60!" message decades after he passes.

This is a good thing overall, in my mind, but this constant reminder of how
short life is has the effect of making people really stingy about their time.
That's probably not such a good thing, as many important connections happen
when we're not looking for them.

As I get older, I find the need to _orchestrate_ my time instead of conserving
it: spending some time on high-energy, deeply-focused tasks and spending some
time purposefully _not_ focusing and instead spending time socially with
others I care about. Working in a good technology team is good for the former,
exercise, outdoors, and family is good for the latter, at least for me.

Being mindful of time is fine. Being stingy with it or bitter about losing it?
Not so much.

~~~
maxerickson
I think death is less present now than it has been historically. Losing babies
used to be a pretty common event, infections were often lethal, etc.

My parents were fairly old when I was born, so I've had the experience of
seeing a fair number of relatives of their generation die (I'm younger than
40). None of that has left me with any particular urgency about how I spend my
time. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying, I suppose my point is that
such things are probably more individual and personal than you have stated it.

------
oldspiceman
Necessary reading for anybody who's sick of hearing people talk about how busy
they are:
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl)

"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against
emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or
meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the
day."

~~~
roel_v
Of course, because problems that don't kill people or at least seriously
physically disables them are not real and whoever has them should just suck it
up and be thankful they're not living in Sudan, right? _rollseyes_

~~~
oldspiceman
Thanks, I've never been trolled here before.

------
debacle
In the current economy, service providers are no longer incentivized to
provide ease of use. _Everything_ is commoditized. Grocery shopping, banking,
plumbers, auto repair, travel. We want it as cheaply as possible because we're
all strapped. This creates time bloat on both sides - it takes longer to get
what we want, and it takes longer on the other side to actually provide
services.

We're currently in an artificial starvation economy. When you're starving,
it's important to conserve energy (or in this case capital) which means that
things take longer than they should. You spend a few hours more to save a few
dollars more, but, long term, the stress of being stretched causes impulse
purchasing, which creates a positive feedback loop.

~~~
tsunamifury
Its called 'Pain Optimization'. I think its the ultimate goal of a capitalist
economy as practiced by Americans (and now parts of China). It doesn't create
the best possible situation, it optimizes down to the least worst situation
the super-majority of its participants will accept.

------
Sorgam
My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as
much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be
frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just
want to.

Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do
programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make
enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice.

I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.

~~~
0x5f3759df-i
What types of companies would let you only work 3 day weeks?

I would gladly give up money for more free time but that isn't a deal
companies seem to want to make.

~~~
justincormack
A lot of people just dont ask.

~~~
yodsanklai
When I was a young graduate, I didn't feel like working 5 days a week. I had
many activities that I didn't want to sacrifice.

At job interviews, I asked about part-time and surprisingly, some companies
were fine with that. At least, until I got hired, then I was quickly pressured
to switch to full time (eventually, I moved to academics which suits me
better).

------
ascendantlogic
As a personal corollary, this year I started doing nights and weekends
consulting. After having spent years playing video games in my free time I now
feel like any hour away from my 9-5 job that I'm not billing is an hour
wasted. My bank account has never been healthier but I know I'm burning the
candle at both ends and it will catch up with me. I can't shake the feeling of
time not worked being time wasted, though.

~~~
Matumio
Work is not supposed to be a religion. Try to figure out what you would be
doing on this planet if you didn't have any obligations. You may find it is
exactly what you are already doing, but if not, you seem to be in a good
position to spend some of your time for your own sake.

------
chvid
Well. Where I live not everyone is busy.

Our population of working age (18-65) is about 3 mio. people with about 1 mio.
on some kind of welfare (unemployment benifits, government paid sick leave,
disability pension etc.).

So here in Denmark mr. Keynes has turned out to be right.

What he failed to see was the rise of the welfare state and just how unevenly
distributed work or "busyness" would end up being.

~~~
kirk21
It becoms a 'Modern forms of slavedom'... You are enslaved by the ppl on
welfare. Deal with it.

------
afoot
When I worked for a large established company a lot of the older, more senior
staff who had been around for a long time would complain constantly about the
workload being much higher than it was a decade ago.

When younger team members got promoted to similar roles with the same workload
they didn't have the same issues. The big difference between the two was the
use of technology. The workload expectation was based on efficient use of all
of the systems and programmes we had available. Those that still used paper-
based systems and ignored automated processes and other efficiencies really
struggled, and their days were much longer as a result.

------
nickik
Its simple, because we want to consume. People work hard and then buy a
expensive car. Well you could have work less and drive a shitty old car.

I dont understand what the mystery is. I myself could probebly get by with
working 4 hours per day but I dont, I rather work 8 hours and buy myself cool
computer shit and books.

~~~
niels_olson
It's perhaps not so simple. I'm a pathology resident. My only interest in cars
is to move my family around for the lowest cost (in time and money) per mile.
My time costs a fair bit, and experience has taught me a new Honda every
200,000 miles is cheaper overall (in time and money) than used cars. Try
finding a used Honda Accord without a salvage title.

My work is dictated by the needs of various hospitals and clinics. Some days I
work from 5 am to 11 pm and come in on the weekend to finish. Some days, like
today, I'm on Hacker News at 9:30 am because I'm waiting for:

* techs to pull some cases for my research project,

* my batch of surgical cases to come out, and

* tumor board at 11, which I prep'd for yesterday.

I suppose I could be working on a rosalind.info problem right now, but I
crushed one on the first attempt yesterday, so I'll delay that until this
afternoon, probably after a 5 mile run through the San Diego zoo. I could be
working with the videographer for my lab video (requested by some grants) but
... I don't want to. Although, I have 40 minutes, so maybe I could review the
script.

We save a fair bit but we also spend on lessons for the kids and an annual
vacation.

I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of
life.

There are a number of life lessons that go into this. Find work that you
enjoy. Live within your means. Exercise. Get plenty of sunshine. Eat less. Set
low expectations, you'll succeed more often and ultimately get further. Give
employees specific, actionable tasks ("specific" may vary depending on who
you're talking to, and learning where to draw that line is a life-long
exercise).

Learn how to modify your own behavior by modifying your environment. For
example: throw away your TV. This will significantly reduce your exposure to
advertising. Similarly, subscribe to a good music service: you'll avoid the
ads and your taste will drift away from the mainstream toward whatever you
genuinely enjoy. Avoid the news. There's so much news that someone else will
know whatever's going on and you're ignorance will give them an opportunity to
tell you. All of a sudden, you're having a valuable conversation. I have
adopted Knuth's position: other people make it their job to stay on top of
things. My job is to get to the bottom.

~~~
nickik
You dont talk about one thing. You have kids. That puts a huge amount of
responsabilty on you and pushes you to work more.

> I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of
> life.

I do so too. I have never enougth time to read all the books and do all the
project that I would want to do. Not to mention all the other stuff I would
like to do.

Overall I agree with you, you really have to take some time, look at your live
and figure out what you want, what makes you happy and what does not, and then
changing that. This of course means that one needs some flexibilty, if you
live with no savings and with a familiy one can not just drop everything and
go on a bicycle world tour.

------
nickik
Another thing to consider is that the law is heavly focused on full employment
and there are lots of benefits. This is true in almost all countrys, laber
market regulation have a clear focus on this.

We have no idea what the (abstract) free market laber time would be. For
better or worse our economys have devloped into a kind of paradigm that is not
focused on flexibilty. This has devloped in the industrialisation and should
be more relaxed now. In some places (most places programmers work) working
hourse are allready much more flexible.

------
pm90
The underlying problem is to figure out what you really want. Yes, I've felt
that feeling of uneasiness in "wasting" time a lot, especially as I moved into
jobs which significantly increased the monetary value of my time. But one
thing I did know was that I did not value money as much as I valued the time I
spent meeting people, being outdoors, reading books or just thinking about
things.

Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide
the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people
take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more
of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we
earn more...making us want to earn even more.

Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things,
but I do think I am on the right path.

------
wallflower
The beauty of being human is that we aren't rational when it comes to managing
our time. At least, for me, in terms of what has the biggest long-term payoff
(e.g. making better friends v. reading articles _two-levels_ removed from
original HN linkage).

> But being busy has become a refrain and rationale for the things we don’t
> do, an acceptable and even glamorous excuse. My friend at lunch reminded me
> of what the Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” – the
> filling of our lives with unessential tasks so we feel full of
> responsibilities or, as he calls them, “irresponsibilites.”

[https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-
bbb124caed51](https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51)

------
teddyh
Commuting not only takes time, it is also _expensive_ :

[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-
of-c...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-
commuting/)

------
Thriptic
This piece resonated with me strongly. I am currently down in Florida with my
parents on a two week break from work for the holidays. This is the first
stretch of time off from work I have taken in 2-3 years which involved more
than a day or two out of the lab in Boston (I have accrued 8 weeks of paid
time off and in addition my employer has effectively told me I can take as
much time off as I want). There is a nice pool where I am, a beach, unlimited
booze, other fun amenities, and yet I found myself complaining to my best
friend last night on gchat that I have been feeling anxious and somewhat bored
/ unhappy for most of the trip.

I feel like I should be spending this scarce free time better learning python
and facilitating my career switch from bio E into data science; I don't want
to eat out because that will harm my ability to cut weight for powerlifting
(my main hobby); and when I am not trying to code or work on lab work, I spend
many hours a day looking for gyms / in the gym. I effectively am attempting to
do what I do every day (work from morning until I sleep punctuated with some
time spent lifting) and am feeling miserable because I am not doing it as well
as I would be able to do it at home. Last night I was checking how much it
would cost for me to change my departure date so that I could go home early
and use my vacation days more effectively studying.

Part of this angst is driven by the fact that while I love my family and enjoy
spending time with them, I feel angry that this is how I am forced to use my
special large break. I am never able to spend time with my friends. I see my
best friend and close high school friends maybe once or twice a year for 2-3
days. They are scattered across the midwest and simply don't have any vacation
days to spend hanging out with me. My college friends in the midwest invited
me to spend New Years with them, but they admitted that they would be working
the entire week and would only be able to hang out with me for about a day, so
I declined. My friends from work are in the same situation as me and don't
have time to go on a trip.

As this article correctly points out, I realize that I have no right to
complain as these are completely self-imposed behaviors and though processes,
but to be honest I'm not sure what else to do with myself or my time. I
sometimes ask why I work the hours I do; is this really the best way to live
my life? While I realize that the answer is probably no, I don't know what
else to do, and so I keep doing it.

~~~
dennisgorelik
Fulfilling work could actually be the best way to live your life.

Why not?

------
bshimmin
For anyone interested in the context of the Keynes quote in the first
paragraph of this article, here it is in full:
[https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-
grandchildren.htm)

------
lordnacho
Isn't the standard prescription to do something that doesn't feel like work
for a living?

I quite enjoy programming, so it's not like I'm constantly watching the clock
when I work. I'm sure there are loads of other jobs that people like doing
that don't make them feel like they would rather be doing something else.

------
tessierashpool
the article starts out with (paraphrase) "decades and/or centuries ago, we
expected tech would save us incredible amounts of time, but it didn't."

if you had a computer in 1984, and somebody told you what processor speeds
would be in 2014, you might have expected all software to run flawlessly by
now.

as it is, everybody has more computing power in their pocket than the entire
Apollo moon landing ever had, and we use this power to look at pictures of
cats.

there's probably an economic principle explaining both of these failed
prediction categories. in either case, what people do with the new abundance
has a lot more to do with what they're willing to tolerate in their lives than
what the technology is actually capable of.

great tech will only produce great results if you choose to do great things
with it.

------
jmadsen
In kind of general agreement with many comments below. If I can just take a
stab at what I see as at least one of the ways we got here:

During the previous recession after 9/11, many company managers jumped on the
title of the book "More with Less" and started trying to stretch resources,
people first and foremost. (I say jumped on the "title" because the book
actually was a clever thesis that had nothing at all to do with making your
workers do two jobs for the price of one).

That recession was long and deep enough & quickly followed by an even worse
one that the new job definitions became the new standards. There hasn't been a
enough of a good economic period for labor to take back its decent conditions.

I think a lot of it is as simple as that.

------
fwn
> "Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th
> century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are
> financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using
> them profitably."

Right. Cavemen lived lazy through the day. If they did not find an animal to
hunt one day they told their children not to starve but to go and get some
chicken wings from KFC.

Surely they were happy to live before the industrial revolution. The time when
time wasn't evaluated by economic ratio. This is a great fairy tale in social
sciences.

~~~
arca_vorago
I know your comment is being sarcastic, but it is also a borderline strawman
argument. Please remember that the original promise of the industrial
revolution was that it would help us be more efficient and therefore would
help workers work less and get the same or more done. The problem is that the
oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work the same hours and all
the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled up.

So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer
society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a thing and thats the
beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up hunting, it's nice to get a
big kill and have enough food to eat off for a couple of weeks.

Thing about how much you spent on two weeks worth of meals, a full half of
your monthly budget goes to food in that time. I can spend 1 day out in the
forest, get a good elk, and another day dressing/butchering it and have enough
food for two weeks. Whens the last time you made that much in one day?

Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend educating
itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment is in danger
because everyone's too busy to even learn these days.

~~~
nickik
> original promise of the industrial revolution was that it would help us be
> more efficient

On what do you base this? Keynes belived this but nobody said 'Hallo
everybody, we are now doing a programm called Industrial revolution and we
hope that in 200 years everybody will work less', the Industrial Revolution
happend because people were seeking to make themself richer and then do with
there money whatever they did.

> The problem is that the oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work
> the same hours and all the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled
> up.

Thats just socialist bullshit. Any measure of human well beeing has improved
at the same time the world population has increased a gigantic amount. That is
a unbelivable achivment.

> So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a
> hunter/gatherer society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a
> thing and thats the beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up
> hunting, it's nice to get a big kill and have enough food to eat off for a
> couple of weeks.

Huting today is not the same. I would advice that you go read actual
descriptions of these societys befor you compare it with yourself huting.

There are intresting reports by american living with native americans for
example. Or court officels from china going into the steppe.

These people did not hunt once and then lived on it for weeks. If you killed a
buffelo it would have to substain a hole clan of people and it would be carved
up with little saving in days. There would also be tons of work making the
other parts usable.

> Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend
> educating itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment
> is in danger because everyone's too busy to even learn these days.

What???? There is more education then ever befor! Again, once you read
accounts of actual trible societys you will see that they had no time in
education beyond what they needed to live. A steppe mongol would train hourse
of shooting the bow and learing when it was safe to cross a frozen river, but
he did not sit around in the style of greeks and figure out the universe.

~~~
alchemism
Are you talking your history lessons from Hobbes, perhaps? Tribal life being
nasty, brutish, short, and full of back-breaking work?

It didn't really turn out that way
[http://www.jblearning.com/samples/0763749591/49591_Ch03_McLe...](http://www.jblearning.com/samples/0763749591/49591_Ch03_McLean.pdf)

------
3rd3
I think an obvious fact is overlooked that while new technology accelerates
existing tasks, it also introduces a lot more possibilities and new tasks. For
example, Internet messaging allows us to spend a lot less time for each
message, but it also allows us to send more messages within the same time.
It's also cheap, so we are free to set our own limits (which we are pretty bad
at).

------
stealthfound3r
Douglas Rushkoff nailed it in a short TED talk
[http://vimeo.com/65904419](http://vimeo.com/65904419)

~~~
rab_oof
A related issue: more people nowadays seem to enjoy working too much (at least
in the United States) to just stop, go home and do something else. Maybe
people, by and large, enjoy their work or don't think about doing something
else. The real question is whether it's a healthy balance or not.

Also, glowing boxes like these have an addictive quality. Just go into any
college coffee shop and the biggest drug there is no longer the coffee, it's
wifi and the glowing screens of laptop, iPad and iPhone getting high on
whatever new notification pops up.

In conclusion, the instant-gratification of outright gamification of
commoditized labor in an Idiocracy-like future doesn't seem either far off or
far fetched.

~~~
stealthfound3r
To the outside observer it can all seem like "work" but to the code artist..
some percentage of it is indeed drudgery but another (hopefully larger)
percentage of it is "creative play" using an artistic medium that the master
painters and scribes of antiquity would have traded an arm for.

For me the problems arise when money enters the equation because then you find
reasons to set aside your vision of a masterpiece so you can hurry up and ship
your your "Minimal Viable Product". You do make a good point though about the
"addictive quality" of shiny boxes. I leverage meditation to help me
"decompress" rapidly on the occasions when I do end up overworking.

Sol Robeson: Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see?
You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine
if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the
time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts
him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally
exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him
to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the
bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to
determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the
problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked
through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery.

Sol Robeson: Now, what is the moral of the story?

Maximillian Cohen: That a breakthrough will come.

Sol Robeson: Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your
wife, she will give you perspective, meaning. You need a break, you have to
take a bath or you will get nowhere.

~~~
rab_oof
Yeah, right. Creative play rarely pays the bills and neither can actual
artists because there is an oversupply of creative talent. The reality is most
jobs are terrible because most people don't have the courage, ability or
financing to prosecute a business model themselves.

What's happening on a larger scale: there's a growing number of single
professionals that live mostly at work, have no family and are pretty much
destined to die alone once premature ageism has thrown them to the wolves.
That's a problem, because most millionaires are married because it's more
practical than doing everything yourself.

For the few biased survivors, it's great if they're able to play more than
work, but most people are slaves to debt without a partner beside them. (Sucks
to be them.)

~~~
stealthfound3r
I hear ya I really do. I'm one of those "single professionals". I agree that
it's tough, but I don't think that you necessarily need to found a company
yourself to break out of the so called "terrible job" funk, all you need is to
be an early employee with equity at a startup that doesn't fail. That means
you do have to take risks (even work for equity sometimes) but there are a
wide variety of risk profiles to choose from and you definitely can find
success in this industry without having to have created a business yourself.

I also don't believe that there's a glut of disciplined creative talent at
least not when it comes to individuals who have experience contributing to
production quality web applications or open source software. The more of this
requisite experience you have, the easier it is for you to interview at
interesting startups, pick a winner, and end up with a valuable equity
position in a real company. Some people manage to do this all while engaging
in "creative play" a huge percentage of the time.

I do however agree with you that the game is stacked to the advantage of those
who already have a lot of free time no matter whether that be because they're
independently wealthy or because they've opted to not pursue the family life.
I don't think of that as ageism per say I think it's something different that
looks like ageism because young people have more free time.

I suppose that's the thing really.. why are you into this business in the
first place ? Are you in it because you enjoy playing with information
technology most of the time or are you in it as a way to get paid to finance a
wife and kids ? For me the answer is clear: I'm doing this because I love
playing with the technology. To me it's a lot like building glorious lego
structures, building robots, remote control cars, model rockets, and all of
that other fun "legacy" stuff that I used to enjoy working on as a kid. I used
to always dream about getting paid to do that kind of thing one day, and I
feel like that's what I have the opportunity to do now with web startup work.

In other words I made the conscious decision to optimize my life for immersion
into that kind of play rather than to optimize it to suit a family life
because that's what I wanted to do. In other words I was a geek before it was
chic and I had long since decided that I was OK with staying that way.

Sure I suppose it would be nice to have my cake and eat it too (have a
family), and if I was a millionaire that might be realistic
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJTRZI2HThU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJTRZI2HThU))
, but I don't feel like I _have to become a millionaire_ just to push back
against some fear of "dying alone".

As for being a slave to debt, yea that does suck, and I have no quick fix for
that, but I will point out that this problem is pervasive and that fewer and
fewer industries offer career paths where you can have any real lasting job
security. Welcome to the globalized era. I'm not saying it's a good thing I'm
just saying that appears to be how it is right now.

My point is merely that some of us enjoy this kind of work because it really
can be creative, as in you're birthing new things into the world that didn't
exist before and which could turn into things beyond what you imagined them to
be when you first started. To me it's that sense of exploration and
experimentation that makes software development fun. I am biased towards
thinking this kind of work is fun and viewing it as play, and viewing life in
the same way. This was not all that different in the past. If you look at say
the renaissance period in Europe you'll notice there were classes of artisans,
craftsmen, and alchemists who were also optimizing for this kind of play over
the pursuit of family life as their highest ideal. Some things of these things
don't often change

------
collyw
"American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than
they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such
as commuting and water-cooler breaks."

Only being 40 I can't really say for sure, but was it not they case that one
man would provide for a household 40 years ago, while now we generally have
both partners working?

------
jotux
Similar but a different perspective:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-
tra...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=0)

I personally strive to never, ever, say that I'm busy.

------
ateng
It is interesting to note that there is lots of factors why people in large
cities generally walks faster. Someone did a research on this (forgot wherr
the source is) and it concluded in average younger people walks faster, and
young people are concentrated in cities.

------
lifeisstillgood
Just slow down. I don't do good work when I am rushing, I don't take the time
to simplify or improve, but if I feel I have time and the support for good
work I can be more productive in days than I would by rushing for weeks.

------
branchless
Because land prices have rocketed because the banks lend based on both incomes
so now both parents have to work to feed the rentiers.

------
ZoomZoomZoom
Quite an interesting read, but it's just stating the obvious repeatedly. Time
equals money. And of course, with slower economics coupled with ever-
increasing competition of the global market money becomes more valuable. But
why do we feel so? It seems, there are some socio-cultural drivers for this
need of the resources.

People tend to want same things their neighbours have, or more. Today you feel
your neighbour is not just someone living across the fence, but also someone
you've just chatted on Skype (across the continents). Our sense of what Normal
is is based on the cultural environment we're living in. And with
technological progress, modern communications and mass media this sense skews
towards images propagated by those who are involved in producing more of this
kind of information i.e. western world.

This flip side of this process is what might have looked like a decent living
now seems less so. When you live in the area with life expectancy about 60
years and suddenly you realize your friends live somewhere where average is
74, you become more stressed to maximize your efforts. So my idea is that most
people who work extra hours do so not to get rich, but trying to avoid ending
up worse than average.

So what is the way we can free our time so we could sit on the "park benches
with pretty girls" more often?

The only obvious answer I see is to improve the overall life quality of the
poorest. This sounds frighteningly lefty, but this notion is based on the
realization of one of humanity's ultimate goals: providing personal freedom
for everybody to do what person feels preferable for him. The non-destructive
way of achieving it is taking off the stress and fears of less income-
maximizing life style. When you're certain you still will be well fed and able
to afford medical assistance even without extra-hours at work you'll be more
inclined to do what fulfils you as a person.

At this point it's natural to discuss the old issues of exploiting social care
and parasitic lifestyle in market economy, which might be possible in
societies with high social guarantees. This is an axiological issue and
answers depend on personal senses of equity and sympathy, and it's a hot topic
on its own. However, scientific and technological progress is what I think the
only plausible potential way of improving the overall life conditions thus
leaving more time for leisure.

*Some context on happiness vs inequality: Paul Alois. Income Inequality and Happiness: Is There a Relationship? www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/614.pdf

Shigehiro Oishi, Selin Kesebir and Ed Diener. Income Inequality and Happiness.
[http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pd...](http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pdf)

~~~
nickik
> This sounds frighteningly lefty

Thats not 'lefty' I have the same goals and Im not 'lefty'. Where we might
differ is HOW this can be achived.

I want to creat a dynamic market economy that grows and gives other people the
same conforts I have, meaning that I can work 8h and always have awesome new
gadgets or I can work 4h and just read books on the kindle all day.

What is really 'lefty' is focusing on inequallity instead of individual
wealth. It drives me mad that the focus is inequalily instead of individual
wealth/consumtion.

I have looked at lots of this 'Happiness' research and I dont have a high
opinion about it (even when it confirms my priors) because its not clear at
all how to measure happiness. I think, we need to provide liberty, once you
have liberty at least your happiness mostly depends on your own action. I dont
think society should be in the buissness of providing happyness, because that
is even more elusive goal then providing freedom.

~~~
ZoomZoomZoom
I didn't say the goal is lefty, however, decreasing inequality gap by all
means is one of the main left ideas.

Focusing on inequality is not means to an end, but it's a usable metric.
Society shouldn't "provide" happiness, but happiness dynamics can show
successfulness of what society does.

>its not clear at all how to measure happiness

I don't think its significantly harder than measuring any other attribute. You
just need to ask the right questions and take into account some social factors
(such as fear of oppression) that can distort the results.

Liberty is an essential condition of happiness (probably, not everyone agrees
but it's just my opinion). However, I think it's taking us too far from the
topic.

~~~
nickik
> Liberty is an essential condition of happiness (probably, not everyone
> agrees but it's just my opinion)

That does not turn out in the reasearch. Social or Economic freedom does not
corrulate with happyness, specially the 'ask questions' kind very well. You
need to ajust for cultural bias, some people, on the question how happy the
are say, 'normal' others say 'good'. This depends on culture and attidute, its
not clear however that the person that said 'good' is happier then the one
that said 'normal'.

Thats why I said measuring happyness is very difficult, its not at all clear
how to ajust for culture and many other factors. And when you ajust, how do
you do it without beeing totally arbitrary.

------
yagibear
TLDR, anyone?

~~~
malux85
Too busy to read it? ;)

------
dodyg
tldr: first world problem.

