
We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015) - thesumofall
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont-need-to-work-so-much
======
TrackerFF
As an European working with lots of American contractors in the tech field,
I'm always impressed by their work ethics. The put in 10-12 hours, 6 days a
week.

But from talking with them, it seems like their focus is on retirement -
hopefully in their 50's. That's their grand plan, because that's when they'll
start "living".

It's a bit of a contrast to us Scandinavians - as we really like to live in
the present. No pie in the sky dreams.

Which is also why we guard our working rights and work-life balance like a
national treasure.

~~~
closeparen
I find it hard to empathize with FIRE people [0] because I like my job. But
the few I've discussed it with absolutely _despise_ working. Like all-
consuming, life-purpose-defining revulsion. And I think there's a feedback
loop to it, because in trying to "get it over worth" they increase the
intensity and make it worse for themselves. Then it becomes all the more
important to get it over with quickly.

I wonder if the European attitude is just more similar to mine, being
comfortable with and accepting of a job as a backdrop to build a life around,
rather than something intolerable to escape from ASAP at any cost. Probably
has to do with the jobs themselves being more comfortable.

[0] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-
independence-...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-
retire-early-fire.asp)

~~~
pb7
You can enjoy your job and pursue FIRE. FIRE just gives you options. You can
either stop working, do other work that doesn't pay as well or at all, or keep
working and live at a much higher standard of living. Maybe the company you
like working for only gives you a few weeks off per year and you want to take
1-2 months of unpaid time off. Maybe you don't want to care about layoffs or
market changes or bad management. Maybe one day you wake up and decide you
want to spend time with your kids and productive work can take a breather for
a while.

It's foolish to focus just on enjoying your job right now, finances be damned,
without planning for the future. For what it's worth, I think it's also
foolish to despise your job every day for years and years just to retire a few
years earlier. But that's not what FIRE is, that's just one group of people
taking it to extremes, as is common in any endeavor. For most people, it just
means diligently and consistently setting money aside that will give them a
level of freedom that those who don't will never achieve.

~~~
closeparen
Maybe we are talking past each other. By “FIRE” I mean the ability to live on
investment income, exclusively and permanently, decades before a typical
retirement age.

Retirement on a normal schedule and security for a few months of rest here and
there are, I would say, baseline financial responsibility (if you can afford
them). These are marginal sacrifices, not a lifestyle/subculture.

~~~
jagannathtech
There is lean FIRE, fat FIRE, barista FIRE, only FI, and several other
variations of FIRE

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

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

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

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

\-- Bertrand Russell, 1932
[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
Invictus0
Seems more likely to me that the people that were previously going to the gym
decided to buy their own equipment. There's also something to be said about
the quantity of exercise equipment inventory available at any given time.

~~~
kerkeslager
Possibly, which is why I included three other examples.

------
moksly
I chose to work in the public sector of Denmark because I’m ideologically
inclined that way. That was decades ago, today I would chose to work here
because of how much less hours I work compared to my old university friends in
the private sector. They earn more money than me, but except for one of them
who founded and now manages a successful company, it’s not that much more
money. In fact when you calculate in all the extra hours they work, my extra
weak of paid vacation, my better paternityleave, the two extra paid child’s
sick leave days I get (per time your child is sick), the two yearly extra
vacation days (per child under the age of 7) and my pension, I probably only
earn around 10-20% less than them, and I get to spend so much more time not
working. Hell I even bumped my hours to 30 a week for a while when my daughter
was born. That was expensive, but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot
of private sector jobs.

I can’t begin to imagine how you guys in America get through life working so
much. Let alone how on Earth you raise a family, maintain a relationship and
have time for yourselves while you do it.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
I feel like you are incredibly privileged that you can afford to to have a
family while working so little hours in the public sector and I suspect your
situation is not the norm in DK.

Friends of mine who moved to SE/NL/DE/DK are definitely working the full
40h/week and sometimes more since, as they say, living there is very
expsensive.

From my experience, the Europeans who toot their _" life is so good here, why
do other people work so much?"_ horn are privileged enough to have a hand-me-
down property bought/inherited from their (grand)parents, and since
rent/mortgage is the biggest expense here, with property prices rising 8 times
faster than wages, that property ownership early in life, which they take for
granted, gives them the clear advantage that allows them to not bother with
the rat race and could even live comfortably on minimum wage.

That of course, is not the norm for everyone and especially not if you've just
emigrated here, so anyone wishing to own their own property one day has no
choice but to jump in the meat grinder and join the rat race.

~~~
Fredej
For what it's worth I live in Denmark, working a private sector full time
(37/week, usually less) job with a nice salary - though nothing out of the
ordinary for my education and experience. Came from a middle class family: My
mom is a nurse and my father is an engineer. No life-changing inheritance from
grandparents (~$10.000).

My wife stays at home with our 2 year old daughter.

We own an apartment in Copenhagen that we bought some 5 years ago, though
we're obviously still paying a mortgage on it (0% loans definitely made that
easier!). We're paying it down aggressively, though still have quite a bit of
cash left to invest.

From my experience it's about priorities. We rarely go out to dinner and don't
own a car - hopefully never will. Rarely buy new clothes.

While it might not be the norm, it's not something that's completely unheard
of.

One major factor though is probably student loans. When my wife and I left the
university we both had savings of roughly $15.000. A year later, we bought the
apartment. That would have been impossible if we had debt we needed to
overcome first. If your friends moved here with significant debt, they're
definitely playing catch-up compared to their peers.

~~~
joncrane
It sounds like you are in a great situation, by why would you aggressively pay
down a 0% interest loan?

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Nobody likes to be in debt, the sooner you can get rid of it, the better.

~~~
hkai
Hmm. But if you were investing that money even in some sort of risk free
investment like time deposit, you'd be earning free money.

~~~
limomium
There is no such thing as risk free investment.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
There definitely are investments that have a better risk/reward ratio than
carrying a 0% interest debt on a mortgage.

e.g. savings accounts with 1% interest in the EU which are government insured
up to 100k. Plus mortgage debt tends to have fiscal benefits in most
countries, too. That's a better idea than paying off a 0% mortgage. Especially
past a certain point where there's plenty of equity in the home.

There's generally virtually no financial reason to pay off a 0% debt apart
from some edge cases here and there. People do it for peace of mind, which is
of course fine, but it only works because of financial illiteracy as it's not
the most financially optimal decision to make. (even not the least risky).

~~~
prewett
The problem with "financially optimal" strategies is that tend to ignore the
fact that income can be lumpy. If everything is steady-state then it's
"optimal" (as in better returns) to run highly leveraged. The problem is that
life for individuals is not steady-state: you might lose your job, the economy
might crater, the currency might get devalued, the property/stock market
crash, etc. A 0% loan on a residence can be quite a problem if your income is
0 for some reason. Unlike a CEO who still gets his golden parachute if his
highly leveraged, "financially optimal" company encounters "unforseeable"
"turbulence" and ends up bankrupt, a bankruptcy in Me Myself and I, Inc. could
be disastrous. Like, family on the streets disastrous. Individuals opting for
peace of mind are minimizing downside risk, not maximizing "upside potential".
Financiers can afford to take risks that end up with them blowing up, but when
it's your life that blows up if some problem comes, minimizing the downside is
a pretty maximizing strategy. The fact is, we know there we be periods of
difficulty, we just don't know what the specific difficulty will be in
advance.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I've got no clue how that's really meaningful in this case. I just mentioned
there's a 1% interest government-insured savings account available, i.e. if
the bank goes bankrupt, you still get your money. The only instance where you
don't get your money is when the government goes bankrupt and doesn't honour
its obligations. In that scenario, your mortgage debt would be even more
screwed.

Meanwhile, getting 1% return on a 30 year mortgage puts you in a much safer,
financially cushier position, than having had 0% returns for that period in
time. Would you rather have 40k saved + 10k interest saved up in savings saved
up in a government-insured savings account when you lose your job, or would
you rather have a 40k lower mortgage debt and slightly lower payments or a
lower time-to-payoff? Particularly given that mortgage payments can be
furloughed and negotiated in times of payment difficulty. The answer is very
clear. Choosing 0% returns over 1% returns in this case is the riskier choice.

------
thesumofall
My European take on this: while upper class salaries might be 2-3x above
middle-class salaries they don’t afford you a lifestyle that would be
unrecognizable to a middle-class family. Maybe a nicer neighborhood, maybe
more long-distance traveling, a good restaurant from time to time. But you’re
certainly not removed from the idea that even a smaller loss in income has a
direct impact on your lifestyle. So the upper class is as afraid of a loss in
income as the middle class. And while middle class jobs are often union
protected and have a stable market of supply and demand, upper class jobs are
often highly specialized and a transition might not be as easy after having
lost a job

~~~
netcan
(Also europe.. ireland)

I would confirm this take. I would also say that "upper class" in modern
european terms, refers to something different then in other times... or
possibly in the US. We have a more cultural take on class. It's not just about
income.

First, our cutoff for "elites" is a lot lower. This is sometimes reflected in
proposed laws. For example, when France implemented a wealth tax, they set the
cuttoff around €1m. Other laws and proposed laws around europe tend to have a
similar take. In US equivalents, thresholds are proposed aropund $50m-$1bn.

Here in Ireland, the top thresholds of income tax are near (even below) median
full time income... €44k. Also, our public housing system houses around 20% of
the population. The quality of housing is better than the lower end of private
rentals... which tend to house employees of Google FB, etc.

Meanwhile, there's a lot more emphasis on cultural divide here. In the UK, the
"anywhere vs somewhere's" is a popular take on modern class division.
Anywhere's being internationally oriented, college educated people.
Somewhere's being locally oriented. It corresponds to a more evergreen take:
professional class vs working class.

In both cases, the income gaps are smaller than the cultural gaps. A college
graduate working in Google account management for €35k can earn half what a
plumber earns, but the class divide is still what it is. This is actually a
significant dynamic in Ireland now. We have a lot of middle-income white
collar jobs at international tech companies, with questionable long term
security. We have a lot of higher paying blue collar jobs, mostly construction
adjacent.

Often, the economic differences between classes just comes down to
neighborhoods, property wealth and accumulated family wealth... not
necessarily income. Often, but not always. The lowest 25% income families tend
to be distinctly, and proudly working class. The genuinely wealthy tend to be
upper class.

Class is complicated in europe. It can be quasi-ethnic, with accents, body
language and cultural subtleties playing a big role. It doesn't correspond
neatly to income.

~~~
viklove
What makes you think it "corresponds neatly to income" in the US?

There's economic class, social class, and socio-economic class. These are
three different things, and that's also true in the US.

~~~
netcan
i don't

------
737min
Here’s an observation: employees, companies & countries that are winning tend
to work harder. Those that are merely coasting or declining - eg in a
situation where there is nothing to win with more effort - work less hard.

Elon Musk - “no one changes the world working 40 hr weeks” - is trying to win
in a global competition. Your uncle Bob who is Director of QA at Oracle?
Probably not playing to win.

Countries like Japan or SKorea or China are trying to win. US is trying to
win. Denmark or Italy are no longer trying to win a world-wide competition.

No one has shown that individuals, companies or countries can wim while
working less than the competition.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
I get what you mean about trying to win on the level of people and even
companies. Winning or being in the game to win is motivating and when you see
an excellent payoff curve where each hour is delivering value, working longer
does not feel so bad.

When you use this logic for larger entities though, it falls down. Very few
countries are in that kind of rapid growth mode for long as an entire country.
Indeed, you've grouped some wildly different countries together there.

South Korea and Japan had periods of extremely rapid and impressive growth
where it really did make sense to say that the entire country had organised
themselves and sacrificed in order to win. Their goal was to grow their
children's standard of living and they succeeded. Is aging, inward looking
Japan on 2020 still playing to win? Or have they won enough to enjoy the
fruits of that victory?

China is a country that is still on the rise.

Is "the US" trying to win at a national level? I don't think so. I think that
parts of the country are full of people who are trying to win but on a
national level? I think the best we can hope for is that the humiliatingly
inept set of responses over the last six months are a galvanising moment for
Americans on the order of Meji era Japan.

I also think that you've given Uncle Bob quite a good job for someone who's
not too bothered about winning. Oracle might have a reputation as not such a
great place to work, but I rather suspect that making it to their director of
QA takes quite a lot of winning along the way!

If you want a tech example of not fussed about winning, maybe someone doing
SAP implementation or running internal business logic as a 9-5 is a better
example.

Also it's a bit odd comparing Italy and Denmark since I'd be hard pressed to
come up with two countries that are so different!

Denmark's labour productivity is the highest in the EU after Ireland and
Luxembourg, both of which have distorted figures because of financial
concentration of assets there by American tech companies. Italy's is not much
more than half that of Denmark.

~~~
georgeecollins
>> the last six months are a galvanizing moment for Americans on the order of
Meji era Japan.

Or how about Sputnik? Or the Great Depression, Civil War, etc. I like to think
that the US has changed course when a course change was required. It often
takes a crisis to trigger it.

------
kqr
It's also the fact that many modern, well-paid jobs are actually somewhat
satisfying. Humans get off on solving problems, as long as they are allowed
autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The things I do at work are the things I would do also in my spare time, if I
had more of it. I like solving puzzles. So if I'm going to do this stuff
anyway, why not get paid for it?[1]

Of course, I don't want to do it for more than around 40 hours[2] a week
(mainly because I have other things I also want to do, and there's only so
many hours in total to do all the things in) but I do want to do it for a
significant portion of my day. I need that intellectual stimulation to be
happy.

But I can imagine some people want to go "beyond the average" and really show
their employers their commitment. In a world where people happily volunteer 40
hours a week to satisfy their inner desires, there's little room to do
anything other than offer 60 hours to prove yourself better.[3]

[1]: Well, I know why. If your employer is bad you won't find work as
fulfilling. So maybe my hypothesis doesn't hold up anyway.

[2]: Now that I have a young child at home, I'm starting to think about asking
for less than 40 hours. There have simply become more other interesting things
for me to do.

[3]: Well, you could work more efficiently instead, which would be my
preferred solution. But I think a lot of people are stuck in a rut of average
skill but want to present themselves as beyond average. At that point you
cannot do "better", you can only do "more". (Which might lead to better, come
to think of it.)

------
pixelrevision
This has always bothered me. In the US there is no way I have seen beyond
running your own business to negotiate the time spent working. When I started
in the work force I thought taking a smaller salary for 4 day work week would
be a reasonable tradeoff but everyone thought I was nuts. I have tried over
the years asking for more vacation or shorter weeks for a pay cut but
workplaces are just not equipped to handle those sorts of requests. The system
here does not value free time in the same way it does money.

~~~
nybble41
There are exceptions. For example my current employer, a decent-size public
company, allows employees to purchase up to one week of extra vacation time
each year. (Straight time—equivalent to unpaid time off, but with the cost
spread out over the year in the form of reduced pre-tax salary and no change
in other benefits.) I've known several coworkers who did the 4-day-week thing
for months at a time rather than taking long vacations. They are also open to
negotiating shorter hours or alternative schedules.

------
noisy_boy
This is made worse by those insufferable over-zealous team members with a
i-can-wag-my-tail-harder-than-you attitude. They send emails from holiday
expressing their concern over a change, which frankly no one gives a damn
about, and moan their semi-brags on how they are dying under work because how
random senior managers (who don't give a crap about them and are just playing
them to get more work done) have "insisted on my involvement". These are the
kind of rotten apples who don't have a life and drag those that do have/want
one to the bottomless pit of overwork. /rant

~~~
soared
As an alternative perspective, they’d make the exact same rant about how
you’re the rotten apple.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Toxic people will use whatever excuse is necessary to justify their behaviors.

If they want to wage slave, slave away. Leave the rest of us out of the
theater production. Unless your job involves life safety, it doesn’t matter
all that much.

~~~
soared
Again, they would also call you toxic for the inverse reasons.

Ie “if they don’t want to work hard and build a career, so be it. Don’t drag
down the rest of us” etc.

Two sides to the story is what I’m getting at.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not every side is valid, or carries the same validity, is my point.

------
wsc981
Recently I came across this video "The design for easy life":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww)

I live in Thailand and am very interested in working less for other people and
more for myself. At first I though I'd need to invest maybe 500.000 USD and
then perhaps I should be able to live on investments. But this video changed
my mind, perhaps I should be able to get by with a lot less.

This Thai farmer claims to work about 1 hour a day and that 1 hour of daily
work generates for him around 50 USD. More than enough to take care of his
family.

Another interesting video from this farmer on "Sufficiency":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWwh5N0JRhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWwh5N0JRhk)

~~~
robbiejs
I love that man. Brilliant mind. I have lived a Digital Nomad lifestyle for 2
years and when I was in homestays on the countryside, I always felt relaxed
and blessed. Just some chickens roaming around, some fruit you could pick.
Simple life.

Big polluted cities like Bangkok and Penang drove me nuts.

One owner of one of those simple homestay farms quit his farming activities
and became a taxi driver, on Lombok (Indonesia). Lombok just got a brand-new
airport and they expect more tourists coming in from Bali eventually. The man
became a taxi driver to make more money for "a better life".

I get it. Everybody wants a shot to live "the dream" and you gotta start
somewhere, but --> you don't know what you have til it's gone.

------
MisterBastahrd
If you are on salary and you are putting in more than 40 hours a week, you are
working to buy your boss his vacation home, not your own.

------
perfunctory
The core idea of the article can be found in a paragraph somewhere in the
middle of the piece

> What all of these explanations have in common is the idea that the answer
> comes from examining workers' decisions and incentives. There’s something
> missing: the question of whether the American system, by its nature, resists
> the possibility of too much leisure, even if that’s what people actually
> want, and even if they have the means to achieve it. In other words, the
> long hours may be neither the product of what we really want nor the
> oppression of workers by the ruling class, the old Marxist theory. They may
> be the byproduct of systems and institutions that have taken on lives of
> their own and serve no one’s interests. That can happen if some industries
> have simply become giant make-work projects that trap everyone within them.

Now. I strongly believe that software / IT industry is one of those make-work
projects.

~~~
dfxm12
In America, too many benefits are tied to full time employment. The biggest
one is health insurance. This creates a huge imbalance of power between
employer and employee. The absolute worst time to lose (affordable) health
insurance is when you become unemployed. It makes no sense! This doesn't even
go into people or families with chronic illness.

In this way, in order to maintain these benefits, Americans must do what they
feel whatever it takes to keep their jobs. That's the number 1 incentive.

This is _not_ the product of an institution that has taken on a life of its
own. Universal healthcare as a majority of support among Americans (as long as
you don't attach Obama's name to it, anyway), but neither party (especially
not Republicans) have shown an interest in delivering this to its
constituents.

------
bluetomcat
In service sectors of the economy, work can be created out of thin air,
without any proportional returns in the form of increased well-being of
society.

For example, you may spend days improving every little detail of that customer
email template, for marginal or no returns over the previous template.

------
k__
I'm from Germany and none of my friends work full-time anymore.

50% - 80% is the norm.

~~~
stevenwoo
What is your approximate age group for your friends and are all your friends
in the same industry? Just curious about what things are like.

~~~
k__
30-40

All different industries.

Healthcare, IT, agriculture, retail, magazines and books.

------
Taylor_OD
I'd love to work 4 days a week. It just doesnt seem like it's possible. But
having Wednesday's off and being able to actually take a week or more of
vacation a few times a year as a manager would make my life so much better.

------
CalRobert
It's a little disappointing they don't address the idea of peer competition.

We live in a time of insane material wealth, so we create artificial
scarcities of necessities to ensure peers compete with each other.

The article does mention the substantial rises in productivity we've had, but
this: "There’s something missing: the question of whether the American system,
by its nature, resists the possibility of too much leisure, even if that’s
what people actually want" merited far more exploration.

There's a horrible positive feedback loop going on.

Say 10 people want a home in an area that has, oh, 8 homes.

If somebody chooses to work long hours, read emails on weekends, etc. they
have a better shot at getting promotions and being able to outbid their peers
for those homes. If someone doesn't do this, they have a better chance at
falling in to the 2 people who can't afford a home.

So the workaholics work and work and work, get the raise, and buy a home with
a big mortgage attached. Maybe a $1.5 million dump in San Jose. Now they're a
highly-leveraged housing speculator who desperately can't afford for house
prices go down. And the leverage they used to buy the house is secured with
the threat of homelessness and personal ruin.

So they oppose any and all new building ferociously and cruelly. Scarcity is
the only reason their house even has value!

Similarly, _they_ had to work nights and weekends, so why shouldn't other
people? As they rise up the ladder this is what they select for.

So we have house prices ratcheting upwards, people working themselves to the
bone to get in to the club of "homeowners" (a dubious word when you owe 90% of
the home's value to the bank), and a strong incentive to make sure it keeps
going that way.

It's true that presenteeism and wasted time at work are an issue, but
ultimately there is a point where more time working means producing more (say
20 hours vs 10), and in a sector where results are hard to quantify people go
for the easy thing to measure - hours where you butt was in the seat.

I mean, houses are pretty cheap to build. Habitat for Humanity does it for
$50k. Imagine if you could work part time and build your own home? It would
threaten people whose power comes from housing scarcity! Why, what if it turns
out there's no inherent reason their house should cost 25 times the median
income? Can't be having that! Better make it illegal to build homes (or
demolish existing low-density ones) anywhere near a job.

The only homes that get built near high paying jobs now are over the wailing
shrieks of existing rent-seekers (aka homeowners). The person who owns a home
in Berkeley can vote, because they live in the area, but the person who would
_like_ to live in Berkeley but commutes from Stockton has no voice. I'm
hopeful that remote work will finally destroy their power, though with a
decrease in tech incomes as well.

~~~
dencodev
Housing scarcity is more about the cost of the land than the house itself.
You're right that that a house can be built for $50k (not by most modern
standards, but it can be done). But if you wanted that $50k house in SF bay
area, suddenly it's on a piece of land worth $2 million.

~~~
oblio
Yeah, but these days you can build cheap, decent quality apartment buildings
with 10-12-20 floors. Suddenly that piece of land can afford much higher
population density.

------
LatteLazy
If you look at the employment rate, you will see that only about 65% of
working age people have a job. Any job.

[https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-
rate](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate)

Add in the huge number of OAPs and most developed nations have sub 50% of
people working. A lot of the issues we have (from stress and mental health to
inequality to the rise of extremism) can be linked to the fact that we have
fewer and fewer people working harder and harder supporting more and more
others.

We either need to find some ways to reverse this trend OR we need to embrace
it. But if we are embracing it, we need to deal with the consequences
(everything from access to healthcare to burnout to how we decide who has to
work and how we compensate\reward them for doing so).

Right now, this is a massive social change that goes basically ignored.
Whether people like Yang and Musk are right about automation and the rise of
AI or not, change is upon us and we cannot keep ignoring it.

------
alexashka
I don't think it's a quantity problem, it's an existential problem.

 _Why_ are we doing what we're doing?

When the best answer anyone can come up with is 'so that my kids get to have a
good life', it's not enough.

It's average people living in a system that's designed to make them
replaceable and eventually get rid of needing them completely.

Not get rid of them so that they can enjoy the human achievement of no longer
needing to work, no, get rid of them so that somebody rich can then hire you
as a wage slave to do whatever pleases them that day.

I wonder if this is just inevitable - it would explain the existence of the
pyramids - why else would anyone build them, but because there were so many
idle hands and a few bored ego-maniacs? Unless of course, aliens :)

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tslling
In China, "996"(9am-9pm, 6 days a week)[0] is popular in tech companies, now
more and more compnanies are adopting this work schedule, so employees have
much fewer choices if they want a "normal" schedule. The administration did
not enforece labour laws well in order to pursue economic interests. What
makes it worse is that, as this work schedule becomes a trending, some
companies and employees take it as granted.

[0][https://996.icu/#/en_US](https://996.icu/#/en_US)

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abellerose
I assume working less while still making the same annually would lower suicide
rate. One of the main reasons people commit suicide is financial problems.
Added free time is never unwanted and can be substituted for whatever the
person desires. I personally think we’re burning out the younger generation
with all the optimizations that have came with technology but at the same time
continuing to expect more from people. I think we’re missing out on what
benefits come to society when people are less overworked.

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sharker8
Well this didn't age well. We have now used the pandemic to force work into
our homes, if anyone was even pretending it didn't follow them before all of
this. That is of course only true for those who can still find work. Of
course, the dynamic of job scarcity creates an even worse version of stockholm
syndrome for those 'lucky' enough to continue to draw paychecks.

------
2sk21
And there is also this related article that was discussed a lot here on HN
last year:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-
workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/)

------
htatche
I just refused a full-time offer because of this. Instead, I prefer to work
few hours a day for my current contract and hope that things get better post-
covid. Still, if anyone is looking for a Ruby contractor to give a hand in
some project, reach out :)

~~~
mac01021
Are you a freelancer?

In a couple of years I would like to start gradually scaling down the number
of hours I work. But right now I am a salaried employee and I have no
freelance experience, so I'm not sure whether that is the right avenue for me.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

~~~
htatche
My single advice would be to find a client (or clients) beforehand and start
doing work for them before you drop your job.

------
markus_zhang
Maybe it's just me, but the idea of retiring early and then travel the world
is really strange to me. I'd rather spend my life seeking and working on the
next ideal job, and the only time that I'll skip it is when I believe it's
impossible to get the ideal job. For now, if you give me a BI/DE job I'd be
happily to work at least 60 hours and keep improving my shits. In short, I'd
rather die working.

But again I'm not against FIRE, because most of the time people don't get to
do their ideal job (or even the top 5 ideal jobs), and in their shoes I'd
rather just grab enough $$ and retire early. The point is, sadly, in modern
society, many people are not really getting the chance to contribute to the
society in a way both he/she and the society are satisfied with. This is very
sad. The idea of Communism, at least part of it, is to make sure that each
person out there gets the chance to fulfill their dreams and do their best,
and this is really attracting.

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geertj
The article starts with the assumption that the total amount of work in an
economy is fixed and that the extra hours we make are make-work. I beg to
differ. At least in high tech, we can improve a product or service as many
times as we want. Each of these improvements can be from relatively minor to
requiring years of research. The total work per year is how fast we move
through these improvements. The free market forces this to be higher every
year due to competition.

------
yelloweyes
Lmfao. How naive can people be?

Do you honestly think capitalists don't know that when people have free time
they start thinking about life, and when people start thinking about life, bad
shit happens to capitalists?

~~~
kyuudou
I was trying to find a rational and intellectual way of explaining this very
stark reality that I've consistently run across but... for now I'll just
upvote this.

