This glosses over the fact that jobs are a central piece—if not _the_ central piece—of many people's identities in the States.
We've lost religion and communities as things that define and provide structure and purpose, leaving us clinging to jobs.
Is this good? No! It's terrible! We should fix this!
However, I'm not convinced that workplace stress is a matter of hours … it may be a symptom of lack of life beyond work—and I don't mean in the "there's not enough time" sense.
I appreciate what Cal Newport advocates for, but it always feels a little surface.
What do you mean by that? Like in the industrial / manufacturing age where people manually did the same thing over and over? Where people were physically exhausted but not mentally?
Depends on which people you talk about and during what period. In the grand scheme of things, renting out most of your waking hours to an employer who charges you for that service is an extremely uncommon thing to do.
I actually relate to this quite a bit. For years I was a workaholic. I was constantly stressed out over work, was generally pretty miserable person.
A few years back got very intensely into a new hobby that blossomed and it totally changed my quality of life.
At the same time, I wouldn't say I've drastically changed my hours. I work 40-50 hr weeks typically, I just stopped putting in the 60 hour ones that I felt I needed to. No one ever noticed or cared. It was always my own impulse to do that. Even though in my head, I felt like there was pressure to do it.
I really think it was just my brain knowing I didn't have anything else lined up for life, so it just kept lining up more work for me.
If all of a sudden that person was told four day work week had arrived, it wouldn't have made a difference. I'd just be there feeling I needed to work cause I didn't have anything else to do.
Recently, my health has prevented me from participating in the hobby. And unsurprisingly I find myself obsessing over work again...
Work is where you provide value to the society, create something for other people and make world better, while simultaneously applying and improving your main set of skills.
Why wouldn't you want tie your identity to something like that?
Just to be clear: I have a few hobbies aside from work — I make music, DJ, paint, cook, hike sometimes. I have friends, and I'm also not a productivity maniac (I actually work in a 4 day workweek startup). But do I see my main job in the way I described above, and I wouldn't want to tie my identity to any other community or hobby. In all other aspects of my life I'm mostly just enjoying life, but at my work, I'm actively improving someone else's. When I worked in gamedev, I loved interacting with players and seeing how they enjoy my work. Now I make professional software and relish in the fact that I make other professional's work easier and more enjoyable.
May be people don't need other identities, but just more fulfilling jobs.
You imply that all companies add value to society and all jobs are meaningful. That’s simply not true. Most people also don’t and won’t have the power to fix these issues even if they wanted to.
Even if the company as a whole adds value there are lots of pockets of politically charged actions e.g. for promotions. Like are we doing anything meaningful to society by building 1 of those Google projects that gets killed in a few months?
If you are lucky enough to work on one of those google projects chances are you have options working on more meaningful things or freedom to steer in that direction.
Need to pay for rent is quite literally need to pay back to other human beings for shelter, one of the most basic human needs. Why would it be a bad purpose in life?
If rent was only about paying other humans for shelter! It takes what -- a month of work? to house a person for a year. (Based on the assumption that about 8 % of the working population works in construction, building maintenance, and related areas.)
I'm happy to pay a month of my wages for a year of shelter. My rent is way, way higher than that.
Never judge value of something by how much it costs to produce, it's not fair. Judge it by how much people are willing to pay for it. And in most major metropolitan areas you're paying premium for your rent to outbid all other renters that would be ready to live in such a lucrative place.
In essence, you're paying back not only to people who work in construction, but to ask the people who made this city so desired, over many generations. It takes much more than a month of work per renter to create all the value that you get from living in New York or San Francisco.
If all you need is literally just shelter regardless of location, there's plenty of places around the globe where you could rent a perfectly good apartment for $300 per month.
I feel like there's nothing inherently wrong with having your work take up most of your mental space. With the way we have things set up, it seems natural to dedicate most of your attention to the place that your money comes from. What's wrong is that employers in the US don't reciprocate that attention. They're happy to have you committed to them without being committed to you. The power balance has gotten way out of whack. Time for unions to make a comeback I guess.
Hours aren't usually the problem I think where a lot of the stress comes from the fear of getting laid off, losing your health insurance and having your car/home repossessed. People that have lived through these employee purges never recover fully.
How many of those people feel like they have time to pursue more fulfilling activities?
Speaking only for myself, my more fulfilling hobbies feel like a zero-sum proposition when I factor in taking care of myself, my kids, my home, etc. What little leisure time activies I pursue are almost all pursued between the hours of 9 and 11pm, because that's the time I have.
I think the OP is right in a lot of ways, that work has replaced our other social outlets. But its also the case that just existing costs more, so time formerly spent on hobbies is now spent on basic lifestyle maintenance, and the time formerly spent on basic lifestyle maintenance is spent working, or commuting to/from work (because a lot of people can't afford to live near they work).
I understand that. I am in a very similar position. I make time for my hobbies and it is often very difficult, especially as an active parent who makes a strong effort to be present regularly in my kids' lives. Sometimes, I don't get any time into my hobby projects for over a week at a time. Sometimes I get time in and it's unsatisfying because they're creative and intellectual hobbies and I'm already mentally drained, so I can't even appreciate them fully.
I wasn't making a judgment (though I wasn't explicitly not making one either), just saying that many people could use them. Hobbies are good identities, and many people feel a need to define themselves but struggle to do so.
That said, I do know people who complain about having very little time, but I know they spend 4 or 5 hours every day on television, video games, and social media. They don't own a home, they don't have kids, they get on the TV as soon as they get off their 40-hour-a-week job, and complain about how they can't afford the time to have hobbies. Excuses exist on a spectrum of reasonableness, and some excuses are more understandable than others.
The majority of people I know who really want to have fulfilling hobbies do have fulfilling hobbies. Many of them work long hours, also have kids, have to take care of their home, and the like. They'll still scrounge together a few hours a week to paint some Warhammer figurines and decompress.
Most people would also benefit from occasional therapy or a personal accountant. It's not accessible for everybody, but the fact remains.
> How many of those people feel like they have time to pursue more fulfilling activities?
And yet, most people have hours every day available to spend watching movies, YouTube, etc. That is time that could be spent doing something fulfilling.
I wouldn’t judge those people too harshly. That might be all they have the mental energy to do at the end of the day, they need to let their brain reset.
As someone who tries to spend most of my days after work making games, there are days I just don’t have the mental energy to do it. And there have been months where I haven’t worked on it at all, as work and things in my personal life get more stressful.
Oh, I'm not judging at all -- I have my own preferred time-burners as well. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the time when I hear people say they don't have time for something, they also spend a lot of time every day doing things like that. For many people, "not having time" is the result of decisions about how their time is allocated. Those people can allocate differently if they so choose.
I think you missed some nuance there. If I only realistically have between 9 and 11pm, I am pretty limited on what hobbies I can take up. It's not just that I'm literally time constrained, but also that the time I have available is not conducive to certain activities, so I'm left with video games, TV, etc.
Its the same story as "I can't go to the bank if they're only open when I have to be at work", but for mental health rather than finances.
I want to add: I 100% agree about the points on "unlimited amount of things that could be done" and "unstructured urgency."
I'm not sure if this has been found to be an effective leadership/management tactic … or if we sleepwalked our way in to this reality (a la ping pong tables), but it's not good.
We've lost religion and communities as things that define and provide structure and purpose, leaving us clinging to jobs.
Is this good? No! It's terrible! We should fix this!
However, I'm not convinced that workplace stress is a matter of hours … it may be a symptom of lack of life beyond work—and I don't mean in the "there's not enough time" sense.
I appreciate what Cal Newport advocates for, but it always feels a little surface.