This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleeping habits. I'd love to get 7-9 hours of sleep, but I just don't have the time.
I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
Bear in mind that we segment our activity more in "modern" society. For example, in agrarian societies you didn't need to carve out time for exercise. Work was exercise. You also didn't need to carve out time for child care, because children worked alongside adults much of the time. And commuting wasn't really an issue when workplaces and residences were in the same community with minimal geographic separation.
It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.
I think the lack of children working along side adults is a great shame. Not that I'm a fan of child labour but I think there is something that adds to a child's self esteem when they take on responsibilities along side adults. I know they complain and don't often like the labour, but I think it brings a sense of purpose and belonging that many young people seem to lack.
That lack of purpose is the point. If you can acculturate children to doing what they accurately perceive as pointless, joyless, regimented tasks and get them used to being told what to do, when to do it and how, to being ranked by an authority figure then school has done its job. An industrial society cannot function with people who won’t just put up and shut up.
I'm also struck by cities that commute heavily by bike (such as Amsterdam). Your commute is your exercise. That is not how most Americans live, however.
I would absolutely love to commute by bike. Distance is a factor but that is not the primary issue. I am in south-east Georgia and bike lanes are an absolute foreign concept. I mean even if we had them, people would use them as passing lanes and all that.
I've seen plenty of 'sleep hack' articles recently; trying to do more with less where sleep is concerned. To me that is a complete non-starter. I truly just need more sleep.
With your four display setup, now perched on your nose, moving between sitting desk, standing desk, and stretching on the floor, means moving a wireless keyboard. And for tasks where phone-like keyboards are good enough, no need for the desk, just wander.
Twitch a finger on a pad, twitch a hand and arm on mouse or controller or knee, or raise your arms and dance. You, not the task, determine your style.
Overlay work, while hanging with children. Or map remote kids, into your virtual world. Helicopter parents, meet drones.
Commuting? Well, I suppose some prefer the village well, to indoor plumbing - it's a chance to socialize, away from family oversight. And I suppose commuting will become more pleasant, as the roads clear out - have you seen video of 1950's highways? ;)
There's a meme, of people blithely living their lives, ignoring the future, not appreciating they will soon be stumbling through the smoking ruins of their city. Perhaps we need its complement. People blithely stumbling through smoking ruins, not appreciating they will soon be living in a city.
Well, with 6 kids or more in each family taking care of small children was a full-time job of its own. Not to mention not having things such as a washing machine...
With 6 or more kids in each family older children frequently helped with chores and helped take care of the younger ones. Even a 5-year old is capable of helping with simple childcare tasks and a responsible 10-year old is capable of being a babysitter for periods of time.
Children would also be naturally spaced because breastfeeding around the clock typically continued until the child was at least 18 months old, meaning that they would normally be 15-30 months apart (the amount of time that breastfeeding acts a contraceptive varies widely from woman to woman but typically breastfeeding on demand will halt a woman's reproductive activity for at least 6 months).
Yeah, it's like trying to work in an open office, with people repeatedly stopping by with problems, and springing surprise meetings, and... well, maybe not quite that bad? :)
I'm not sure what's scarier: a coworker stopping by saying, "hey, the PROD-DB-1 server has been down for four hours" or your four year old stopping by and saying, "there's an oops in the kitchen."
If you train the four year old correctly you might even get "there's an oops on the PROD-DB-1 server". That would be more than I get from some of my adult co-workers.
A friend of mine runs a rural radio-based ISP, while raising... four? kids or so. It's entirely possible that some of his downtime was caused by someone accidentally spilling juice into something and letting the magic smoke out, but I've never asked.
Automation never results in more leisure. It results in more specialized work and increased workloads. The sentiment expressed in the first line is why I intend to stay working remotely for as long as possible. I hated the fact I saw a drab grey cubicle farm more than my house and family.
Children are not working, students are not working, the retired are not working, depending on the household stay at home parents aren’t working that much, the unemployed are not working.
Automation and increased productivity has resulted in a lot of leisure. It’s not evenly distributed but hours worked per capita is not on an upward trend.
Too glib; they've been holding pretty steady at 8 hours, mainly due to regulation. Other work has increased hours, such as in many areas of health care, for example. Many folks also patch together multiple jobs in order to achieve a livable income and can work upwards of 12-16 hour days. I know several, personally.
Keynes predicted we'd be down to 3 or 4 hours a day by now, but that never happened due (partly) to the ever-increasing competitive ability/imposition that technology allows managers and shareholders to impose on labor in an effort to maximize economic potential and productivity.
How many hours do people work, really, though. If management became more lenient of people going home when the day's work is over, I imagine we would be a lot closer to 4hrs/day.
If my workplace announced that policy I'd just assume they wanted to know how productive I actually was. I would leave on time to signal that I had an appropriate workload.
Even now, average working hours in developed nations are above the "legal norm".
Though the automation definitely helped to make it more feasible to work less, there is still a political fight to be had to push the hours down even more.
Once you go remote it's hard to go back. I have been remote for 4 years now and I can't imagine doing the whole commute / office thing ever again. I don't even care if they pay more, nope. No way.
Amazingly enough, this is exactly how I feel. There's no chance for raises, although the company have a lot of opportunities to make more money, but I can't deal with the commute and office politics ever again.
I also used to feel this way. What worked for me is to not to do some of these things. For example, I got a robot vacuum cleaner and a robot mop. For any additional cleaning, I have a cleaning lady that comes every once in a while. This saves me a couple of hours of cleaning each month. If the car breaks, or something needs to be done around the house, I hire someone to do it. Groceries are delivered according to a schedule. Saves me a couple of hours of running around the supermakt.
I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.
As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.
Actually, studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do. It's just recent history that's an anomaly...
The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think.
Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot).
I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves.
Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
> Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car is often a simpler (if not the only) option available.
There are some things I pretty much only get done during my commute, like reading more challenging literature. Fun books are great when I'm falling asleep in bed, but deeper books require me to set aside time when I'm not tired—which rarely happens except on trains.
Nope. 10 mins drive to train here, so with margin of safety that's 20 mins. 50 minute train ride. 10 minute walk at the other end.
So 13+ hours each week.
As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.
Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.
I used to live in some area where public transportation required me 2x50min to go to work whereas it was about 2x15-25min by car. Bought a bike and turned that 2x60min but went down to 2x30min in the long run, when conditions are good (no night, no rain)
I can recount for you the story that I've heard from those in my area who have kids:
First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit.
Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids.
A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses.
This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids.
Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
Maybe. But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
School is simply a horrific hellhole for the bottom 20% of kids. People just like to feel like it's not. And unfortunately "bottom 20%" can happen to anyone -- it's not merit-based. More like affluence-based.
The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by doing that. They're deluding themselves into thinking that it's effective when in reality the kids are getting bullied throughout the day at the school.
Well, it's not like the problem can be solved, so I guess parents need something to convince themselves they're making a difference.
> The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by [driving instead of busing].
Sure they are. A bus is a different environment than school. For one, the only adult is actively concentrating the opposite direction of all the kids, who have large seat backs that block view of all but their heads. That leaves a lot more room for... activities.
I took the bus a few times when I was in junior high school almost two decades ago. I faced very minor bullying every trip. At school 7/8 of my classes were "advanced" in some way (honors, pre-AP, AP, orchestra, etc) so I didn't interact with the kids doing the bullying. I can count on one had the times I felt bullied at school during those years.
Now for me it's possible I would have been better served by just learning to handle small stuff like that, but I can certainly see how a bus ride could be hell for some kids and then they'd be mostly ok at school (maybe just some incidents at PE and lunch).
If we're sharing anecdotes, I only got bullied after school or at the bus stop, never on the bus (at least there's an adult on the bus - usually none at the bus stops).
I think the bussing is avoided simply because it's a chicken/egg problem - if an significant number of parents don't opt-in, then they can't service the populace at large. In my kids current district they only bus between schools - if you live > 1mi from a school, you might as well walk/drive.
It is solvable. If society's violent toward one another then it's probably a symptom of deeper issues. I'd say:
1.) too resource constrained. There are plenty of studies suggesting ties between drier climates with stricter societies. Maybe desertification is a deep enough issue to address actively.
2.) not enough actual mental aid - for one, counseling parents of bullies. I realize this would employ a ton of counselors and I see nothing wrong with that expense.
3.) Look for ways to address the "it's cool to be stupid" meme. Ways to do so could include devoting resources to things like the FIRST Robotics competition.
> But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
Not a parent but I wouldn't expect to drive children to protect them from bullies but child kidnappers or other random dangers. I'm pretty sure that's why my parents drove me too.
Is that stuff really a concern? How many random child kidnappers are there? Don't children go out to play? And then walk home alone from wherever they hung out? I thought Stranger Danger was sort of a joke for many areas now. Especially considering people on HN are usually middle class at minimum.
I never had any issues walking to the bus stop starting in kindergarten. Though granted I almost never walked alone. Usually with a friend or two.
I'm in a much more affluent place now. I see parents walking their kids to the corner of the street of our housing complex. Seems a bit extreme to say the least.
Walking distance being two miles in the last couple places I lived... Which is probably fine for high school in areas with decent weather, and somewhat rural.
OTOH though, we have elementary schools in urban/suburban areas where 1/2 of the population of the school falls within the 2 mile radius (great saves money on busing!). Combined with high speed traffic, questionable neighborhoods, bad weather, a tendency towards overprotective parenting, and most parents of early elementary school children are going to be driving them rather than letting them walk to school.
The crazy thing is that most elementary schools are going to be getting out at ~3PM, which is far to early for most parents to leave their jobs, which means they end up paying a few hundred dollars a month per child in after school fees. A real problem for people near the poverty line, so those are the 5 year olds you see walking home alone at 3PM...
Driving kids less than 2 miles to school is a schedule issue, but not the kind of time sink described. It's also reasonable if a parrent happens to dive by school on the way to work etc. I simply object to the idea that having kids ride the bus is somehow an issue.
Our elementary school has no bus and the trip there is about two miles, mostly down a street with fast traffic and poor walkability. The drop off process is at least 30 minutes each morning on average in my experience, even longer if there are multiple kids and they don't go to the same school.
The school isn't built like a sports arena, so traffic flow around it is fine throughout the rest of the day, but morning dropoff in particular is very congested because the volume of traffic spikes for a single 15 minute period each day.
Coupled with general morning rush hour traffic, this ripples out to long left-turn waits (no turning arrow), congestion, angry drivers trying to cut down residential streets, parking problems, and so on. Then depending on how far away you had to park, you have to walk that distance with young kids.
Pick up time is easier, especially with after school programs, because the spike is diffused out over a wider range of time.
That sounds unusually bad. I don't know in your specific case, but I see parents dropping young kids off as the same block as the school. Or even across the street if there are regular crossing guards which provides even more surface area.
I can only suggest this is the kind of thing that's generally fixable by a local community.
When I was in school (90s and early 2000s), it would have been considered extremely embarrassing to have your mom drop you off and pick you up every day. I think it was about the time I graduated that things began to shift. When I was in elementary school, the was nowhere for parents to pull up curb-side and get the kids. By the time I finished high school, the elementary school had blocked off half the curb-side into a separate loop for parents to pick up/drop off kids.
Hah, even more so it was embarrassing to have your parents walk you just to the bus stop for me especially after 2nd grade (which was what separated our early and middle elementary school). Roughly same time period of school. We also only had one bus stop for a pretty big multi-hundred apartment complex.
Things do seem to have changed now. Or it's just that I moved. Not sure.
Two working parents means preschool until kindergarten, and preschool doesn't offer busses. If your district offers wraparound care for school-aged children, it's probably not served by busses. You can't have kids home alone any more because somebody might inform on you.
Inform? Wow... with our muni they would just assume some other adult was caring for the child at hime, unless they had reason to suspect abuse for some other reason, of course.
If your kid does after school activities the bus system doesn't help much. Add that to zoning issues where taking the bus in the morning might mean an extra hour in commute time (in many states the way to get around No Child Left Behind averages was to stick the accelerated programs in the worst performing schools meaning busing children across town to prop up averages) and a lot of parents end up driving both ways.
15h / 5 days is 3h / day -- 1.5 hours each way, that's a long commute.
The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away.
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
Would you do it again if something awful happened and you all of a sudden were in the same spot you were when you did that work (less or none of your mortgage paid off or something). Just wondering. Seems like it sucked but worthwhile if it paid off 1/3 of your mortgage. Good job!
I have little knowledge about the truth here but I'd heard that this sort of warring stuff only ramped up after agriculture became common, no? Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer, but if everyone can hunt/gather for enough food, the motivation seems reduced.
OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
The usual tribal conflict pattern is to seize territory as a hunting ground. Note that for nomadic tribes, there is no village and therefore no fixed location to raid.
E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds.
* Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.
Humans are Klingons. We in the developed world are currently living in a very strange universe unlike any before it in the history of humankind. Previous to the peaceful, violence-free lifestyle most people enjoy in the West everyone was pressed into sustaining the human war machine. American Indians had a long history of inter-tribal warfare to rival any European combat. It's just what humans do. Our apex societal violence is force-multiplied by a small group of people operating complex technological machinery, even though everyone else is still pressed into service and driven to exhaustion for industrial productivity.
> Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer
Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
Tribal warring is common even in apes. Territorialism is especially strong. There are also plenty of things to war over besides food, such as space, shelter, mates, glory, gods, historical feuds, etc. Remember if we don't sacrifice one human before nightfall, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare.
The Hobbsian trap: kill them before they kill you.
Minor motivations and proximity are enough to set it off. And thereare plenty of motivations anyway: fighting over good hunting areas, water, gathering areas, and women.
The commute has been an issue of mine for a while - and listening to podcasts or audio books helps but, I'd rather just step outside to get to work. I blame this on where I live and my absolute reluctance to move. So yeah, commuting is my choice in the end.
Great essay. Bertrand Russel never ceases to amaze. For others, the essay is titled In Praise of Idleness, but is about using your idle (non-working time) for pursuits.
Not to turn this into something else, but pursuing things during "idle" time is another reason why if reasonably possible, basic income could be great alongside more advancements like automation occurring.
What studies? This is the internet, use that fancy hypertext.
I'm not very familiar with this particular area, but I do know from books like The Better Angles Of Our Nature (and criticisms thereof) that this is a contentious statement. There are many myths about ancient humans, some that overly indulge in 'savagery' and others that are too idyllic.
The evidence for either interpretation is fairly fraught and I'm deeply skeptical of any affirmative claims one way or another.
Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Common_charact...)
Sackett, R. 1996. "Time, energy, and the indolent savage. A quantitative cross-cultural test of the primitive affluence hypothesis". Ph.D. diss., University of California, Angles.
Hunter gatherer societies also weren't paying for cell phones, and internet, and mortgages/rent. I'm sure you could get by working part time for 15 hours a week if you gave up all of your modern conveniences and lived outdoors in a tent, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable.
> I'm sure you could get by working part time for 15 hours a week if you gave up all of your modern conveniences and lived outdoors in a tent, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable.
It’s interesting you’d say that. I agree on average, but the enjoyment in that lifestyle would be hard to imagine in ours. I don’t think it’s hard to see our perception of pleasurable things is different from frequency.
Frankly I think there are only small, incremental improvements to happiness possible after modern healthcare and plumbing. Which are, granted, still extremely expensive where I live.
I would love to work, say, 20-30 hours a week for 50%-75% of my base salary. Buy stuff on sale, cook for myself instead of eating out, I think I could live quite happily that way. But unless you're good enough (and social enough) to find work as a consultant, there aren't many skilled jobs that will let you do that. If you're not willing to work at least 40 hours a week, they're not interested.
Yeah, their leisure time sucked pretty badly though. And they lived a precarious existence with none of the nice things we take for granted. I wouldn't swap.
>>hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working"
Looking at it purely in terms for food and survival requires very little energy to get by life. But that comes with its own problems. Actually Hellenistic period in many ways was a far better time to live in than now.
Some people feel that humans have evolved over millions of years to do well in hunter-gatherer tribes and we have not genetically adapted yet in 6,000? years of civilization. If we think returning some habits of hunter-gatherer tribes would be beneficial, then we need to know what they are/were and not just wild-ass guess based on the Nobel Savage myth.
It's worth adding that there were still some nomadic traits, initially. They'd plant and move on, hunting as they went, and would come back to where they planted when it was time to harvest. The speculation that I'm familiar with suggests that they did this with naturally growing crops before they began to cultivate them.
I was thinking that the beginning of writing as the start of civilization, but the start of agriculture could work. With a bit more thought, the beginning of cities (greater than, say, 10,000 people) might be a better one.
Right, its good to present a model of what their habits were, if that was your area of interest. To use them as a prescriptive guide to base your habits on, requires further explanation and reasoning.
Because only well designed studies can show a truth. It is obviously the case that when you drop a big rock and a little rock at the same time the big rock will hit the ground first. Because we have a study we know this to be false even though it is obvious.
I understand the thrust of your comment and generally agree with your broad sentiment. But, most scientific studies present a model that fits data. While you are right that they can show a truth, that is not their aim, and often they are contradicted with newer data and models.
Studies are only valuable when they form a scientific consensus over repeated experiments or provide some predictive power that can be confirmed through other experiments.
To use a studies as a prescriptive guide to base your life on, or change of habits is an error IMHO, and ironically, quite unscientific.
I guess you could say its a pet peeve of mine. 9 times out of 10 when I investigate a "studies have shown" comment, it turns out to be half-true or based on weak science, or too new to be replicated by other scientists, or sometimes the context is completely different from its use in an argument.
There was no such study. Galileo showed this was false with the following famous thought experiment:
Suppose it were true. Join a heavy rock and a light rock by a cord and drop them from a tower. If the light rock falls slower, eventually the cord will be pulled taut and retard the fall of the heavier, so this system falls more slowly than the heavy rock alone. But the system is heavier than the heavy rock alone, so it should fall faster, a contradiction.
The gold standard is a model that explains that behavior, and experimental studies that work as the model predicts. The model that big ricks fall faster makes sense, but it isn't backed by experiences. Many studies have seemed to show something but in fact the authors just didn't realize they had to control for something important (sometimes an accident, sometimes outright scientific fraud)
"The experiment did take place in Delft in 16th century the Netherlands, when the mathematician and physicist Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot (the father of Hugo de Groot) conducted the experiment from the top of the Nieuwe Kerk."
Well, that particular scenario is false only when there is no air resistance (nowhere on this planet?). More importantly, it wasn't just a "study" that figured out the law of gravitation.
I am aware of that famous experiment on the moon. However, my point was that the law of gravitation was developed centuries before such an experiment could possibly be performed.
For long periods of time humans were malnourished, didn't wear proper shoes, didn't have proper beds, and didn't bathe properly. Just because it was done in the past and people survived doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to go about things.
>I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks)
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
>Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
You can kind of see this transition happening if you visit currently-industrializing countries like India or China.
No kidding. Mine are 4 and 1.5, and my hobbies now include watching Paw Patrol, being the starting gun for pee races, and picking up toys in rooms that were clean an hour before. I think back on the days where I could play video games or practice the guitar with such fondness.
3.5 and 2 year old, we have Foxtel but it's only ever used for watching Paw Patrol, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and a cycle of Disney movies. Ah the days when my partner and I could just go on dates whenever!
It gets better after a few years mate, I generally have a few hours at night now to spend time with the missus, game/watch movies, do writing/side projects. This is with a 3.5 and 2 year old.
For what it's worth I don't regret it but man, I really do think "hmm... when will I next have 15 minutes where I have the use of both hands and no creature yelling at me and I'm not at work?"
I could just sleep less (with dire consequences noted here), but I've managed to keep getting 7 hours or so a day (not all in one go, but it could be worse).
Millions of years of biological imperative. The fact that you are here is proof that your ancestors were successful at procreating. Its in your genes (and your jeans).
Humans can decide a lot of things. We're all still dumb animals driven primarily by instinct, although we like to think the levels of abstraction we put on top of those instinctual actions makes us somehow enlightened. It's a matter of what instincts are stronger: the desire to reproduce, or the desire for pleasure and comfort.
Four sixes or three eights feels like about the right balance, to me. It'd be the point at which a working professional could plausibly and in a non-trying-to-make-a-point way respond with something other than their job to the question, "so, what do you do?" It also might be just enough time off to let a working couple also homeschool their kids (they'd still need a daycare or some kind of parent-free activity or something some of the time, though) without running themselves entirely ragged.
You’re not imagining it. With 8 hours of sleep and a 9 hour work day plus all the other things that are effectively ‘required’, we are left with about 4 free hrs per weekday in a very optimistic scenario (commute is 30 minutes each way, you’re really fast with your bathroom routine, you down breakfast super quick, dinner and lunch are 30 mins each, etc).
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
I think the most annoying part of the 8 hour work day is that a vast majority of people aren't actually working close to 8 hours. There's a lot of talking and looking at mindless stuff. My friend worked for IBM in the finance department and he streamed every world cup game. Got a promotion too.
I don't think we have to get out of hand. The average American watches 2hours of TV a day (Nielson). I don't think we would say that was "a job". There are plenty of leisure and other activities one could forgo to actually "work".
* You can collapse your commute and exercise in to one activity.
* You either pre-cook meals on the weekend, or utilize a meal substitute like Soylent (or both)
* Most chores involve cleaning things that just get dirty as part of their normal use, if you shower and spend most of your "toilet time" at work, you automatically have someone who's going to clean up after you.
In what possible way? Biking or walking to work is "dreary and sad"? Spending less time cooking so you can spend more time doing exciting and fun activities is "dreary and sad"? Pooping at the office is "dreary and sad"?
What kind of life do you lead where being stuck in traffic, daily meal preparation, and shitting on your own toilet is a constant thrill ride?
My commute to work is 10 minutes. I poop and shower at home, in my own lovely bathroom. I cook elaborate meals at home and serve them to people I love.
I guess I'm just surprised when people don't share the same joy of cooking. Or, for that matter, taking an excellent bowel movement in one's own toilet.
eating - I think that's why Soylent was so popular. People liked the idea of drinking a meal while working/multi-tasking. I'm not 100% into it, especially since I'd prefer something with a better ratio of protein, but I see the appeal.
for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.
I was having a conversation with my boss at lunch today - and he made a joke how the difference between our respective sleep/activity schedules is basically the same as the difference between our schedules on the east coast of the USA and our team overseas (he's a morning person, I'm not and have never been).
I told him I'd never again work at a job that required me to be there at 9am, because I'm effectively useless before 11am, completely independent of how much sleep I've had the night before. The only plus side, I joked, was that even though I'd only gotten 4-6 productive hours of work done, no one batted an eye when I left at 5pm, since I'd been there since 9.
Many advanced nations outside the United States (talking mainly about Europe) have learned long ago that the eight hour workday is too much. But in many places in the United States, an eight hour workday would be considered quite short. The other issue is annual vacation time; it's surprisingly short on average in United States compared to most other places.
I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
You nailed it! Everybody expects something from us - our partners, bosses, children... We also have needs and expectations - we need to exercise etc. How should we find time for all this working eight hours a day (realistically - at least 10 hours as most people are commuting. You wake up, go to work, get back, try to do your best at whatever you need to do... No wonder people sacrifice their sleep.
Working remotely has helped me a lot (cutting commuting). I work 8 hours, eat, exercise and get 8 hours of sleep. My wife who isn't working does more chores than I do (although I help a lot during the weekend). My only complain is that outside of exercising I have very little freetime, but that's mainly because I spend lots of time with my kids.
Do something about it bro. If you want something you gotta take it. Nobody is gonna come offering you a dream work week. But the catch 22 is you gotta lose some sleep to find time to develop some systems to make passive income
Its not "rent seeking" if you solve a problem that others have in a way that is repeatable and low margin for you. It does favor software solutions a LOT though.
Hmmm, I get what you're saying but I still don't feel like that can be a global solution for everyone. At least not until we live in a post-scarcity society of some sort where we can all get paid from some software we wrote.
Totally on board with this. I'm currently looking for a 1/2 time contract gig, mostly because that's about all I want to work in conjunction with running a household and raising two kids.
> Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life.
It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.
