this may be me projecting my own sensibilities (and sorry if i am misinterpreting) but.... why cant people just hang out, take some time off and relax with friends?

why does everything have to be about "productivity" ?

My play time is 100% about maximizing my enjoyment and regeneration, to get me back to doing the things i really enjoy doing. Even my casual, lounge time is a calculated effort at that.

Now hopefully i have a healthy balance. I don't work myself too hard because i don't want to burn out. I'm also less productive if i'm burning out.

But yea. I just enjoy building things. It's who i am. If i had one wish it would be to not need sleep. With those extra hours i'd learn to woodwork or something physical, but still build - create.

My only regret is that my ability to build (software) is limited per day, and i give a significant portion of that to the necessities of life. Aka work. It's not making me rich, nor is it things i truly want to solve. But hey, i still enjoy it - and for that i am truly fortunate.

After seeing what my wife went through working retail; I can't imagine having to work retail. It was awful.

Wasted time is "I have a handful of really low priority things that I'm never going to do so I'll look at Netflix and see what I haven't watched yet". For me, though, it's a bit more than that. Our budget allows us to live just fine, but with what amounts to very little work, I can literally take my family on a vacation about every two months.

Before eye-rolls abound, we travel extremely cheap -- I'm talking week vacations, family of 6, under a grand. And I decided a long time ago that my priority with my children would be to put my money toward memories rather than "crap". We've had gift-less Christmas's in favor of a (way over-budget) vacation[0] more than once and we'll probably only do it that way from here on out.

Given a choice between channel-surfing-Netflix, which I get plenty of (and I think a lot of us find ourselves in that spot) and driving around to places in my local city that I haven't been before (and it's surprising how many there are), I'll take the extra paycheck. Honestly, I'm nearly out of things to repair/improve in my home with my spare time. There's still a whole lot closed down up here.

[0] Partly because of that, we have a hard time when we aren't planning a post-Christmas trip. Our kids don't want much. I mean, they have basically everything in the palm of their hands from Apple and Gooble, as it is. :)

    > It shouldn't be about squeezing every last ounce out of an employee

At least as far as his business was concerned, if every one of those 9 employees weren't giving everything that was expected of them[2], they'd have failed. Really, they should have failed--my dad had underestimated how apprehensive the huge companies would be about working with a "brand new outfit" even though as far as the purchasing people were concerned, my dad was the last company they worked for. But after delivering early (and often himself[3]), he slowly proved that the last company really was all him).

   > that's what the American dream has become.

[0] He received no compensation after the lawyers got their take.

[1] Several years later he purchased the old company back from the larger outfit that had originally purchased it. They remaining employees were let go -- the previous owner was planning on shutting down the operation as it was and there was enough bad blood built up over the years that the staff likely would have preferred to collect unemployment than just quit.

[2] My dad didn't handle operations/staff, he was sales/financials, they paid hourly and never played games with overtime (the majority owner of the last place tried that with a secretary ... who sued them with years of logged hours for documentation) and as far as I know, they laid all of one person off (and they agonized for weeks over it).

[3] He likes to tell a story about meeting with a plant manager at 3:00 AM. I'm going to butcher the story, but the manager, expecting that my dad was a lowly delivery guy for his company, started griping about how awful the boss must be for making him drive 150 miles in the middle of the night to deliver an order that was supposed to be there at 5:00 PM (he was rarely late, but it happens). I can't remember how it went down, but I'm sure the guy was shocked when he found out that my Dad was the son-of-a-bitch owner. :)

However, after spending almost a year hanging out at home and relaxing, it's actually kind of nice to get out and do something.

And of course, to each their own. Some people just enjoy accomplishing things and don't like sitting still. Others prefer to spend their idle time relaxing as much as possible. Neither is inherently wrong, and there's no reason to shame either group.

It doesn't matter how much you "side hustle." that isn't going to invent nuclear power or discover AC current.

There are plenty of kinds of wealth that don't involve money. Being wealthy in time is probably the most important one of all, given we can never get more time in this life, no matter how much money we acquire.

Your use case is the ideal use for "gig work", but much like the proverbial thinking that McDonald's jobs are only for high school students, it's not realistic at all. A lot of people's livelihoods are tied with "gig work".

If my wife continued doing the DoorDash at the amount she's doing it (just under full-time), she'd be doing OK, but by no means "well". Still yet, she'd be making far more than minimum wage if the per-delivery pay doesn't change much. When you say "a lot of people", on paper, that person is "my wife". She's got various skills, but no degree, and she's been out of the professional workforce for so long that the best salary she can expect to make is as a server at one of the local chains[0]. If she found herself in that position, again, there is no question that she'd DoorDash until she could finish up her nursing program.

[0] That's not meant as "she can only make a waitress' salary" -- she had a 3-bedroom apartment with her two kids working as a waitress. It can pay well if you're organized/friendly and employed at the right place.

We see this play out at large scale in an economy like France, where even pre-pandemic the youth unemployment rate approached 20% (and now is more like 35%).

This applies equally to gig work: gig work is able to employ so many people because the services they provide are cheap enough to appeal to broad stretches of the population. Triple the prices of food delivery or uber, and the market will dramatically shrink.

  > Forcing them to provide higher wages will result in higher prices, which will reduce their market viability and result in closure of some locations.

It's all got a breaking point -- it's ~$9.00-~$12.00/hr (locally based on the marquis in front of the local McDonald's) times every required front-end employee vs. a multi-million dollar investment that might eliminate the 90% that labour cost, but might also be completely rejected by customers or otherwise fail horribly. Time is always going to bring that "multi-million" side down, but another way to accelerate it is to raise the cost of labour (either artificially by increasing the minimum wage or naturally as a result of full employment/good economic conditions).

[0] Because they kill the "scale" that checks that you've set the item you bought on the "purchased" side in favor of putting an extra person behind some screens and opening up 8 more check-out aisles. Additional shrink from the less strict systems is offset by lower labour costs. Of course, lost sales from people like my great aunt/uncle who are pissed off that they need a manual to operate a Walmart end up creating new opportunities for companies to offer an option to pay someone else to handle that hassle for you. So now you just pay the damn cashier, directly, through DoorDash or whomever.

I heard a story once about how construction sites in India don't often use tools like bulldozers, because it's so much cheaper to just hire 400 dudes with shovels. I'm sure we'll all look back at retail and the food industry in 20 years and view it as barbaric that humans were used to do such menial labor.

Except the minimum wage in the UK is very close to that of France but we don't have the same youth unemployment rate.

There is much more going on than just the effects of a minimum wage.

This is not meant to be personal or attacking, but I'm curious how much of this applies or not to you and your wife.

This is meant to demonstrate my general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in signifcant social/familial time investment.

In my early 20s I worked hard, but I also couldn't wait to get out of the office and hang out with my friends. As I get older, I still hang out with my friends when I can, but I also really enjoy interacting with work peers and getting things done at work.

Even in my off time, I find myself preferring to do projects around the house or yard rather than watch yet another show on Netflix or waste more time scrolling social media.

> This is meant to demonstrate my general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations It's interesting to see this in contrast to complaints on HN that older developers are crowded out of the workforce by companies that prefer to hire younger developers. Perhaps it's more likely that breaking into good jobs is just hard in general, and it's easier to blame your older or younger peers.

> and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in signifcant social/familial time investment.

Someone in their 50s or 60s is likely more interested in securing their retirement than simple consumerism. That's about the age it becomes obvious that you physically can't work forever, and you need a decent chunk of money in the bank if you want to do fun things in retirement.

As for social/family time investment: Someone in their late 40s through 60s might have raised kids to adulthood, who are now off doing their own thing. It can be a shock to go from constant family time at home to having nothing to do. Not uncommon for them to return to work to fill the void with some activity, a way to continue getting things done, and to simply socialize with coworkers.

I'm reaching the big four-oh. I'm blessed in that most of my hobbies revolve around software development, which I also do professionally. That's not to say if I had "FU money", I'd keep my 9-5 (I very well might, but it's still a job). I've been pretty much full-time employed at a good job since I was 19--first in systems, then in software. Incidentally, I landed that first "real job"[0] by taking a pay-cut to $8.00/hr assembling PCs, installing networks and writing software for small businesses for a year to give my resume the appearance of more skill than I thought I had (turned out I was perfectly suited for the position but lacked the confidence to recognize it at the time).

  > therefore not caring about lack of benefits from work and possibly being part of the no votes when my coworkers vote to unionize

  > general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in significant social/familial time investment

I watched a guy get laid off from a $85/hr network tech job and when the two months severance ran out and the mortgage payment came due, he discovered that he could make his paycheck on garbage day if he drove his SUV through the right communities. That's all he's been doing for the past decade. He loves it because it takes 3-4 working days a week, a lot of the inventory is free (he buys things on Craigs/Offerup and sells on e-bay, occasionally, but often just grabs appliances that people leave at the curb). After discovering that about half of the things he picked up still worked, he invested in a box truck so that he could deliver the working ones, locally (which turned out to be a big deal). Heathcare was the big issue (I want to say he was paying $2,000-$3,000/month for terrible coverage for his family), but he sorted that out last year.

Having served at my church for a few years, I have hundreds of stories of people who hit bottoms like "homeless" and -- almost always through others (often strangers) -- found a way out. That's not meant to belittle those who are struggling or imply that their circumstances are their own fault. Frankly, it doesn't really matter who's fault it is--the person who has the highest probability of fixing the problem is the person experiencing it.

I was lucky (privileged, whatever), though, to be born to my Dad. He was one of 7 kids living in a 2-bedroom house (his "bedroom" was the couch and in his 70s, he's never lived alone or had "his own bed"), went right into construction work building garages, almost joined the construction union but decided to go into sales, instead. He was a good salesman but the commissions were weak. Despite that, he managed to somehow support a family of 4 well enough to save and buy into part of a company. We went on tons of trips -- they were all paid for via cereal box tops and by us tagging along on one of Dad's sales calls.

That company was later sold out from under him, he sued the owner and won but ended up paying more to the lawyers than his winnings, meanwhile he opened his own competing business and worked without a paycheck for two years so his staff would get paid. He's retired, now, and very comfortable but damn ... as his child ... I'd say watching what he went through was the single strongest vaccine against opening my own business he could have found.

The people I know who are "financially independent" (wealthy or otherwise, money isn't in the top 10 of their concerns) -- the first step was getting out of "hell", you can't get out of debt/become wealthy if you're searching for money for your next meal. Covering as much of that as possible and putting every remaining penny back into other things. Doing an 8-5 on a W2 is a reliable, consistent and predictable way to make money. Understanding that making money is a matter of convincing another human being to trade green pieces of paper for "something", and that acquiring said green pieces of paper doesn't have to be done by following your dream/doing what you love but can simply be "a means to having more money to do the thing I love with" or to ultimately getting to the dream job. Hell, my in-laws made most of their income two years ago selling elephant ears at fireworks shows[2]

I don't know your situation and -- as previously mentioned -- this is not meant as a judgement. You may find the only way you can get past those "barriers" is to move somewhere else for a bit. We joke that Ann Arbor, Michigan is basically missing almost everyone between the ages of 25 and 40. You can't afford to live there unless the bank (or school) is paying for school or you're already wealthy/retired from your U of M degree. You may be in a spot, like me, where moving is absolutely not an option.

Not sure if any of this was helpful but feel free to reach out via my profile and best of luck to you.

[0] At the time, graduating with a CS degree -- according to terrible, paper, sources provided by my High School -- would land between $35,000 and $45,000 where I live, so I considered any job that paid within that range to be a "real job". I'm not saying it's a good gauge, it's just the one I used.

[1] Not two years later this same person approached me for a $10,000 "investment" in a "pet rock"-like fad of these styro-foam balls with pictures on them that people attached to their antennas. The intelligent man in me turned him down without much consideration. I'd have about $70,000 had I trusted the guy.

[2] You wouldn't believe how many $7.00 elephant ears (that cost all of a nickle) you can sell in 3 hours, or how long it takes to get that smell out of every pore of your skin.