I only got about a paragraph in and realised it was someone with a chip on his shoulder.
Nobody intelligent finishes the 4HWW book and believes it to be a manual on how to whittle your hours down to 4 a week.
The book (to my interpretation, at least) is about prioritizing activities in your life, and spending as little time as possible on the things that bring the most reward (both monetary and not). It's mostly just a wake up call to not spend your life in a cubicle farm if you aren't happy there.
The original working title for the book as 'drug dealing for fun and profit' which was nixed by the publisher. He ad-tested a selection of titles in Google Adwords and selected the best performing title. That's where the 4 hour work week comes in : the most effective hook to bring in buyers. Apparently it's the most effective to raise the ire of hard-working bloggers.
The author's premise is that most people equate work with something unpleasant. Therefore, the 4HWW is a "lie" because most people need to enjoy their work more instead of adult fantasizing about living the retired lifestyle (I didn't get the logical leap).
As a programmer, I think there is some enjoyment from being able to create and weave stuff that people use out of code. Yes, there are parts to the job that I dislike: the downtime, some group apathy, office politics, etc. However, I feel that I am fortunate to be in a profession where I can exercise problem-solving and creativity and have relatively durable metrics for performance vs. Some of the more abstract office jobs my friends have.
As a very smart kid I know said in his valedictory address:
"Work doesn't necessarily make you happy, but it may give you the means to do the things that make you happy*"
Remember life balance is not static, it's a dynamic process. Happiness is fleeting because our survival depends on it.
Actually, most people don't hate work at all. I hear they love it and they couldn't even imagine life without work and the satisfaction (also spelled "exhaustion") it gives. At least that's what everyone says when I make it known that I hate work. Still, even though everyone loves to work, I can't get anyone to pay for my survival. (In fact, there are those who condemn welfare leeches because that makes them have to work more!)
But seriously, are these romantic articles doing us any good? I expected something a bit more cynical with a title like this. Instead, all I got was more you-can-do-it peptalk, telling me that there's a wonderful job somewhere over the rainbow where I won't even notice the restrictions, responsibilities and captivity inherent to jobs.
Admittedly, I'm making the same mistake as the author of the article by conflating doing work with having a job. Doing work can be great; I absolutely love programming. However, there are no jobs where you can do whatever you want all the time. It's no use to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps if we admit that jobs suck, we can find alternatives. (And I don't think founding startups is it.)
Somebody's got to dig ditches and handle sewage. Until we invent robots to do the manual labor and put nanomachines in the toilet to treat the sewage in-situ, there's no real replacement for the job in our society.
Yeah, somebody has to do that. But it doesn't have to be one person. I wouldn't mind digging a ditch or handling some sewage every once in a while. If everyone did a little of everything without commitment or paperwork or whatnot, I bet we'd be much better off. Utopian, sure, but I'm certain it could be made to work. (Even the worst slackers would start doing things when there's no blame, expectations or obligations.)
Also, I'm afraid that when the robots finally do everything, we the people will still be left with paper-shuffling jobs. As robots gain ground, jobs will be lost and new pointless jobs invented for the sacked. That's been happening for decades now. It's like boiling a frog: we won't even notice when we get to the point where robots are doing everything and the only reason we're still working is because we're keeping each other's artificial jobs going.
Kind of hard to explain this point. Think insurers insuring managers who manage insurers, only more widespread and complex. Think circular references in a reference-counting garbage-collected environment: objects that are completely unnecessary but things have gotten so complex that it's hard to see it.
Then of course there's the question of who owns the means of production: if corporations had to pay for the robots, they won't just make them do everyone's work for free. Quid pro quo, right? And this doesn't take malice: the frog will be boiled very gradually.
(I know you can't boil frogs like that. That's not the point.)
Nobody intelligent finishes the 4HWW book and believes it to be a manual on how to whittle your hours down to 4 a week.
The book (to my interpretation, at least) is about prioritizing activities in your life, and spending as little time as possible on the things that bring the most reward (both monetary and not). It's mostly just a wake up call to not spend your life in a cubicle farm if you aren't happy there.
The original working title for the book as 'drug dealing for fun and profit' which was nixed by the publisher. He ad-tested a selection of titles in Google Adwords and selected the best performing title. That's where the 4 hour work week comes in : the most effective hook to bring in buyers. Apparently it's the most effective to raise the ire of hard-working bloggers.