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Why do we work so hard?

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Re: Why do we work so hard?

#131

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jasonkester wrote: post #110
buf wrote: post #7

I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me. I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years. I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addic…

There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours. I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I could just drop everything and go travel…

"Revealed preferences" used to be called "unconscious compulsions."

The phrasing is revealing, because "revealed preferences" suggests that your actions are somehow in alignment with your true core values, while "unconscious compulsions" suggests that your actions are destructive to your true core values, and you could consider doing some psychological work to realign them.

Psychology suggests the latter view is more realistic, especially if you're not getting any genuine fulfilment from a situation.

It also suggests that unconscious compulsions can be the result of external influences, particularly in childhood, and may not be true preferences at all.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#132

Post by stegosaurus »

I don't want to be a serf.

Working is the only way I know of for me to accumulate capital in order to become financially independent.

The more I do, the faster I accumulate capital, the more years of my life I'll spend able to do what I want to do.

It doesn't feel like a choice to me. The alternative is to live a mediocre life and always have one eye on my "responsibility" towards my capitalist overlords.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#133

Post by usrusr »

Animats wrote: post #80

Competition. It's not that we really have to work that hard to produce a product or service. It's that we have to work really hard to beat the other people trying to do the same thing. Increased productivity doesn't help, because everybody is still running flat out to compete, at a higher level.

Nobody really needs the product, but if it is good enough it will nonetheless grant us a part of the pie much larger than welfare. It's the service economy. All parts of the service sector that go beyond the much smaller one you would see in an old fashioned industrial economy could well be considered a naturally occurring redistribution model.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#134

Post by jaimeyap »

jasonkester wrote: post #110
buf wrote: post #7

I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me. I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years. I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addic…

There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours. I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I could just drop everything and go travel…

People can want more than just one thing. It might be fairer to say that they want all the things they say they want. But they want this other thing the most, and since this other thing isn't compatible with the others (can't travel the world and also be CTO) it wins.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#135

Post by DrNuke »

Earth is a small rocky ball among billions in the void. We don't know why we are here and what happens next. Stick your head into a mission (work, religion, family, whatever you like) and don't think about that.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#136

Post by usrusr »

cesarbs wrote: post #77
Tempest1981 wrote: post #17

Some people thrive on "solving puzzles", which is sort of what engineering is. For better or worse, there are an infinite number of puzzles to solve.

The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non-problems. When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it actually required solving or if a mor…

After the first two paragraphs i was deeply convinced that you were questioning the products those puzzles were part of, not just the way those puzzles got in there.

The cynic in me likes to widen the scope one step further, then those figurative 80% are the fraction of software created that is basically "twitter for pets" (or some transitive dependency thereof, technologically or via business). It's easy to focus on one of the many exciting puzzles hidden inside a "twitter for pets", but if you take a step back (and yes, that's one of the perils of age), well, twitter for pets.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#137

Post by burgessaccount »

nostrademons wrote: post #57
burgessaccount wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thoughts. To me, it has always seemed like, if I had something figured out, that had made me happy, i would WANT to share it, if it could help others. When people find a diet or an exercise regimen that works for them, they love to talk about it. I don't think it purely comes down to boasting. I agree that people with deeper wisdom will often be less eager to boast or force their values on others. But I a…

That works great until you realize that other people often have different value systems. What you're super proud of may be deeply offensive to another person. Just think about how saying "I'm a Googler, and proud of the work I do" might go over for a CS student vs. how it goes ever for the journalist who's struggling to make a living because Google has commoditized the news business. In practice, what usually happens…

I think it's interesting you're describing values systems in terms of particular jobs. Like, I work as a writer, and I do value the work that I do, but I don't think of that as my values - my values are: sound, well-researched information; kindness; humor; creativity; taking care of important resources; starting good conversations... It is difficult to believe that any of those values are "deeply offensive"to anyone - and if a person finds them offensive, I do want to change that person's mind. I agree that values are often associated with a community, but i think the work of speaking across community lines to find common values is deeply important - particularly in a far-flung democracy. In your Sanders vs. Trump example, I think actually a lot of the underlying values are the same - dignity for workers, safety for families... if we were all better at speaking about our underlying values, we would have an easier time understanding each other.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#138

Post by burgessaccount »

ianamartin wrote: post #126
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't sound moralistic at all. It sounds like an appeal to analysis of sources of information. I don't see how you can go wrong. We went from Eisenhower to Kennedy in a few years. I think this, and the fact that people move too much are largely the whole story. See also Peter Whybrow for more on this.

>>> the fact that people move to much ??? I'm really curious about what you mean by this. Would you please elaborate?

I don't want to speak for ArkyBeagle but I think, when young adults move, they often move for work - so you show up in a city where what you're there to do is work, the people you know are through work, you don't have the balanced social structure of family, friends, and work, so you don't end up spending healthy time relaxing with family and friends, you just... work. That's my guess.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#139

Post by Draiken »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #14

There's several issues intertwined here. The easy ones are those market forces I experienced at the relative bottom of the pay-scale and at the smaller end of the company scale: you're asked to work harder and more hours because it makes more money/profits for your employer to get you to work as long as possible for as little as possible. However, I think there's two more aspects I think I can contribute. Firstly: so…

I completely agree with you.

This notion that work is life sounds absolutely insane to me. I love programming, but I also love spending time with my wife, playing games, learning new things, traveling, writing and a whole lot of other things.

The worst part of the status quo is that it doesn't matter whether or not I'm an workaholic, I have to work to do a little bit of what I love.

We don't have time to do everything. But we have to limit ourselves to love our work only because there's almost no time to do anything else!

Some people think working 80/week is good, I don't mind them. But if I want to travel, to afford even simple things, 40+ hours of week of work is inevitable

And the bottom line is, most of us only work to make the top 1% even richer

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#140

Post by lgieron »

jasonkester wrote: post #105
BadassFractal wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar story here, been doing the crazy startup founder hours for half a decade now, haven't really lived much outside of the office in that time. Feeling also trapped: if I drop out, then I'm somewhat giving up on all of the people who over the years I had to convince to join me in a vision that I'm becoming tired of. It'd very likely lead to the collapse of a source of fulfillment, purpose and income for many peop…

What's something someone with a strong entrepreneurial, technical and managerial background can do for maybe 20 hours a week? Exactly what you're doing now. But only 20 hours a week of it. You can spend today having the talks you need to have to make this happen, then start your first sane work week tomorrow.

There's a documentary ("Some kind of monster") on Metallica's creative process for the St Anger album. It shows James Hetfield (arguably the band's leader) wanting to have a more balanced schedule, and adapting the band's process to fit to it. The result was a very mediocre album.
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