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Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

theguardian.com

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Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#41

Post by ellius »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #2

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, wor…

I think he made the mistake of ignoring half the connotation of the word. "Barbaric" really implies a combination of two underlying ideas. He's right insofar as the 9-5 is backwards and unsympathetic to human beings, which I think is his point. He's wrong in that it isn't physically brutal. The problem is he picked a word with a complex connotation when he needed a simpler one.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#42

Post by lj3 »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #2

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, wor…

> Really, barbaric?

Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say,

> It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag...

edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0].

[0]: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#43

Post by return0 »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #2

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, wor…

> It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival,

It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#44

Post by scarmig »

jerf wrote: post #22
jgrahamc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"." As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this…

1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies.

2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it.

Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies.

The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#46

Post by tsunamifury »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #16
jgrahamc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

And every weekend. And evenings and mornings. And the kids are at school anyway. This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.

Many of us work 14 hours a day, plus occasional weekends, don't yet have kids or a house, and are at the top of our field.

You can call it whatever you want, but its not adding up to a "better life."

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#47

Post by pc86 »

Avshalom wrote: post #32

Of course it's actually 7-6 with the commute and lunch

My lunch is included in my day but I know that's an extremely rare situation. The 4-mile, 10-minute drive is pretty nice too.

But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#48

Post by Declanomous »

geoka9 wrote: post #37
Declanomous wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that he didn't choose the photo, but the body language strikes me strange, what with the arms outstretched. I'm probably being a bit harsh, because it's not his event, and he didn't set up the stage, or the lighting. Regardless, I view speakers who make gestures like that with skepticism, since I associate the posture with grandiose self-interest.

I've no idea about the guy, but photos from live events can be very out-of-context, so I wouldn't put too much weight in this.

That's fair, but the context I'm using is the rest of the article, which is rather grandiose itself.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#49

Post by fsloth »

krapp wrote: post #29
fsloth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chained to a desk from 9-5 is inhuman if the work is not intrinsically motivating . From quality of life perspective I'm not sure if it's much better than generic hunter gathering. The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept. The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better. Sadl…

Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line. To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if…

"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..."

I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale.

There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lots of the conventions our civilization has are tradition based and eminence based. They are not the pinnacle of human development.

Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

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