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Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

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101–110 of 179 posts

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#101

Definitely believable since sustained stress is highly related to sustained blood pressure issues. Sustained stress onto your heart damages your heart and other organs such as kidney and your liver. Ask any doctor who has even remote specialization or expertise with heart disease. Stress is directly correlational to heart disease. If you do experience palpitation or risk of high blood, I recommend you regularly check…

> Stress is directly correlational to heart disease.

Is there a better word than "stress" for this? Stress (in the form of exercise) is also how you fend off heart disease.

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the good old "my anecdote trumps science" post on Hacker News. If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse. "Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the latest evidence were conducted for this study. Data from 37 studies on ischemic heart disease covering more than 768 000 participants and 22 studies on stroke covering more than 839 000 participants were synthesized. The…

Still the point above is valid. A good 'job' is a source of well being. A bad job will kill you faster. The former might be very rare though.

I wonder if that's true. A good job is still a job. If you enjoy it and that leads to you spending more time working because it's "fun", it's not hard to imagine that good job could actually lead you to die younger than a job you dislike and only work the minimum amount possible at. That's not to mention the fact that you might also sacrifice more time commuting, lower salary, and less benefits for the sake of a "good" job doing what you enjoy.

There's plenty of reasons to imagine a job you enjoy could lead to a shorter life.

Maybe it doesn't though. And even if it does, is prolonging your life for as long as possible actually a noble goal in the first place?

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#103
post #28
post #12

I would differentiate between “working” and “sitting in the office”. My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. Sourcing wood, visiting clients, organizing everything, etc. He was in good shape and died at 92 years age. Being forced to sit in the office 45 hours a week I don’t think that I reach age above 60 years. This sitting whole day in the noisy environment was destroyi…

My grandfather was a carpenter. Died at a good old age... with missing fingers, arthritis, back problems. I fucked my knees working in construction, actually every single person I know in that line of work has health problems. Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body. Tbf, it's possible to do it in a trade, too, but it'…

>Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body.

That entirely depends on time requirements and stress levels. When you need to work 50-60 hours in a week and/or have high stress, exercise may be a 'choice' but there are many who it's not a choice for.

After a long or stressful week, I absolutely cannot get energy and motivation to exercise appropriately. I usually want to do absolutely nothing but relax and do incredibly low mental/physical stress activities. If you have a lot of these sort of weeks, no matter how much of a choice exercise may be, it's not a viable choice for many people. It's not a matter of laziness, when times are relaxed I get a good bit of healthy exercise and living habits in. When stress is high they all suffer.

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#104
post #12

I would differentiate between “working” and “sitting in the office”. My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. Sourcing wood, visiting clients, organizing everything, etc. He was in good shape and died at 92 years age. Being forced to sit in the office 45 hours a week I don’t think that I reach age above 60 years. This sitting whole day in the noisy environment was destroyi…

I have a few anecdotes like that: - 39h/week at a truck dismantling warehouse (very heavy duty stuff) I was fresh like a dolphin (was doing pushups during pauses to get ready for the next shift, pretty telling), had to leave after harassment, missed that job a lot. - part time gig as morning newspaper delivery, couldn't be easier on paper.. couldn't last more than 2 months due to very peculiar stress that driving and…

Love those extremely varied anecdotes, esp and tragically the courthouse one. What was the nature of the harassment?

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#105
post #33

In years to come we will look down on current working conditions in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. As a step in the right direction, I believe that most jobs should be offered on either 4 days (80% salary) or 5 day (100% salary) contracts. On this topic, I recently built https://4dayweek.io - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance

> In years to come we will look down on current working conditions in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution.

Absolutely agreed. Working for someone else for 8 of the best hours of the day (if you're lucky, and not pressured into 9 or 10 hours), plus the surrounding 1 hour on either side to get ready/commute, for 5/7 of the days of the week, is no way to live.

> most jobs should be offered on either 4 days (80% salary)

Woah, hang on. Are we currently working at 50% pay compared to those 15-hour factory days? No. So how does it follow that a further reduction to 4 days should merit a pay cut? Our target should be 4 or even 3 days at 100% pay. Productivity has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated[0]. We deserve fair compensation for our labor, don't be so eager to discount it.

[0]: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#106
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally, HN people are more educated and better trained in logical thinking The main effect this has is that HN people have an overinflated sense of their own competence, and are more blind to their own ignorance.

I do not disagree, and I hoped it was already visible from my initial comment. But, on average, you probably still get better results from HN crowd than from other crowds, in matters that require knowledge and logical thinking. Do you disagree?

Absolutely disagree. I think HN is massively blind to its own biases, and makes the wrong calls very often as a result.

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any chance you were exposed to COVID at any point? I know there’s an association between COVID-19 and clotting events (even for otherwise asymptomatic individuals)!

The heart damage stories have been debunked* (but don’t expect the media to cover that) * https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/14/setting-the-record-strai...

It seem so, lets see if that study is confirmed. We can't believe anything COVID related that has not been reproduced independently many times by independent groups, there is too much fear and convictions.

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still the point above is valid. A good 'job' is a source of well being. A bad job will kill you faster. The former might be very rare though.

I wonder if that's true. A good job is still a job. If you enjoy it and that leads to you spending more time working because it's "fun", it's not hard to imagine that good job could actually lead you to die younger than a job you dislike and only work the minimum amount possible at. That's not to mention the fact that you might also sacrifice more time commuting, lower salary, and less benefits for the sake of a "goo…

Then it's unrelated to the nature of the task. I thought it was meant to attest of working + time (which I don't believe in[0]). You will probably die faster if you're a passionate climber than if you're a library clerk even if you despise books.

Commute time is also part of the blend btw, it's a balance.

[0] for instance I have money and am jobless but my actual context is unhealthy as hell (social, emotional needs unmet to the fullest)

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#109
post #98
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether logical thinking gets you to correct result strongly depends on assumptions you make and model you apply the logical thinking on. And my impression is that HN is not really good at those. It also starts to fail when the assumptions are only sorta kinda true, with many asterixis, because logical implications then treat them as true. Very very often, people start with very wild assumptions and then make wild im…

That's how you get conversations, and eventually progress. To me, that's the attraction of public forums like HN: people (including myself) make assumptions, and conversation often (or sometimes?) leads to corrections. If we'd all be working with perfectly correct assumptions, we would not need forums anymore. We'd just be fed information, process it in exactly the same way and reach the exact same conclusions. In my…

What it primary does instead is to disseminate feel good assumptions. Because the people don't state them as assumptions, they claim them to be facts. The conversation does not lead to corrections often enough in programming and business unrelated topics.

That is fairly normal, group of people talking about something they dont know much about is not supposed to randomly pivot to correct conclusions. But, HN is uniquely convinced HN is superior in this regard.

Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people do this. I can't even work on the balcony, because it's either too bright, too hot, too cold or too loud. And it's in moderate climate.

Also not sitting at a proper desk with a full size keyboard, mouse and monitor will cause you all sorts of back/neck/arm/hand pain. There's no such thing as sitting on a beach with a laptop coding. You can only do that for a few days at a time. People who say otherwise are lying.

Thats just for their social network bragging most of the time.
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