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Work/life balance should be difficult

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Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#11

Post by lordnacho »

The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow.

Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future.

However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old.

It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#13

Post by toomuchtodo »

colechristensen wrote: post #8
dvt wrote: post #4

> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family , you build shelter for your family , it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure pro…

It’s not even pure productivity, much of it is just wasted time. Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.

Advocating for a 4 day workweek (or rather, the ongoing ratcheting down of the workweek) gets us to what you describe: flushing out the busy bodies and preventing the savagery of work theater. If work fills the time you allocate for it (Parkinson’s Law [1]), there is no governor on useless tasks or meetings, and countless hours of person life are needlessly wasted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#14

Post by ravitation »

jonahrd wrote: post #7

This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy. But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs. It goe…

> But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.

Not only that, but it's probably true even less often when looking at the totality of jobs everywhere.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#15

Post by skywal_l »

I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs:

1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.

2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.

3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.

If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.

Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.

His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#16

Post by mfer »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #5

The sum total of your life at any period of time should be fulfilling and each part of your life should be rewarding. If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.

Our society needs people to haul garbage away. I would bet many of them don’t do it because it’s rewarding. It just gives them money to pay for things they care about. Should all those people leave hauling our garbage?

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#17

Post by amw-zero »

I'm not sure that it _should_ be hard, but I am sure that it always will be hard. This is just the nature of life, your attention is zero-sum. More time here means less time there.

Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money.

So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#18

Post by MathYouF »

dvt wrote: post #4

> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family , you build shelter for your family , it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure pro…

I wonder how these companies we all work for manage to pay our salaries by selling anything if nothing we build contributes to the needs of peoples families.

After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#20

Post by ravitation »

slg wrote: post #3

The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?

I don't know if it really feels incomplete, instead the article seems to make a more compelling case for the opposite of the headline actually being true.

If we assume the following premise from the article is true...

> The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame.

The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.

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