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Work/life balance should be difficult

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Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#71

Post by bidivia »

This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members.

Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.

If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.

When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.

It is not worth it but people do it again an again.

People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.

Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#72

Post by MisterBastahrd »

mfer wrote: post #16
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?

There are actually people who have retired from their IT jobs to drive garbage trucks. If the garbage hauling job doesn't itch a scratch that you have, then find something else or raise the pay until someone is happy to haul your trash.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#73

Post by Barrin92 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #64
kelseyfrog wrote: post #24

> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have do…

It's more than a social fact. It's a consequence of living in a physical reality with physical wants and needs that require action to be satisfied. The best we can do is move the work around, and have someone else do it. (We can harness physical forces to take care of most of the work in the force-times-distance sense, but we're still a long way from moving the rest.) And the ultimate problem with moving it around so…

OP talks about 'work' in a particular way, as does the author of the piece. What we need is food, shelter and so on. 'Work' as in conflict with 'life' (i.e the work-life balance) is a social construct.

It didn't always use to be that way, and it doesn't have to. That we have physical needs is a fact. That we have alienated work from life, or family, or expressing ourselves is not. That work created an absentee father is not in the laws of physics, obviously, but that it's hard to perceive it as anything else is what OP pointed out, and that's something worth paying attention to.

The idea that you have to 'move work around' (kind of sounds like moving garbage around) wouldn't make sense to a person who is able to express themselves in their work. Ask a craftsman for example, an artist, or someone on a family farm.

The fact that people are detached from their work, that they're objects of their work, that their work dehumanizes them in extreme cases, that is a result of a particular mode of production we are living under. Someone for whom their work is an extension of their life, who are not detached from the products of their work, and for whom work strengthens their social relations, there is no work-life balance, because there is no work-life conflict.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#74

Post by ryeights »

dionidium wrote: post #59
kelseyfrog wrote: post #24

> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have do…

> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too. Something I believe, but can't really prove is that this is completely wrong and there's very little about the need for "work" that's socially determined. We are biological creatures that evolved under very specific circumstances. And "work" in…

Who’s to say that the work we do is a good simulation? Most jobs are not fulfilling, and our country is in the midst of a mental health crisis

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#75

Post by taterbase »

20211215throw wrote: post #37

The first 10-15 years I worked my ass off. The last 10 I've taken it easy so I'm behind on all the new tech. The problem is now I want to work hard again but my skills are out of date. Despite the "unbelievably Strong" job market I'm finding it hard to get roles.

How would you characterize the differences between your years working your ass off and your years taking it easy? What did daily work look like during these eras?

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#76

Post by wccrawford »

mfer wrote: post #16
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?

When I worked retail, I met a lot of people who I would bet didn't find the work rewarding at all. They were there to get the paycheck. Most of them did as well as they did because they felt it was the right thing to do, but some only did well enough to not lose their job.

The older I get, the more I understand those people who only did enough to keep their job. I used to feel it was an ethical obligation to do my best, but I'm realizing that that is a one-sided view. The opposite argument was always "they don't treat me as well as they can" or something like that, and so they excused their own behavior... And I get it now.

I have no doubt that there are many garbage collectors who find their job rewarding... But I've also no doubt that there are many who just do it for the money, and would be just as happy (or more so) if their needs were met by society and they could concentrate on something they enjoyed instead.

FWIW, I think it's important that people do things that they feel contribute to society. But that doesn't have to be "work".

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#77

Post by jasode »

ravitation wrote: post #49
Ancapistani wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here. Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend…

> Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. Would your abilities feel stretched by being a cashier? How about a janitor? Waiter? These jobs are what "work" actually is for most people. I think most people could go without doing those things. Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work (and for most people those things and "work" are hardly relat…

>Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work

Your reply is entirely reasonable but it seems the gp already covered what you wrote and anticipated it in his disclaimer: ">It needn’t be employment,[...]"

He just happened to use the imprecise label "work" -- which is so tainted and overloaded that one can't re-use that word to also describe "non-employment intellectual activity" because it inadvertently tricks people into talking past each other.

(E.g. Notice that you used "work" as synonym for "employment" but the gp did not.)

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#78

Post by [deleted] »

amw-zero wrote: post #26
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.

This is spoken from a clear position of entitlement. Many lives do not have the benefit of being fulfilling or rewarding, and those same lives do not have a choice to "do something else."

[deleted]

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#79

Post by avgcorrection »

That you need work is kind of tautological: work is some kind of struggle that you have to go through in order to achieve some end. When work becomes either a non-struggle or optional is also when it stops being work.

But it’s quite the claim to say that work is a psychological need.

Think what work is for most people. Work for most people consists of providing surplus value to the owners of whatever organization that they work for. That is what work is in economic terms.

Where is your Maslow now?

But people like this author—although perhaps not him in particular—have to give some lip service to show fealty to the concept of Loving Work in case some potential employer or whatever other person-with-networking-potential stumbles upon his blog. (We have careers to maintain…)

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#80

Post by avgcorrection »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #64
kelseyfrog wrote: post #24

> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have do…

It's more than a social fact. It's a consequence of living in a physical reality with physical wants and needs that require action to be satisfied. The best we can do is move the work around, and have someone else do it. (We can harness physical forces to take care of most of the work in the force-times-distance sense, but we're still a long way from moving the rest.) And the ultimate problem with moving it around so…

But now the goalpost has been moved. The OP claimed that it is a psychological need.
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