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Work/life balance should be difficult

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Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#101

Post by jodrellblank »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #96
jodrellblank wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, do…

Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited. It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored. If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, am…

{Insert HN comment guideline about avoiding simplistic dismissals here}.

> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."

Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".

> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."

He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".

> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."

Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.

The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#102

Post by goodpoint »

Ancapistani wrote: post #33
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. 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…

> I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it.

Intellectual life and work are completely orthogonal.

People have been taught to confuse them because it benefits the ruling class.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#103

Post by chasd00 »

shard wrote: post #92
willcipriano wrote: post #34

> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline. This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of…

I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view t…

> The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted.

then the author's father should have figured it out. i don't have a lot of sympathy for people in problem solving fields that, for the life of them, somehow can't solve for family. You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. Just like everything else.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#104

Post by chasd00 »

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 can't remember who said it but there's a quote that goes "no one ever said on their death bed 'i wish i would have spent more time at the office'"

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#105

Post by supernovae »

disambiguation wrote: post #88
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…

I think you're also doing a trick here. While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work. Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if w…

I've always wondered why we don't switch to a 20-30 hour work week or 4 work days a week...

And not in some bs "part time vs full time" but that we have enough humans on this freakin planet that you should only need to work 30 hours a week to live a healthy, balanced life.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#106

Post by willcipriano »

shard wrote: post #92
willcipriano wrote: post #34

> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline. This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of…

I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view t…

I could perhaps have been hasty to condemn him to some degree. However I think it is critical to our society that men teach boys how to be men. I find that what is called toxic masculinity is often men who haven't been instructed and are doing a thin impersonation of what they believe it to be. We can't let other men off the hook so easily, given that those choices echo down the generations. I don't believe the posters father will ever read what I wrote, but I hope the poster does, and when he finds that his children need him I hope he understands how trivial someone else's deadline is in comparison to their need for their father.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#107

Post by walshemj »

Bancakes wrote: post #84
amw-zero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?

Technology has allowed the rise of "made-up", survivally unnecessary jobs like Metaverse programmer, pop singer, and marketing specialists. If anything, the pandemic proved we don't need restaurants and tourism to survive.

You would consider Homer "survivally unnecessary" (the poet not the cartoon character)

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#108

Post by WJW »

chasd00 wrote: post #103
shard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view t…

> The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. then the author's father should have figured it out. i don't have a lot of sympathy for people in problem solving fields that, for the life of them, somehow can't solve for family. You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. J…

Perhaps. Not everyone can learn everything, and blaming the father for his shortcomings because he was apparently smart in other fields ("in a problem solving field") is just callous. Yes, the world would have been slightly better if he could have done it. But sometimes the world is not as great as we would like, and people inside it do not live up to our (or even their own) expectations. They deserve empathy, not to be called cowards in internet comments by people who never knew them.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#109

Post by chasd00 »

shard wrote: post #95
llIIllIIllIIl wrote: post #23

Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.

This might be true in this case since the father was a Silicon Valley engineer. Stepping back, however, and I hate to be that guy, but your statement is "dripping with privilege", as the kids say nowadays. I can tell you that my parents would have not been able to say that, as they worked in manual labor jobs which damaged their bodies in order to provide me with the opportunity to study instead of work. As a second…

well privileged or not death is inevitable. From the person panhandling on the street to the Elon Musks of the word, you have about 75-80 years on average then lights out. I think you can consider and contemplate that no matter your privilege.

Re: Work/life balance should be difficult

#110

Post by chasd00 »

golemotron wrote: post #43
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…

Some people aren't family oriented. They find more meaning in work and, despite the all of the attempts to devalue work in the blog and this response, it's ok. We don't have to judge people who make that choice because we prefer another.

i made some other replies that would imply otherwise but you do make a fair point. I think it's not fair to ask your partner/children to pay your ticket if you want to put work first however. If that's who you are (and that's perfectly acceptable) then don't have a family and ask them to foot your bill emotionally.
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