111–120 of 192 posts
Yes, but the place you get a paycheck from doesn't have to be this kind of work, the work we need. I need a paycheck. I need work. They can come from different places. Give me my paycheck and let me spend time with family and on my true work, if not, in this market, I'll find another job that pays more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Of course even flawed people deserve some level of empathy, but there's a difference between empathy and immunity from responsibility or criticism.
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…
I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all... but I do that kind of interesting. I like to think that if I had unlimited free time, there's no way I'd ever be bored, I have so many things that I love doing... No way I'd give up 20 hours of my week just to go work as a cashier when I don't need to.
That said... things might change when I get older.
I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.
So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.
The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.
I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.
PS:
Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
Some are meanings are constructs, but some are limitations of complete communication from a single English world.
This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
This modern economy is the exact religion that preaches the same gospel in the blog post: Maslow's pyramid of needs dictates that you need to work. Which is.. fine, I guess? My problem with that is that the work has become super productive in the past decades and that excess production allows only a fraction of people to stop working. Coupled with replacing the benefits of an actual community with the downgrade which is a workplace to give you that sense of belonging, self-sufficiency propaganda and employer-only provided healthcare, you get a nation of wage slaves.
We don't really need to work. I mean not all of us. A lot of the work done nowadays is bullshit [1]. The pandemic kinda showed us exactly who needs to go work to keep society going. The rest is just the result of:
- inertial protestant ethic
- wealth hoarding by the owners of production
- people tied to their workplace are easier to persuade/manage/manipulate politically
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.
Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.
> 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…