121–130 of 192 posts
guy who works all the time loses some of his family, feels bad, continues to neglect the remaining family, and the son chastises him for not climbing the corporate ladder high enough. in conclusion work is a Very Important Thing
> 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'm not saying that we all need to work for hyper-capitalistic machines. Or even anything remotely resembling a "business". But humans need to do semi-regular things that approximate work. Whether it's something like running a farm, coding programs, or passing lessons on to the next generation—we all need something semi-recurring, with some perception of value.
I do agree that the sense of duty towards work that is stereo-typically cultivated in Silicon Valley is a social construct and not at all a universal truth. THAT we can both agree is definitely a social construct.
This dude, who graduated from the USC during a huge economic boom, landed a dream job at a small video game company that was about to blow up, then never had a different job since gets to decide who is a programmer or not?
You were born during an economic boom, graduated from a prestigious university with the perfect degree at EXACTLY the right time. You started out on 3rd base, why would anyone take career advice from you. If you were to re-enter the workforce today you would be down here with the rest of us, instead of lording over us with your fancy title. Have some humility.
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Nothing against Kent Beck, I rather like him and he is not being a jerk in this post, unlike the blizzard dude. But it is kind-of the same situation. A lot of us did not get in on the ground floor of the software engineering gold rush and got to become rich and (semi? kinda?)famous with our own Wikipedia article before the industry got crowded.
I'll speak for myself: I am extremely career oriented. I want to do good work and I have done well for myself. But I don't have a wikipedia article. I don't have the fancy degree to get my foot in the door. I don't have the 50 year long career that make people jump to attention when my resume slides across the desk. I don't have the mental stability to burn out my starry dynamo every night trying to make my boss more money.
Nobody cares about keeping me happy. I don't get the interesting work at my company. I take what I can get and I am a commodity level developer like 99% of everyone else on this website. I think I do high quality work but it ends there for me.
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Another aside: My parents were both workaholics. They weren't really around that much growing up, and I was always forced into band/sports/daycare/etc. because it was basically free baby-sitting and they didn't want to have to leave work to pick me up. They have even acknowledged this to me. As my mom once said: "Building your business was more fun than raising your kids."
I'm not complaining, they are nice people and did their best. Honestly, this is pretty normal and I don't think it is that big of a deal.
What IS a big deal is the lack of hobbies and interest my parents have outside of work. My dad is retiring, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He plays a lot of video poker. It is frustrating, I want him to thrive and not hang out at bars all day, but he hasn't developed any relationships and hobbies outside of his work. ( Living in a tiny town doesn't help either. )
Work can sometimes provide you with Esteem, Belonging and Self-actualization, but often it's a poor and unreliable mechanism to fill those.
Working on interesting things with other people you like and feeling accomplished and useful and respected in that way is great, but you can do that without it being a Job.
If I had an infinite stream of money, I'd still be working on interesting things when I need too, and it be easy enough to find those.
In my opinion the work as we've defined it today is accidental, a necessity to provide the lower things on the hierarchy like food and shelter, and in some cases can also be fulfilling and interesting, but rarely in a sustainable way and often it's not at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 just went into the hardware store last week. The cashier at the store was talking to someone he knew. He actually took the job there because he had retired, and had nothing to do. So he works there for 20/hrs a week. So for him, he needed work. 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 bor…
First, as I said in my comment, the man in your example is likely not working in order to "stretch [his] abilities" as was the context of my comment...
Second, I'm not sure that doing something out of boredom is equivalent to a "need," regardless of how one might describe it.
Third, it seems to me that many people's only source of purpose is work (partially because they must work exhaustively to survive), so, when the need or ability to work is removed, they have nothing else; the idea that "work" is either a necessity or a noble pursuit in of itself only serves to reinforce this outlook and the resulting behavior (i.e. deriving all purpose from work).
I don't want to push too hard, but it should be somewhat self-evident who might benefit from a culture that perpetuates a myth of work as necessity.
> 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 don't think that was the author's message at all. Rather, I think that this post is about balance , and about being emotionally present. He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care . The only way to avoid the struggle is to cease caring, and that means you push something out of your mind that you really should be paying attention to becaus…
Yay, survival should be a struggle, because it shows you care (about increasing the ROI for the shareholders you'll never see)!
"We need work" is justified by "we need shelter and food".
The only thing a constant struggle shows is that you don't have the freedom to choose how you spend your life.
What people need is a vocation, a calling, fulfilment from creativity or helping other people out. The things that we call hobbies, that is (and people who enjoy them - amateurs).
Work is an exchange of about half of your waking hours for the privilege of not dying in this society (because as far as food and shelter go, yes, we actually do need them, as well as healthcare, education, transportation, etc).
The only way to avoid struggle is to be rich - and that's because the rich had set it up that way.
Van Gogh never even had a career to give up, and his struggles weren't because it was hard for him to divide his attention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Art, entertainment, and communication are not new human creations. These jobs are the result of psychological needs that humans have. Maslow's Hierarchy is more than a cave, nuts, and berries. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Just different definitions of "work". I think the sense meant by those saying people "need work" is "meaningful toil". Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose. So cashier, janitor, waiter would fit that broad definition, even though they are not a focus of intellectual life. But there can…
The author literally said "We need food. We need shelter." right after saying we need work.
I meaningfully toiled over a 3D print of a twisted hexagonal mesh over a tube around a 5,4 torus knot yesterday. Guess how much it helped me pay rent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?
> 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…
Alas, alas, work has been co-opted to mean employment in most people's minds.
There's learning, there's helping, there's contributing, there are a million things that aren't idling and require effort, but net you with no money.
So they don't count as "work".