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Maybe you should do less 'work'

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#381

Post by ironmagma »

deltaonefour wrote: post #379
ironmagma wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really relax your moral rigidity. You believe your intuition is correct, but there's nothing saying it is. Our intuition comes from culture, which is the result of centuries of Judeo-Christian influence, which I hazard to guess most of HN is not OK with taking as a source of knowledge, even an implicit, squishy kind of knowledge. Instead we should be foundational about this. "Every economist" doesn't belie…

You are bartering your value to the organization and getting less in return. That's the definition of getting fucked. If you want to start your own company then you are fucking other people. In either situation, somebody is getting fucked.

You mean that if I started my own company then I would be “fucking” other companies, since we have a distinction between companies and people.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#382

Post by fuzzfactor »

vkou wrote: post #231
adwn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boomerisms Kind of ironic, given that "boomers" lived under the 4 decades long threat of total nuclear war. Frankly, as an instance of those "age 30+ millenials", that would instill a far stronger sense of doom in me than the rather gradual, rather benign (compared to WW3 between the US and the USSR) effects of climate change.

> Kind of ironic, given that "boomers" lived under the 4 decades long threat of total nuclear war. We still live under that same threat, almost nothing has changed... Other than public perception [1] of the dangers. All the same failure modes that lead to nuclear war that were in place in 1980 are still here, today. [2] All the same kinds of people are in still in charge. [1] Just because the news has gotten bored of…

>All the same kinds of people are in still in charge.

Very true.

However the quality of those kinds of people has declined further while it has become easier for complete non-leaders to attain leadership positions around the world.

The political & financial leadership shortcomings across-the-board are more disappointing through time since it doesn't seem like there is enough sophistication to avoid war as well and preserve what prosperity there is.

So this is all basically threatening peace & prosperity, that's what really gets people worried.

The pandemic certainly didn't help, why work so hard if you may not even be around tomorrow.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#383

Post by fuzzfactor »

Apocryphon wrote: post #184
0des wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize this has been going on for at least a century, right? At one point we literally confiscated all of the gold by order of government. Whether the overton window is shifting or not, this stuff has been going on since time immemorial.

I’m talking about specifically concerns that the youth would have. And the Overton Window does not refer to things getting worse, nor does it mean things were inevitably getting worse for an American audience until living memory. Certainly ‘90s kids can point at a solid decade of optimism, until it all abruptly ended. To children growing up today, this must all feel like a step back compared to those earlier eras. Th…

Globally shocking threats of all kinds which you are powerless to adequately cope with are well, globally shocking.

And some generations are more affected and/or more sensitive, or even more numerous with the shock spread out further.

The threat of further shock can have quite a dampening effect.

For a great many boomers when they were young men struggling to stay in college before student loans became widespread, otherwise facing being drafted for Vietnam service, it was not as comfortable as people sometimes imagine.

Nuclear proliferation was ongoing their whole lives with threats only increasing from a baseline higher than what most living people have had to endure now. It wasn't only the young men who couldn't be so sure anything would be here when 1970 came around. Or if they would reach that milestone themselves regardless.

You could just feel that things were going to get worse before they got better.

Good catch about the gold standard ending in 1971, of course it wouldn't have been possible if gold hadn't been confiscated in 1933, basically two generations earlier.

How did they get away with saying the confiscation was a "continuation" of the gold standard (after the "necessary devaluation of the dollar" was accomplished) anyway?

These were both global financial shocks to two different and separate generations each of whose members had various vulnerabilities.

A lot of the gloom preceding, then manifesting with, events like this, or worse world wars, has got a lot of similarity to the way some people feel worsening insecurity for the future right now.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#384

Post by fuzzfactor »

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #216
0des wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a high performer the tone of this article is a shot across the bow.

Depends on your definition of high performer. If you prize delivering short-term value by chugging through the task pile faster than other people can, then sure this article is not aligned with your ideals. That is not what I would call high performance; I would much rather be someone who can take a razor/lawnmower to that pile of tasks and do exactly the subset (down to potentially none at all) which delivers the mo…

Sometimes I want to stop and smell the roses, but mostly I want to smell the roses along the way while accomplishing other things too.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#385

Post by machiaweliczny »

giantg2 wrote: post #44
pm90 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you need a vacation : )

I have a toddler - vacations don't really exist at this stage of life. Plus the past two years have seen me using most of that time for family medical issues. This year I'll be using about 1/4 of my time off for my wife to go on vacations.

My travel addicted friends went twice to vacations with 6 and 12 months old no problem.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#386

Post by j7ake »

Melatonic wrote: post #341

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees. I end up working 20 hours a week (instead of my normal 35) with a reduced salary (and I was even able to collect partial California unemployment benefits for the remainder of the reduced hours under a special program called Workshare). Honestly it was amazing…

This sounds great. Ideally for me is that I am able to choose stretches of the year where I work 50% and stretches where I work 100%, and small number of weeks where I work 150%.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#387

Post by jokoon »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #190
noahtallen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one avoid the inequality, though? One could be working 60 hours a week at fast food joints and not make anywhere close to a part time software developer. As a result, the “lazy” developer is generating more tax revenue. There are too many possibilities to make it “fair”, unless we get rid of the income tax. Even if everyone paid the same amount, it wouldn’t be fair, unless everyone made the same amount of mo…

It's not a complete avoidance. Rather, i'm just advocating that we don't build the idea of less work on the shoulders of people who work more. That seems to me to almost codify the need for some people working more, and that seems a slippery slope for _some_ people getting good work-life balances and others not. My argument is that we _all_ should qualify for a work-life balance. Not depend on some people not getting…

Unless there is an universal income, and unless entry jobs can be better paid with 20 hours, that's how it is going to be.

Employers have this mentality of workers either work 40 hours or are not hired, it's all-or-nothing.

So if workers CONSENT to do all the work and get all the money, it's only fair that a fraction of that money is sent to those who have no work and no money.

Workers have a better chance of negotiating their work time than the unemployed. And if they can't because they will be replaced by somebody else who will work 40 hours, then it's a political problem that needs fixing.

But meanwhile, I'd rather get welfare than suffer at work. It's not like capitalist society has a sense of "community", so I don't feel like there is a need to participate.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#388

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #366
nickjj wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work. It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion s…

> Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends. I've tried to hire part-time employees or 4-day workweek employees in the past. You described essentially the #1 roadblock. It actually works okay as long as you have…

[deleted]

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#389

Post by imtringued »

0des wrote: post #180
Apocryphon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even getting past climate change gloom, present economic situations don’t inspire much confidence. College admissions seem much more stringent than they were a decade or two ago, never mind the rising tuitions, the debt obligations, and so on. Housing prices continue to climb. A lot has happened since the Great Recession.

You realize this has been going on for at least a century, right? At one point we literally confiscated all of the gold by order of government. Whether the overton window is shifting or not, this stuff has been going on since time immemorial.

Except in ancient egypt and for a short period when Bracteates were used as currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracteate#Early_medieval_bract...

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#390

Post by wildmanx »

nickjj wrote: post #363
Melatonic wrote: post #341

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees. I end up working 20 hours a week (instead of my normal 35) with a reduced salary (and I was even able to collect partial California unemployment benefits for the remainder of the reduced hours under a special program called Workshare). Honestly it was amazing…

> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work. It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion s…

> So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle.

This indicates that you are tying "free time" closely with "spending money" by doing some costly activity. Perhaps that's the issue right there.

Just sitting in the sunshine at a lake with a book, or with a cappuccino in a cozy coffee place downtown chatting with friends, neither costs significant money. Or go running or biking or swimming or rock climbing. Or hack a cool side project in Haskell, whatever floats your boat.

I'm not sure what you are aiming for to do with your free time, but if anything that doesn't cost significant money you book as "just procrastinating" instead of enjoying the free time, then that's the issue here.

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