121–130 of 381 posts
People do have excess free time. How else can you manage to waste 4+ hours on streaming and social media per day?
I think some of that is not 'free' but 'recharge' time. If you're so exhausted that all you can do is stare at a screen then you're not doing what you really want.
Consider the general behavior of people on social media in that light.
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Social instability and riots - I assume you are referring to Black Lives Matter - did not happen due to "too much free time", JFC. They happened because police were routinely murdering Black people and there was/is a massive disparity in wealth.
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Not really, no company hires you for 10 or 20% in software engineering, while still paying enough that you could sustain yourself. The minimum is 80%, because it still the most of your time, so it seems reasonable in the work oriented society.
>no company hires you for 10 or 20% in software engineering, while still paying enough that you could sustain yourself. I agree that most employers wont offer 10% positions, but my feeling is that someone can work 10-20% for 10% pay by gigging pretty easily. Whether 10% pay is sustainable is a different question, but I was under the impression that you thought it was. If you are looking for 10% work and 50% pay, I ag…
>The antidote is simple to prescribe but hard to achieve: it is a return to the goal of efficiency in work—fulfilling whatever needs we have, as a society, with the minimal effort required, while leaving the option of more work as a hobby for those who happen to love it. What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen…
No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose.
Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.
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>no company hires you for 10 or 20% in software engineering, while still paying enough that you could sustain yourself. I agree that most employers wont offer 10% positions, but my feeling is that someone can work 10-20% for 10% pay by gigging pretty easily. Whether 10% pay is sustainable is a different question, but I was under the impression that you thought it was. If you are looking for 10% work and 50% pay, I ag…
Being responsible for your own insurance while gigging makes this seem less feasible given the cost.
Im a bit skeptical that the poster would actually be happy with 10% pay, which would probably not cover the insurance, shelter, and food they are used to.
That said, I am open minded and there are certainly people that do live on 10% of a SWE salary. You can rent a mobile home in a low CoL area, get on Medicaid, and have a lot of free time. Some people do exactly this, but it is a pretty rare breed.
I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here. If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like! I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and th…
Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?
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And no one cares about your diatribe or outrage. The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best. Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.
>The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best. Citations required I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible
The idea, your idea is that there's a way to tell everybody what to do to make all the things work and everyone will follow the plan and like their spot in it. You lack the imagination to recognize individual will let alone the fact that society works because there are millions of experts making choices everyday. No central planning board to 'organize' 'labor' can accomplish that or house the knowledge of these individuals
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As I’ve gotten older, I have been vocalizing a question to my friends and family: why is it so unreasonable of me to not want to work a job I don’t like, and instead spend my time producing documentaries and teaching audio production to kids? These are two things I’ve found I love doing. They provide value to society. Yet a sustained income from them is basically unattainable except in very specific, lucky cases, not…
Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be? I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is produ…
This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.
Do we even know what it is to be human anymore?
But consider the huge leisure industries that have grown over the past 100 years. Movies, TV, now streaming services. Radio and now Spotify and podcasts. Video games. Sports and all the media around sports. Even social media is arguably mostly entertainment these days.
Or look at active leisure. How many more cyclists and rock climbers are there today vs 100 years ago? Or skiers or runners or hikers?
Judging by the shape of the economy, there is a lot more leisure time than before. As a whole, Americans spend a lot less time growing food and making clothes and, well, surviving in general, and a lot more time doing the things above. But Americans also spend a lot more time making the things we fill our leisure time with.