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Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

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Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#251

Post by onesafari »

mirrorlake wrote: post #232
onesafari wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny seeing so many people who spend hours every day on social media or Netflix or Steam claim that they have no time. We can see the data on how many hours are being consumed. What explains that?

My armchair hypothesis is that using your phone, internet, or TV lacks sensory novelty--you frequently sit in the same place, doing the same thing. It's a repeated stimuli, which causes your brain to filter a lot of it and discard it, leading to the feeling like a night watching TV was a night doing nothing. Your memory of watching TV blends with all memories of you watching TV, especially after a few days have passe…

That makes sense and could explain a lot of it. The time spent is essentially compressed in memory making it seem smaller than it is.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#252

Post by eric4smith »

Hellbanevil wrote: post #33
eric4smith wrote: post #19

Quoted post unavailable.

The only thing I agree with is people got the leasure time and loved it. Most people don't enjoy their job, or jobs. Most people don't like commuting rediculious distances just to make rent, and eat. Most people realalized during Covid they might have been happier. The virtual/physical infrastructure wouldn't have been built with work from home. This is our first experiment with working from home, and it went pretty…

Who will feed the slackers?

You see, that’s the problem that you conveniently skip.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#253

Post by dopidopHN »

zdragnar wrote: post #206
quartesixte wrote: post #195

Compared to my parents and grandparents generation, my life is filled with leisure. Basic everyday necessities took up so much of my grandparent’s time when they were younger. A meal would take hours to prep. All the veggies to prep said meal grown. And then the many hours spent cleaning, maintaining, and improving the living space. Social obligations. They basically just worked all day long to just live. Leisure wer…

Don't forget making and mending your own clothes, washing them by hand, beating rugs outdoors by hand, all the little chores that have been replaced by electrical tools or are cheaper to purchase than make yourself. Harvesting and chopping firewood, or managing coal. If you visit an Amish community, they might talk about how people occasionally want to join them, only to realize just how much easier modern life is an…

I’m almost 40, not from the US, and mass market hit us later in ( 1955 rather than just after WW2 )

Still: you will have to go back to my grand parent generation to find folks carrying out the activity you describing.

And even then, that was seen at the time as a rural predicament ( bigger cities had «modern confort » already, but not isolated farm and so on.

( agreeing with all you says… just that the timing seems off )

Source : my 4 French grand parent born around 1920

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#254

Post by dopidopHN »

bluedino wrote: post #244
quartesixte wrote: post #195

Compared to my parents and grandparents generation, my life is filled with leisure. Basic everyday necessities took up so much of my grandparent’s time when they were younger. A meal would take hours to prep. All the veggies to prep said meal grown. And then the many hours spent cleaning, maintaining, and improving the living space. Social obligations. They basically just worked all day long to just live. Leisure wer…

Hours to prep a meal? Maybe for Christmas dinner.

2 hours is plural. It’s not hard to spend 2 hours total if you count prep and clean

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#255

Post by salt-thrower »

kubb wrote: post #48

I have several fantastic things that I love doing and work makes it very hard for me to pursue them. One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries. Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk. Anot…

Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I hate the performative theater of office life. Pretending to care, pretending that our work matters at all. But the pay is great, and I can’t afford to live without it, so… that’s how it goes.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#256

Post by hansword »

CodeSgt wrote: post #115
Forgeties79 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.

Your view is manifestly incorrect. There are so many groups of people that are looked down upon, what you describe is just a tiny tiny subset of these. If you are grasping to find an example, that shows a great deal about your position in life.

(If you still struggling, start with sex workers, people working in waste management, and people with physical disabilities, aka 'hookers' and 'trash people' and 'cripples'. Yeah, they definitely not looked down upon. LOL. I could literally write 10 pages of further examples.)

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#257

Post by quartesixte »

bluedino wrote: post #244
quartesixte wrote: post #195

Compared to my parents and grandparents generation, my life is filled with leisure. Basic everyday necessities took up so much of my grandparent’s time when they were younger. A meal would take hours to prep. All the veggies to prep said meal grown. And then the many hours spent cleaning, maintaining, and improving the living space. Social obligations. They basically just worked all day long to just live. Leisure wer…

Hours to prep a meal? Maybe for Christmas dinner.

When you have 7 mouths to feed, a wood stove, it does take about 2-3 hours to cook.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#258

Post by olalonde »

azemetre wrote: post #237
koheripbal wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has more with a lack of discipline, than a lack of available time or resources.

How can you argue it’s a lack of discipline when companies like Meta and Google literally hire psychologists to make their products more addicting? Why should society pay the price for their malfeasance?

Because our free society is based on the fundamental assumption that grown-up adults are generally responsible and act in their own best interest. Throwing out those assumptions is very dangerous and brings us closer to authoritarianism and tyranny.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#259

Post by quartesixte »

tayo42 wrote: post #216
quartesixte wrote: post #195

Compared to my parents and grandparents generation, my life is filled with leisure. Basic everyday necessities took up so much of my grandparent’s time when they were younger. A meal would take hours to prep. All the veggies to prep said meal grown. And then the many hours spent cleaning, maintaining, and improving the living space. Social obligations. They basically just worked all day long to just live. Leisure wer…

You should include your grandparents age,generation, location becasue this doesnt sound like the life mine lived through the 60s and 70s

Rural post-WWII East Asia, broadly.

They encountered their first flush toilets in the airport on the way out of the country.

My maternal grandparents were city dwellers and while they did not have as many menial tasks to simply live, the economic conditions of the time made for very long work days.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#260

Post by peter303 »

According to this months US employment figures, 36.3% of the working age population (16-64) are neither employed nor seeking work. This includes students, housewives, disabled, financially independent, etc. So good fraction of the population has avoided the puritanical work-all-the-time ethic.

If you spread out the work hours evenly, everyone would work about 25 hours a week.

If you add in the young and elder, the percentage of non-working people in the US rises to 52%.

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