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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)

#301

Post by Forgeties79 »

annyeonghada wrote: post #136
CodeSgt wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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? Is producing cigarettes, making apps more addictives, making food superpalatable, synthetizing pernicious drugs and so on more valuable than producing documentaries, studying ancient languages and civilazations, studying exoterical physics topics? N…

> Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.

Honestly all of these threads could be distilled into this simple point. Way more concise than what I wrote that’s for sure haha.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

mquander wrote: post #293
actually_a_dog wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free society? What kind of "free society" is it when people can't afford basics like housing, healthcare, and education? The median US individual income is currently about $36k. People at the median are either not making it or just barely making it. How is that "free?" MIT has calculated that the living wage in the US is just over $24/hour which is $48k per year. The median is about 1/3 short of that. That's what you…

That living wage is for a family of four, not an individual.

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by kirse »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

I went to a "progressive" school where we had one strange class called "Design For Living". Today we'd probably call it "lifehacking". Among the fascinating and odd topics was a lesson on managing free time. The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests, keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities. I think d…

By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to.

You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic].

Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.

I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.

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

#304

Post by actually_a_dog »

mquander wrote: post #293
actually_a_dog wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free society? What kind of "free society" is it when people can't afford basics like housing, healthcare, and education? The median US individual income is currently about $36k. People at the median are either not making it or just barely making it. How is that "free?" MIT has calculated that the living wage in the US is just over $24/hour which is $48k per year. The median is about 1/3 short of that. That's what you…

That living wage is for a family of four, not an individual.

Sorry, I misread. The graph here shows that a single individual needs to make nearly $40k or $20/hour in order to have a basic lifestyle that doesn't even include savings or entertainment: https://uc735a30719703449309c8146b8e.dl.dropboxusercontent.c...

Besides, do you want people to not have children at at least the replacement rate? You know, that's bad for the economy, right? Current US fertility rate is below replacement rate, and immigration is only barely making up for it.

The argument stands.

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

#306

Post by olalonde »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #292
olalonde wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

What freedom? Freedom implies the ability to do things. You can't do that if you can't afford to live. Keep in mind MIT's living wage calculation doesn't include things like savings and any sort of entertainment. What kind of life is that?

I meant it as in "negative liberty" or the "freedom from interference by other people". This is how it's usually defined when people say "free society", the opposite being an "authoritarian society".

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

#307

Post by paul_x_miller »

olalonde wrote: post #306
actually_a_dog wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What freedom? Freedom implies the ability to do things. You can't do that if you can't afford to live. Keep in mind MIT's living wage calculation doesn't include things like savings and any sort of entertainment. What kind of life is that?

I meant it as in "negative liberty" or the "freedom from interference by other people". This is how it's usually defined when people say "free society", the opposite being an "authoritarian society".

No post body was provided.

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

#308

Post by rufus_foreman »

hansword wrote: post #25

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…

>> Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday

I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write.

As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do.

Or as Bukowski wrote:

"if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire."

In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.

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

#309

Post by ben_w »

bombcar wrote: post #287
ben_w wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?

Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.

Possibly.

But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get.

Same for petrochemicals, steel.

I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.

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

#310

Post by drdec »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #226
bombcar wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do a single-income family and successfully, but you have to make some choices to do so. I know many who do it, and not all with no kids (some with many). Things like older cars, smaller houses, location differences, etc. But there are major cost savings that offset, especially with the kids. Single car may work out, less gas, less tax, even less food expenses (many people faced with two incomes eat out more,…

If you were the lower earner would you want to stay home? This is an incredibly disadvantageous position to be in.

It depends on the relationship you have with your spouse. A solid, long term relationship with trust makes this much easier.

We've done this for 17 years now on my salary which has been maybe a little over the national median for software engineers in that time. We live in a median-cost city. Since we are homeschooling, we have avoided communities with high property taxes (we pay 50% less than our neighbors in good school districts).

We've had two cars the entire time, although we'll let them age rather than trade them in for newer models. Our house is modest and we were actually able to pay off the mortgage years early. We max out my 401k and our IRA contributions.

We don't take fancy vacations, which is more of a personal preference rather than a cost cutting decision.

At this point everything is completely commingled financially and we just think of it as our money. Legally that's pretty much the way it is, if we were to get divorced (not going to happen) my wife would be entitled to half of everything (including my 401k). My sister was in a similar situation and I saw this happen in her divorce.

So there are safeguards for the non-working spouse. But still, if there isn't a high degree of trust and openness in the relationship it might not be a good idea. It has been great for our children.

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