141–150 of 222 posts
This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern "The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises…
IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!
Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!
I have no duty towards life. I didn't choose to be born, did I? In fact, I vegetate waiting to have enough strength to suppress my fear of death and kill myself.
Yes, I've tried therapy in the last 15 years. Yes, I've tried exercise, meditation, journaling, workaholism, idleness, religion, philosophy, science and so on and on. I just want to be done. Every evening I pray to deities I don't believe in: "Have mercy on my suffering, do not make me wake up".
So, no: there is no duty towards anything, just the futility of existence in itself.
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> another wiseass answer There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's. > what they ought to be paid How do you propose to determine that amount? > is not satisfying Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step t…
> There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's. This is typically where people drop in their Milton Friedman video/meme: "With my own money... with someone else's..." Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance. > How do yo…
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GDP/hour of labor is a really interesting metric. For the US it is about $75/hour.
Romania has the second highest GDP/h in EU. Why? Because of undeclared employment / illegal work.
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> Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented? How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.
You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.
It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
Paul Graham has a very nice perspective on this: https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html (2005) "I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Business still reflects an old…
This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up.
It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenient thing to promulgate the idea that "we were designed to work" without further clarification when you own capital and reap the value of others' labor, and it's an easy thing to say when you derive healthfulness from the work that you personally happen to do. By "work" do you mean activity that's deemed productive to modern society? Otherwise, why not say people need to spend some time being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c, if that's what you really mean?
I don't mean to sound suspicious or to insinuate some dark motivation on PG's part, but it (ironically) seems lazy to not bother to scrutinize the modern conception of work – to take something for granted because it's all that most of us living have ever known.
We need exercise, but we can get that running for our lives or playing a sport, and the latter is less dangerous (and preferable unless you're a thrill seeker). We need work, but do we need to get that by doing the things that we call "work" today?
(As a total aside: this reminded me of [1], shared some time ago on HN, which tenuously suggests that we were also designed to be idle. I took "designed" in PG's comment to mean "evolved", and my assumption is that small, pre-industrial societies are more representative of the conditions of the past few hundred thousand years in which modern humans evolved.)
Edit: @kergonath also replied to the idea of too much idleness elsewhere in this thread [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427
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You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.
Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe. It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
> It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient.
Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.
Paul Graham has a very nice perspective on this: https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html (2005) "I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Business still reflects an old…
> Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't. This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up. It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenien…
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You made a clear rebuttal to my original comment, supported by what Marx wrote. I'd ask that you take ownership of your own argument rather than shifting it over to Marx. Your assertion was this: > Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why. In order for me to agree with your assertion, I'd hav…
Take a step back for a moment. The point your making is that wage slavery shouldn't exist as an interesting or separate category because all organisms have to work to live. This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive. It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentall…
I am saying that extending the definition of slavery to simply include any process that is being thrust upon a living being is idiotic. All living beings are required to perform labor to live. Performing labor for wages is an extension of that that fits within a human framework. Rather than individually performing all the requirements to live by creating your own shelter, making sure that you stay warm, hunting other animals or gathering edible berries, nuts, and the like, we've figured out a way to more efficiently divide the labor and abstracted away the notion of labor into something called money (or wages). It enables human beings to use their time more efficiently and is why we are such a successful species.
No, you're not enslaved because you feel like you have to work for a wage. Unless you are being coerced by another person into performing labor for them (with or without compensation), you are not being enslaved. External natural forces like going hungry or going cold are not acts of coercion. That is simply life.
> This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive.
I'm not sure how you extrapolated this, either. To quote you, "It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused."