One thing that's funny to think about is in the distant past, one of the big selling points of automation and industrialization was that we could have the same things but work much less. That didn't quite work out. Now we work more, for more things. The tragedy though is there isn't a great option for trading luxuries for time. You're either 40+ hours a week invested in a career, or you're barely scraping by on a bunch of part time gigs with no health insurance or retirement plan.
The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
291–300 of 511 posts
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#292It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…
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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#293It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…
"then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant"
A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#294It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…
> In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably. I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours ever…
this is the problem of believing things are "better".
it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.
but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.
You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.
On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.
Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,
I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone who understood basic economics wouldn't assert that investors are ruining the housing market for individual family buyers So you don't think that adding demand without adding supply makes prices go up? Or you disagree that prices going up makes it harder for a family to buy a house? Edit: I see you added to your comment... > so their investment helps out families on net by helping to increase the supply of…
The investors entering the market today will make prices go up today, but have the effect of reducing prices in the future (either or renters or buyers, depending on how to investor chooses to recover his investment). Investment in housing in past decades has reduced the price families need to pay now. There a zero investors in housing who are not out to either provide housing for rent or to eventually sell housing.…
> The investors entering the market today will make prices go up today, but have the effect of reducing prices in the future
The flaw in this argument is that it assumes markets are perfectly efficient, when in reality they are affected by several factors.
> there are strong barriers to the creation of new housing
Right, this is one of those factors.
Others include land limitations, interest rates, government incentives and backstops.
Plus even if you're right that decades from now housing will be more affordable that's of little use today.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your premise - just because someone doesn’t make money on their work doesn’t mean it’s not good. We live in a capitalistic society, where the laws of supply and demand rule. You’re able to make good money in carpentry by simply showing up, because there aren’t many carpenters left. Just like my cousin is able to do the same with landscaping. It’s all work fewer people are doing. Other friends of mine,…
But you see, you’re kind of making my point for me. Being good isn’t the same as being good enough. And this is only a problem if every industry is saturated with people who are good enough. This isn’t the case, and if I’m not good enough at playing guitar to make a living at it, I go elsewhere. I don’t ask the world to make me a spot. We need more carpenters and plumbers and a whole host of other industries. It feel…
Ok let me rephrase this - the people I referenced aren’t good - they’re amazing. They have the credentials (Juilliard, S.I. Newhouse, etc.) and the work experience (lead role on broadway, ESPN and sports illustrated) and it’s still a massive struggle in their industries.
Compare that to being a warm body at a landscaping job, where the bar is “I showed up to work today” and it’s not even a comparison.
It’s the laws of supply and demand. Simple as that. Everyone wants to be a movie star.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their g…
> I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. Keyword "luxurious". People first and foremost want…
A roof, food and leisure time are historically luxurious. Poverty is the natural default. Anything more than that requires a lot of hard work as a society, and has only been realized in the tiny sliver of humanity that is recent (last ~200 years) western society. Everywhere else and at all other times has been starvation, strife and constant work to subsist. And you die by 40 on average.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post I am responding to mentioned providing a family of five with a self-owned house, a car, a couple of vacations per year and a comfortable retirement. To many people around the world - still today - that would be considered a luxurious lifestyle. You are right that it's possible for one person to support a family. For most people working in the tech industry here on HN they could probably figure out a way to d…
The post you are responding to didn't have Starbucks coffee every day, did have internet, cable tv, subscriptions to streaming services, a computer with a monthly subscription in every pocket. They didn't even have that option. The above is just a short list. Live like 1955 and you can support a family of 5 with, a car, vacations every year and a nice retirement. You won't have many of the other luxuries people enjoy…
Is that actually true?
Subscriptions £30 pm
Starbucks £40 pm
Phone contract £20 pm
ISP £30 pm
That’s £120 pm, or £1440 annually. Doesn’t seem like it would make that much of a dent. Probably the number one thing you’d need to do is cut down on food costs, which is doable, to be fair, as it’s quite easy to spend 10x or 100x more than what you need to stay fed.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#299As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it. One new hire on my team spends upwards of 2 hours per day "walking her dog." I eve…
I see this too, and not just post-COVID. 10+ years ago we used to have "Let's Learn This Now!" where the developers would agree on particular subject and then learn and discuss it on our own time, and occasionally it would lead to improvements in our development. We went through Ruby (on Rails), Angular (nope, not even) to React (meh), queuing (ZeroMQ mostly), Asp.NET MVC, Redis, Docker, Octo, NoSQL dbs - the list go…
As a kid, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said programmer. So that’s what I did.
The money vs. passion thing rings true, but at the same time, I’ve found that channeling passion to my employer doesn’t really reward me in the way I want. When I go “above and beyond” my job description, the reward is actually a punishment: more of the shit I don’t want to be doing.
Instead, I set aside some time to work on open source stuff. I actually feel a sense of ownership then. I’m not working to make somebody else rich, and I can do things my way and in my own time.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it was the influx of new money printed, which we've done in the form of Quantitative Easing, multiple bail outs, etc.
Which mostly trickles up.
It didn’t even need to trickle up, it was exclusively handed out to the top on the assumption of “trickle down economy” being a real thing.