91–100 of 279 posts
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You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like.
>>>You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like. Most people in the United States do not have this option because they do not have enough money to do so.
You're searching for the ability to live without constraint. So long as scarcity exists, this is fundamentally impossible.
My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that was the only lifestyle they knew.
As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory, unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.
The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.
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> We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die. Yeah but we’re not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40 hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you don’t stay for a lot more.
You are allow to do what ever the fuck you want until you die just don't expect me to give you money for doing what ever the fuck you want. As I too am doing what every the fuck I want, which happens to include only giving money to people who do something useful for me.
Can we agree that people with no money will starve to death unless they use violence to take food from someone, or the government uses violence to take food from someone on their behalf? The foodstamps of this great depression are equivalent to the soup lines of the old great depression: they prevent people from robbing, looting, and starving in the streets.
25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even. Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects. The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicate…
I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living" We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/w…
If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-starter.
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I agree we are stuck in an outdated model however I am not keen on someone me telling how many hours I can or should work.
If you're like most people, somebone already does: your boss, who answers to "convention."
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>>>You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like. Most people in the United States do not have this option because they do not have enough money to do so.
They have the option to raise that money. You're searching for the ability to live without constraint. So long as scarcity exists, this is fundamentally impossible.
Absolutely agree.
>>>They have the option to raise that money.
Absolutely disagree. They are working 2 and 3 jobs, my friend. They do not have the money to raise that money.
>>>You're searching for the ability to live without constraint.
Please explain where I indicated this, I did not mean to.
Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.
This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it required 0 scientific research to synthesize. We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.
Set a man on fire, you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
To wit: there is a strong correlation between what constitutes doing whatever the fuck you want, and how soon you'll die.
I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:)
No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down I'm against it.
There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!
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Says someone who obviously doesn't have a child support payment.
Yes, looks like he chose to not get married, not have a kid, and not get divorced.
In the US this is not legally a man's choice.
Wikipedia>>>In some cases, men and boys that have been raped (statutorily or otherwise) by women have been forced to pay child support to their rapists.[1]