Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

newstatesman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 278 posts

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#191

Post by chii »

eldavido wrote: post #186
bmcn2020 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

highly agree > I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. Definitely speaking from a place of privilege. Single moms living in poverty don't have the luxury to care for her mental health. She probably can't take even a few days off, voluntarily, much rather months or years. Let me ask you (caymanjim), in the months and years you take off, how do you subsist? The average American has, wh…

This sentiment expresses something I'm starting to see a lot in our discourse. I call it "third-party outrage", where you (bystander) get mad because you think some "aggressor" did something bad to some hypothetical "victim". What cracks me up is that oftentimes, the victims don't even care or don't get nearly as mad as the bystandars. Same story with tech workers getting mad about how Amazon pays their employees. Is…

Would you still make the same statements if the topic was about whether the word 'blacklist' should be replaced?

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#192

Post by ksolanki »

caymanjim wrote: post #115

I'm a huge fan of sloth. I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week except for genuine emergencies (things like outages; being behind schedule never counts), and I'm close to drawing the line at four days a week. I always take at least three weeks off a year, and that's in a bad year. I take "mental health days" often and with no guilt. If you…

I am not sure. My biggest driver has been to be in my death bed and having done nothing, having made no difference to the world. So I keep trying.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#193

Post by eldavido »

ckocagil wrote: post #167
sm4rk0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations... All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worke…

I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family time, vacation, meals with friends, etc. for some kind of price. That everything can be bought and sold, that everything has its price.

Some things have to remain outside the realm of market exchange. Marriage is a good example. You just can't put a price on it. Ditto for kids, and a lot of other highly meaningful life experiences.

I think the problem is thinking that markets and commerce are the whole story. They aren't. There's just so much more to life: serving others, community, family. None of this is anti-capitalist per se.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#194

Post by tetris11 »

ksolanki wrote: post #192
caymanjim wrote: post #115

I'm a huge fan of sloth. I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week except for genuine emergencies (things like outages; being behind schedule never counts), and I'm close to drawing the line at four days a week. I always take at least three weeks off a year, and that's in a bad year. I take "mental health days" often and with no guilt. If you…

I am not sure. My biggest driver has been to be in my death bed and having done nothing, having made no difference to the world. So I keep trying.

I like to think that friends and family will look on my works and say "he was a creative man", but deep down I know that those words will only come from a few who already know how to appreciate it.

Therefore, I work to please that faceless few. I am happy with this, because it is nice to be appreciated, but at the same time I cannot help but feel that I am not building something meaningful in my more direct social circles.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#195

Post by _underfl0w_ »

claudeganon wrote: post #133
cpursley wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief, people. If you're wearing a mask while on a bike (distant from people) you're doing it wrong.

I don’t think this is true at all. I often wear a mask when it’s not entirely necessary, just to be on the safe side in case something happens or I encounter someone unexpectedly. Sure, I’ll almost always be fine in these circumstances, but the “cost” of wearing a mask is really nothing compared to the protection afforded me in the event of the unforeseen.

Absolutely cannot agree enough with this sentiment and I do the same out of what seems like basic cautionary instinct, though the sheer quantity of people (perhaps a loudly vocal minority) who seem to consider the particularly minor inconvenience of wearing a mask to be too high of a "cost" continues to surprise me.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#196

Post by _underfl0w_ »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #20
allenu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but because we're in a lockdown, a whole host of things that we'd normally have available to us are gone. Normally when people have time off, they can still meet up with friends, or hang out at the coffee shop, or go to a meetup or a conference. Now we're idle at home without much-needed social connections to grease the daily wheels.

Meetups and conferences are happening online now and it's actually pretty nice. For example, if the Julia Conference had not gone online this year, there's really no way I could've gone to Baltimore for most of a week to attend. But because it was online it was not only free, but also accessible. They had discord channels to hangout in as well as other ways to socially engage.

The most recent DefCon conference was held virtually and they referred to it as "safe mode" which I thought was a funny, poignant touch for a computer conference.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#197

Post by alexbanks »

eldavido wrote: post #185
tayo42 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing that so much of that movie is still relatable 20 years later to a whole new generation of workers. Except maybe the scene where he kicks down the cubicle, if I need to be in an office give me a cubicle or something lol

Yes. I'm genuinely surprised how timeless this is. You watch it today, in 2020, and it's shocking that it was made 20 years ago. This tells me that Judge and the other writers managed to latch on to some very timeless things. Not sure what they are, but they nailed it.

They latched onto the meaninglessness that is office work, combined with the obvious passive aggression and lack of respect that big companies have for their employees

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#198

Post by luckylion »

eldavido wrote: post #186
bmcn2020 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

highly agree > I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. Definitely speaking from a place of privilege. Single moms living in poverty don't have the luxury to care for her mental health. She probably can't take even a few days off, voluntarily, much rather months or years. Let me ask you (caymanjim), in the months and years you take off, how do you subsist? The average American has, wh…

This sentiment expresses something I'm starting to see a lot in our discourse. I call it "third-party outrage", where you (bystander) get mad because you think some "aggressor" did something bad to some hypothetical "victim". What cracks me up is that oftentimes, the victims don't even care or don't get nearly as mad as the bystandars. Same story with tech workers getting mad about how Amazon pays their employees. Is…

I don't think it's outrage, it's more so pointing out that "if you're poor and can't afford to renew the lease, just take a million or two out of your savings account and boom, you're wealthy" isn't good advice because it requires having a savings account with at least a few million in it.

And for anyone in that situation: how many of them are too poor to pay rent?

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#199

Post by perfunctory »

mettamage wrote: post #173
allenu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your attitude. How, if I may ask, did you end up with your current philosophy? Was it through past experiences where people did take your time and you gave in? I love the idea of taking lots of time off, but on a personal level I have a lot of guilt surrounding that. I know it's not rational since ultimately it's my life, but it's still something I need to work on to get over. If you have tips on changing my m…

I identify with his post. I always had a rebellious streak when it comes to people judging me. In return, I don’t judge other people myself. It also saves a lot of energy :) That’s how I don’t feel guilty. I am not doing anything and you can do whatever you want in life too. I find it tough to achieve though. I am currently at 4 days per week but would like to be at 3.5 days, that’s my optimum (lower than 3 days and…

> lower than 3 days and I will go insane of not exercising my mind

It's not like paid work is the only place where you can exercise your mind

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#200

Post by burntoutfire »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #164
spanhandler wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think Russell got this one wrong and Vonnegut got it right. Consuming-all, creating-none became normal because of mass media. Its availability drove down the social value of playing on an unremarkable, very-local sports team, or playing the piano unremarkably, or singing, or being pretty good at telling a story (but not as good as the radio), and so on. Know what you see references to all the time in previous…

I agree it is more about this kind of raising the bar than "lack of free time". I can't even stand watching college-level sports anymore because the quality of play is so low compared to getting the best 500 or 1000 people on the planet together in a professional league. That said, I think there's also room for a new kind of very-local active-not-passive activity to spring up. We already see the beginning of this wit…

The photos of Grand Canyon require literally no time investment into building a skill. I think this is about as much (i.e. zero) as most people are willing to invest into totally non-productive hobbies right now.

For instance, many people are still gardening - not only because they like it, but also because the product, a beautiful garden, makes the effort worth it for them. I doubt many people would still garden if we could just display an equivalent garden in their AR glasses - similarly to how almost no one plays the instrument now because we've got recordings of music.

Post reply on HN