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The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

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Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#271

Post by rosege »

osrec wrote: post #24

Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long…

Your comment strikes a chord with me. Similar to the saying that someone reminded me of the other day, we spend huge amounts of time working to afford a house and then we are hardly ever there. I'm working on breaking out of it too - my idea is to move to somewhere with a much lower cost of living (im currently in one of the most expensive places) and then shifting to working 2-3 days per week, hopefully I can still do that for my current employer while in my spare time build up a few side gigs which I will eventually shift to.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#272

Post by some_account »

smattiso wrote: post #225
mathgladiator wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You captured a core reason that I picked up wood working: projects finish. An annoying aspect of software is that it takes a life of its own. It is never done, but there are feature requests, bugs, and updates. You make a table, and that is it. It's done. Sure, you have to clean it, but mostly it will last a while until it breaks down.

This is why I wish I had gotten into video game development rather than app development. Once the game is finished it is (for the most part) complete.

Are you being sarcastic? The game industry is the hardest and most miserable. Surely you haven't missed that.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#273

Post by mathgladiator »

stephenhuey wrote: post #235
mathgladiator wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose not to have kids. Was a great call becauses kids are like 1,000,000 each (when you factor in investment returns).

The ROI for a child is priceless. :)

I got goats; I think they are a better deal. ;)

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#274

Post by mathgladiator »

watwut wrote: post #255
mathgladiator wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many animals, every day is a fight to live. Constantly looking for food.

Cats sleep 16 hours a day for example. Animals in nature are not constantly looking for food, except grass eaters who ear whole day.

True. That is also because digestion for them is wonky (IIRC).

However, they are a predator. Look at mice or other small creatures, and you realize their entire existence is the search for food.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#275

Post by notabee »

ghettoimp wrote: post #173
dizzystar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are so fortunate to only have to work a 9to5, there is no excuse to waste these years. How many musicians do you know that play in clubs? Most are working two restaurant jobs, renting a room, and scraping money together to buy strings, just for the chance to entertain a crowd for little or no pay. It's all perspective, really.

“Only” work 9 to 5? Don’t forget your commute. And you’ll still need your wife to get the kids to school and pick them up. Hope you earn enough for that and she’s happy st home. And you should help out with dinner and the lunches and homework. And when you get the kids to bed it’s 8 and you’re exhausted. Enjoy your weekend.

A household with a single income? Laughs in Millennial

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#276

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

slphil wrote: post #259
JDiculous wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually false. The average American worker today works more hours per year than a 14th century peasant ( http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie... ). Hunter-gatherers only worked 2-3 hours per day. Despite technology allowing us to work less, we work more. Yes we should be grateful of technological advancement, but too many people are unnecessarily depressed and suicidal, and it doesn't…

To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us. Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is fals…

While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually study then is through archeological records from before the birth of cities, which are unfortunately limited in what they can say.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#277

Post by some_account »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #62
osrec wrote: post #24

Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long…

I find this idea bizarre. It's like humans enjoyed their time for millennia and only now we have to work. For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live. It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricit…

The article criticizes American work culture for very good reasons. Of course we should work and have jobs, but that doesn't mean work needs to be like it is in America.

Do you guys in America even know how it is in Sweden for example? We don't have this competitive culture, and companies are trying hard to make their employees feel good at work. Nobody really works full 8 hours at big companies and nobody is stressed very much. Bosses never blame anyone directly for anything since it's not allowed, culture wise. People are very relaxed.

When I read about American culture, it seems insane.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#278

Post by jasonkester »

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere.

I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach.

To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world.

20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back.

You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#279

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

pascalxus wrote: post #88
remar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you're aware of this, but a lot of people just don't have the financial freedom to even begin thinking about a decision like this, or it ends up requiring a lot of energy to make that plan viable. And as you've probably experienced, energy is not exactly abundant after a day/week/month/etc in an environment like that...

With the right financial planning, it can be done. But, if you've already taken on 20K in student loans and 5 year cell phone contract, it's gonna be much much harder. That's why we need to start teach financial education really early: like K-12. Food and water can be quite cheap: the grocery stores are filled with healthy foods you can get for less than 1$ per lb in most of the US: corn, whole wheat flour, bananas,…

Everything you say proves your privilege. If you work a minimum wage job there is no way you can put aside 20k in a few years. Taking on student loans is necessary for many to even get a degree to have a chance at a decent job. And poor people usually are excellent at managing resources, yet you go "poor people just lack character", while what they lack is money, which is stolen by a small group of people at the top because they are a bunch of vampires sucking the life out of everything.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#280

Post by bambax »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #62
osrec wrote: post #24

Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long…

I find this idea bizarre. It's like humans enjoyed their time for millennia and only now we have to work. For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live. It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricit…

Past societies had classes, so conditions were very different depending on the class you belonged to. If you were a Roman patriarch you were expected not to work at all. Same if you were a 17th century French aristocrat.

The promise of the modern society was that everyone being "equal", we would all become aristocrats. In fact we all became slaves.

(And of course, hunters gatherers lived, to the best of our knowledge, in classless groups where each individual worked very little each day).

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