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

Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

nber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 395 posts

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#311

Post by WalterBright »

aaarrm wrote: post #214
Aurornis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can…

Jobs that you want to do vs jobs that you have to do are entirely different levels of motivating and result in completely different energy levels for people. If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout. Having more free time, yes pe…

Fortunately, there is an immense variety of jobs to choose from.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#312

Post by scottgg »

deepspace wrote: post #61
cableshaft wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it. But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life. But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat compli…

I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID. But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa af…

I can see that this _could_ happen, but I've had the opposite experience; I spend an hour or 2 every day outside exercising, I knock off at a sensible hour to play with the kids, I have lunch with the wife & kids on days that they aren't at school/work.

I do miss the corporate banter a bit, but organise social events with colleagues in the nearest city periodically that helps.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#313

Post by boringg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #132
ElevenLathe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.

> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities. We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

Irrelevant comparison. Completely apples to oranges existence. Its almost as if is a different species if you take in education, culture, health, food, society, knowledge etc.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#314

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #310
globalnode wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of t…

> its all about class struggle That's the foundation of Marxist theory. In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.

[deleted]

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#315

Post by fuzzfactor »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #187
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities. We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off. Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering. Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today... Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.

>Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.

Depeds on if they were the ones who had arrived in the land of abundance or not :)

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#317

Post by fuzzfactor »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
qwerpy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours. Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more…

> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement). The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate. Then they get to retirement and realize that…

>doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.

OTOH some have a lot of money.

They work their butts off as far up as they can in a place like a NY bank, then retire, early or not and join the yachting community :)

Sooner or later they find out that a one-day fishing trip is more work than a whole week of employment was, and they need more than a week to recover.

So you end up with a yachting community with most of the vessels just sitting there most of the time :\

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#318

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

bregma wrote: post #284
wiseowise wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority. You lock people for decades in the madhouse which lea…

> Did I just described rich kids? You just described Lord Of The Flies. Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.

True mindfulness is to know when the machine breaks, why it breaks and to recognize known flaws of the machine, for example to assume that all others are automatons running on low-energy heuristics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#319

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

Aurornis wrote: post #181
spartanatreyu wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest. I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks…

> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years. There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients re…

I think those that would start a business, self-select themselves out of any crowd that would receive UBI before the experiment.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#320

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

WalterBright wrote: post #310
globalnode wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of t…

> its all about class struggle That's the foundation of Marxist theory. In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.

Marxims is such a lazy evaluation system. Discarding culture altogether, refusing analysis of religion, its basically a Proof Of Non work, when it comes to sociology and analysis
Post reply on HN