by anirudhgarg on 6/30/21, 4:38 AM with 62 comments
by cirrus3 on 6/30/21, 5:26 AM
It starts off with:
> Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?
Uh, well, for starters, 15 hours is apparently what it took to survive and live a comparatively successful lifestyle back then, a lifestyle that really only involved SURVIVING to see the next day.
Dial that up to what it takes to live a comparatively successful lifestyle now and you know the reasons, article done.
The whole "15 hours" thing is misleading considering that in the modern world where we're not all on the same playing field anymore (for a lot of disturbing underlying reasons) and just fighting for survival is no longer the common experience or goal, and again, lots of easy reasons.
I did not read this whole thing but the premise and title seems to ignore so many obvious reasons out of the gate that it didn't seem worth it. Maybe they got down stating some obvious reasons, but I may never know... starting off with a click-bait title and intro lost my interest asap.
If you want to comment "but hey, you never said what those easy reasons are!! provide links!!" then you are probably part of the problem.
by Blackstone4 on 6/30/21, 5:29 AM
by iamnotwhoiam on 6/30/21, 5:52 AM
If you can get away with it then try working a little less and see what happens.
My life is so much better now that I work an intensely focused 4-hour day. When I am working, I turn on a timer. When the timer is on, I try very hard to not get distracted. When I do get distracted, I turn the timer off. When that timer reaches 4 hours, I'm done for the day.
I don't count meetings in the 4 hours, but I am blessed to not have very many of them. I also work from home, so no one knows what hours I'm actually on.
I've picked up new hobbies, I'm more devoted to my family, I cook more and my career continues flourishing.
I wish everyone could work like this. Maybe I'm taking advantage, but I seem to be providing at least as much product as I was before plus avoiding burnout and taking pride in the fact that my real salary is nearly twice what it is on paper.
by oars on 6/30/21, 5:23 AM
For many of us, working provides our lives with structure, and a purpose that we're able to pursue.
I don't know what I'd do with all the additional spare time I have without my job. My kids wouldn't be at home because they're at school. I already have enough time for my hobbies on weekends and when my kids go to sleep.
by trixie_ on 6/30/21, 5:18 AM
It's because just like the rest of us - it's what we do. We don't know how not to work without feeling like we should be doing something 'productive'. It's more cultural than anything else.
by baggy_trough on 6/30/21, 5:11 AM
I don't understand the "despite" in the above sentence. The more they would work to meet their material needs, the less impoverished they would become, no?
by likecarter on 6/30/21, 5:16 AM
by cirrus3 on 6/30/21, 5:38 AM
> as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.
> You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.
by nobody0 on 6/30/21, 5:40 AM
When you finally stop, you are about to admit maybe painstakingly your own exsistence.
by prawn on 6/30/21, 5:40 AM
by amarshall on 6/30/21, 4:53 AM
by chaps on 6/30/21, 6:42 AM
Part of my job there was to add tests into ansible to make sure that the devs' installer could do what it was designed to do. But.. every time I tried to push anything, I would be given absolutely nonsense reasons for why my code wasn't acceptable. The worst instance was an ansible config getting rejected by a dev because I used bash in the ansible deploy code and that "not all clients' hosts will have bash" (in spite of a contractual requirement for bash to be installed). He insisted that I call /usr/bin/python instead. It was infuriating. I ended up writing my own automation that would install on an arbitrary set of hosts using the company's existing automation infrastructure just so that I wouldn't have to manually ssh into hosts or deal with the devs' nonsense. It worked well!
Anywho, the point. With the devs being asininely critical of my code, my boss eventually had a talk with me, saying that my performance wasn't great and that I wasn't pushing any code. I disagreed, but gave up, said fuck it, wrote four lines of "passable" ansible configs, then watched youtube for the rest of the week. At the end of the week, my boss told me that my performance was much, much better and that I should keep it up. So until I quit, I did as little work as I could.
Seriously.. sometimes it just really doesn't make sense to go above and beyond.
(Soon after, a major client complained that our packages weren't running on any of their hosts, right before a major event of theirs. The devs' automation just didn't work for AWS hosts, despite a large percent of our clients using it. So I wrote my own automation that just used selenium, which worked well enough to get things installed before the event. Afterwards, I was told that I had too much access, and that if I ever went to the press about the issues we had, that all of my coworkers would be fired once the client sued. Good times.)
by tehjoker on 6/30/21, 5:08 AM
by jordhy on 6/30/21, 5:04 AM
by refurb on 6/30/21, 5:00 AM