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I like being busy, but I like having agency over how I am busy. I don’t want to be “busy” because I have a bunch of arbitrary and meaningless paperwork to turn in that my boss won’t even read, but I like being “busy” in that I’m happy to spend my time doing things that have an immediate impact.
Give me a 12 hour day cleaning up a homeless shelter over paperwork.
Long live the 4-day work week.
I mean, it'll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
Those fuckers want an eight day week.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
Joke's* on you
(The joke is on you.)
It's not that we're too busy. It's that we're too busy without purpose. What's the point of being busy when it doesn't proportionately translate to having our needs met?
We have more abundance than ever before in all of human history, and yet we work harder than hunter-gatherers just to feed ourselves, and we have less leisure time than they did. We work more hours per day and have fewer days off per year than medieval serfs. And for what? What's the purpose? So some asshole who was born on third base can buy another mansion?
Thats our monetary policy. People must consume more every year to create more inflation, as technology actively reduces the price of goods.
If goods get cheaper we have deflation, they create more money supply via lower interest rates, and the price of inelastic shelter gets bid up, and asset holders receive a value windfall until prices rise. Which is why we are at a higher price to income ratio than 2007.
People born closer to the gold standard are richer, they got in when currency wasnt tethered to consumption.
Exactly! I work in a group home, so my work is very easy, but I want to go into IT, so I can actually go into a field I love
Preach.
There is no reason why taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens. But if everone no longer had to worry about survival, no one would put up with corporate abuse from rich cunts and plus if they'd paid their fair share of taxes and couldn't just steal tax money to gamble with, they'd never be as filthy rich as they are to begin with.
What you describe is more or less the Nordic economic model, except the basic income. Corporate abuse is low, because it is not unthinkable to "not work" in response to such abuse, but also because unions are strong. Nevertheless, a lot of people still work a lot, so it doesn't completely change the work/life balance oddity op is posting about.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens
Well that's how it's done in most rich and even some poor countries. So I assume you are talking about the US which is indeed in a terrible situation with human rights for it's wealth. And sadly voting red/blue won't ever change it.
Not the basic living income part, at least not anymore.
There is Social Security but it's generally pretty miserable and nowadays not even enough to pay for rent (thanks to insane housing inflation all over the place) plus most supposedly developed countries haven't been building much social housing in the last couple of decades (which is partly why the house price inflation is insane - less state built housing means less Supply but the Demand for new living places is still roughly the same).
Neoliberalism has been exported from the US to even the most Developed nations out there and that's definitelly screwed up the Social Safety net (also Healthcare, even in countries without a national health service, as well as in some cases the quality of Education).
Also even when things were at their best, there was always this coverage gap for the lower end of the working class: the poor were the ones helped by the social safety net and above a certain income point which was in the area of blue collar work, people could live a pretty decent life from working, but there was a segment of the working class with people having to work shit jobs, juggling multiple jobs and so one just to make ends meet and were the help from social security wasn't enough.
Even in the best countries this gap has been made much worse by decades of Neoliberalism, both by shrinking even further down the social safety net coverage (to just the trully miserable) and because on the upside income growth didn't keep up with price growth so even parts of the middle class now have to work shit jobs and count their pennies to the end of the month.
I'm currently unemployed, and I was not expecting to be so busy. I thought I would have a little more leisure time, might be able to catch up on a few things that I never seemed to have time for, like catching up with family, playing some video games in my back log, and doing a small bit of travel. That hasn't materialized. It's like as soon as I stopped "working", more things came up that needed my attention. I'm basically busy from the time I get up in the morning until I wrap up for the night and veg out in front of the TV for an hour before bed. I swear I had more me time when I was working. Not sure how this happened.
Would you mind sharing what kinds of things are taking up your time?
This is common, it's because there was a huge backlog of things you just never got around to doing because you didn't have enough time. When you're working you prioritize some relaxing time because you have to go back to work soon. Now you have to do all the tasks you've stored up.
yea, "unpopular" because we're all indoctrinated from preschool onward that it's "natural" to be yanked out of sleep by an alarm, bust our asses to show up at work, move on to things at the sound of a bell for all the daylight hours, then get minimal, if any, sleep in order to do it all over again tomorrow. god forbid you get an opportunity for a nap in the middle of the day
thank the industrial revolution: slavery dressed up in "freedom and opportunity" -- same as the other familiar phrase "arbeit macht frei"
you exist to generate value for your owners. that's it.
I worked 55+ hours a week for years. During the pandemic I became a stay at home mom. I suddenly, never sped while driving and any road rage tendencies vanished, nearly overnight.
While I feel quite isolated and lonely sometimes, as everyone I know works and are busy all the time, I can't stress enough how much of a change my driving habits went through when I was no longer in "workmode".
I used to break an average of 3 traffic laws every morning getting to my 6am shift. Then, the rush to just.get.home.
To a point now, I don't like driving during rush hours, or shopping after the work crews get off. 10am on a weekday at the grocery store? Everyone is pleasant and polite."excuse me" I say, and we have a polite interchange. I'll give a compliment to a womans dress, and I've passed some good on to a fellow human, sometimes I even receive compliments from the little old ladies, I've learned from them after all.
If I go to the shop after 4pm or on a weekend? I can feel folks souls have been ripped out and stomped on, knowing what they feel.. I say excuse me as i have to scoot pass their cart, and I don't even get a response just a glare. Then I return home sad.
It's extremely unpopular in the American business world. This world is so fucked up on so many levels. People wonder how things can be so bad over here... This is a big piece of that puzzle, along with our terrible and underfunded education system, and our lack of affordable healthcare.
Just these three things are bad enough, but then there are so, so many more problems. The United States is a gilded dumpster fire we've somehow been convincing the world is a beacon of prosperity.
Yeah this is one of the reasons labor needs to organize.
There's one boss telling 500 workers that they all need to work themselves to death? Fuck that. We outnumber him. We could be productive without burnout and things could be fine.
Unfortunately there is a pyramid scheme in place filled with fools that think they can become that one and are willing to fight against those "beneath" them.
Under the table were the fatcats are sharing slices of the cake, squirrel the little mice living of the crumbs that fall down, and once in a while one of the mice catches a bigger crumb, proudly raises it above its head and shouts: "See, the System works!"
For anyone else reading this: you could be the one to make that change, and gain you and your coworkers better pay and time off.
Seriously consider joining the IWW. They'll train you on how to organize your coworkers and form a grassroots union, no matter what your job is.
I think about this a lot. We have essentially, purely through accident tbh, created a society that we are evolutionary unprepared to live in. So much of our typical day to day is actually horrible for our bodies and often antithetical to their good function.
In a strange way, it's almost incredible. We have invented a rock that we cannot lift.
Eh, agreed except it’s no accident. A small group of people have managed to convince everyone else to do all the lifting in exchange for crumbs and little green pieces of paper. We have allowed ourselves to become our own worst enemy rather than unite and explore the stars
Competition is good for a lot of things, but it also becomes a day-to-day race to the bottom that rewards whoever is willing to sacrifice more of their life for the sake of their job than others.
The logical consequence is exactly this: we back ourselves into an increasingly uncomfortable corner that leaves less room for living than we could easily enjoy with our current technology.
I don't think it's the level of busy - for most of human history mere survival took a lot more time than it would take us today if we worked directly on actual survival. The problem is that we do the survival by working on too much irrelevant shit that enriches other people, who keep making our share less and less.
From historical anthropology and studying modern hunter gatherer groups, I believe the current consensus is that these people work or worked between 20-30 hours a week. Please correct me if there is more recent information.
By golly you're right, the consensus is that people in simple foraging societies worked about 6.5 hrs/day. Scholars seem to believe medieval peasants worked more like 8-16 hrs/day, depending on how long daylight lasted - but taking frequent rest breaks, festivals and other holidays.
The key part is that there was a massive amount of plant and animal life, so there was plenty to forage. Like 80% of all life compared to 10k years ago is dead now and we just have scraps left now.
You can't just state facts and then call it an unpopular opinion for likes
It's only unpopular for the 1% extracting wealth from the 99%
Sort of, but there really are huge swaths of Americans that grew up learning about "work ethic," putting in those extra hours, etc... I still struggle to turn it off sometimes myself. And then have to learn over and over and over again that "put in extra unpaid work and it'll pay off" is horseshit every single fucking time and I'm a fucking idiot.
I think this is accurate. We may be the most "intelligent" animal on this planet, but we're still animals. We've been pulled out of a natural order and forced into systems the worst of us came up with to keep said worst ones happy. At the exact same time we also have the capacity and potential to make this planet a habitable, utopia for all creatures, but those systems, man...
I'm so tired of working. I just want to live modestly in a bought off house but the ever inflating cost of living will make it an impossible dream.
I retired from my software developer job right before COVID hit, bought a very small (and very inexpensive) fixer-upper house for cash, and started driving a school bus. I make like 1/5 as much as I used to and I'm as happy as I've ever been in my life. I work less than five hours a day and I have a big break between my morning and afternoon runs so I can ride my bike, have a leisurely lunch and a nice nap in the middle of my day. If the school board would just take my suggestion to send all the middle-schoolers to the Antarctic for three years, my life would be perfect.
Humans used to have a much more direct connection between what they did and their survival. Gather enough food and you won't starve. Keep an eye out for other tribes/clans/families competing for the same resources and you don't get killed. Processing TPS reports all day doesn't seem like it does much of anything even though it gives you money. We've lost the connection and our brains can't handle it.