The problem is that people don't know how to use their free time, and so it ends up spent getting high and watching TV. Maybe people would be better at exploiting the time they have if they were allowed free time earlier in life. Kids are pretty good at taking advantage of the time they have, maybe if they were allowed to keep more freedom through to adulthood they'd keep the skill. Maybe if our non-free time weren't so stressful we wouldn't feel the need to use our free time just to unwind. Or maybe its that entertainment has gotten too compelling. I'd rather not believe that people have an innate need to be forced to do whatever they do.
I think our 19th-century-style schools are the problem: we drum information and behaviours into kids until they forget how to be independent. All this time wasted sitting at a desk in a classroom means they might miss out on the chance to develop a passion for something, something that they would fill their free time with later in life. And then we're surprised that people just want to watch netflix.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
No amount of time spent with friends is "really unproductive", it literally keeps us alive. I didn't see a note about it in this article, but I suspect that the no-income people that are happier with their lives are doing low cost entertainment activities with friends.
The implication of the statement "Humans absolutely need jobs in order to lead happy, beneficial lives" is that humans are, by their very nature, to stupid to figure out how to do it by themselves.
I very strongly believe it's a cultural problem, not a human problem.
I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
A retired mechanical engineer spends his time making videos of mechanical linkages in CAD. He's was at 1700 a year ago, hard to say how many he's at now, he's still releasing them. This is what technological progress looks like I think, in a couple of years this will be shown in just about any intro class into the subject and it will reduce the learning time by like, i don't even know, 100x? 1000x? Idk how these were described before but boy do they seem hard to describe in anything but animation.
I'm also having a hard time imagining his brain isn't getting exercised just fine.
I'm not a mechanical engineer and I spent like good 15-20 minutes watching them and getting quite a bit out of it.
Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.
My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.
On the health issue - most of the studies I've seen cap the health benefits of working at a few hours a week. Volunteering for an hour a day seems to be just as beneficial as spending most of your waking hours on an office job.
I spent just as much unemployed time between jobs both times (about 6 weeks), but the second time around was worlds better. I wasn't working full time, I had plenty of leisure time, but instead of using that time sitting around watching TV and wallowing, I had lunch with friends, I studied in cafes, after volunteering I took walks around the city, I went to bookstores -- it was awesome! I actually miss being unemployed. Having a "thing" you have to do during the day, instead of a vast blank schedule is an amazing psychological boost.
You get the feeling that in years past, the ZMP would have been given some measure of slack, and allowed to work their way into a more productive status. But that's what's changed. I think there's been a cultural shift - look at the relatively unpleasant reports on how peoples jobs are now. Plus, unemployment ( especially if you're of an age to live with parents in their McMansion or even your old bedroom in a more modest home ) is a lot more comfortable than it used to be.
There's been a long-term trend towards advancing the age at which people join the workforce. People had moral reservations about the abolition of child labor - after all, it had worked out okay for them. It's only when unemployment began to be a more palpable problem that the mores concerning child labor shifted. Even then, my own father was pressed into service as farm labor as recently as the 1940s. This was standard.
As production has become less and less labor intensive, the workplace becomes more and more about social signalling. And as the population of firms becomes increasingly about maintaining old guard products and services and less about actually advancing the footprint of the firm from within ( with low cost financing enabling M&A activity instead ) firms are rapidly shedding workers. You don't even need offshoring or Chinese production to explain this. All you need is the Jack Welch "neutron bomb" effect.
We see increasingly ambitious tech efforts, not the sort of thing a half dozen people can do in a year or two, to sell for a few million.
But mainly, as the workplace becomes overtly inhospitable and the cost of slacking goes down, the equilibrium shifts.
"And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to"
There is a sense in which being "productive" implies creating value, i.e., producing more value than you consume. If you restrict yourself to the realm of money, then being productive generally involves profit (e.g., producing something that gives net increase in monetary value over consumption costs). But if some person with leisure values things that other people generally don't want to pay money for (e.g., writing poetry), their leisure time can be productive (producing poetry) while they're purely an economic consumer (making no money, but spending money to live).
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming
I would also agree that a person having some leisure that is "just passively consuming" is fine, maybe even good. But I'm pretty sure it's bad if _all_ of a person's leisure is "just passively consuming", at least if they have a decent amount of leisure (if you're working 80 hour weeks then it's probably not bad at all to have your leisure time all be passive consumption).
It's not really a hard-and-fast rule, but I suspect in many cases that leisurely-but-productive activities have output that is only nominally productive, like, I don't know, amateur painting, dime novels, learning a couple chords on guitar.
Really economically valuable output usually seems to require concerted work, which (even if fun) most don't think of as leisurely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524448
It's hard work being a human being.
The brain is good at what you practice it doing. I very much hope that I wouldn't need to be as mentally active as I am right now when I retire.
and this is your explicit assumption and also needs justification. a better source than a fluff piece in a daily newspaper would be helpful too.
"productive" is a really loaded and problematic word to use here. why is "production" the moral underpinnings of the good life? surely a healthy person might find fulfillment in any number of different activities regardless of their impact on GDP.
I would study philosophy if I could afford it. Travel a lot. Go swimming more so my back would not be such a mess and so on.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be bad for my brain.
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...