Being more generous, I think a work patten more like a tour of duty in war may be desirable to encourage. Work hard in a high stress job for a period of time at the metaphorical frontline and then rest and recuperate.
Both can be awful.
Just because physical labour is physically tiring, it does not follow that mental labour might not be even more stressful.
I worked farm labour in my 20s and those were some of the best jobs I ever had.
Every meal was a banquet and I slept like a log. Potatoes tasted so good, it was as if I was eating ambrosia.
I also believe that the body and the mind need to be worked together.
The disembodied work typically done in offices is unbalanced, and can be very taxing.
When you live an easier life than 99% of humans, that's worth being grateful for.
Interestingly given the context of this thread, I think the attitude of always needing to be angry, always focusing on negatives, always demanding more, always blaming others and obsessing over grand injustices can itself tip some people into mental illness.
It's a memeplex thing, though. Constant rage at injustice is a great way for a memeplex to turn people into highly-motivated ideological soldiers. It's a technique used by demagogues from Stalin to Hitler to Castro and Kim, and which you see today as well. But the need to always emphasize that rage and injustice and resentment can definitely push some people over the edge. Gratefulness is a good antidote, in proportion with a balanced and contextualized understanding of the problems of the world.
Absolutely, and social media only amplifies these “oppression Olympics”.
There is nothing "easier" in feeling unhappy or angry. Mental illness is widespread across billionaires despite their wealth. It's also well known that mental illness is less common in traditional, less developed societies.
> ... I think the attitude of always needing to be angry ... can itself tip some people into mental illness.
No. People cannot artificially create mental illness in themselves by simply thinking "negatively". There is no simple self-destruct button in our mind: people need to go through (untreated) trauma, pressure, abuse from external sources or diseases or serious genetic conditions.
Here's a wiki on it. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
It's one of the purest most common logical fallacies used.
There is plenty of historical evidence that shows otherwise.
In most subsistence societies people, including farmers, worked far less than now and with less pressure, lived in a more social environment and had a lot of holidays (especially in the middle ages).
Not that it matters too much, but a holiday in the Middle Ages didn't mean the peasants didn't work, it just meant that they didn't eat meat. Otherwise it was work sun-up to sun-down 6 days a week for barely enough food to keep your family alive - that is provided there was not a harvest failure two years in a row.
You are more than welcome to start your own business with a more relaxed environment, but don’t be surprised when a company with a lower work/life balance puts you out of business.
That's why we're in this mess. We see these things as inevitabilities.
You know what that means? We don't control them. So we're going to create a bad situation for ourselves because businesses cannot pull out of a basic game theoretical problem? You think this is OK and not worth looking at? What is even your endgame here?
I don't have a good solution given the current economic system.
This quote from your earlier comment comes after you finish "describing the problem".
Taken together, the rhetorical effect is an expression of fatalism. Your formulation accepts the currently destructive state of affairs. It's disingenuous to say "all I am doing is describing the system".
You're describing the system and then subtly suggesting any attempt to improve matters is folly.
EDIT: Fix number agreement in first sentence.
[0]: https://www.deutsche-depressionshilfe.de/depression-infos-un...
Not to diminish burnout, but claiming that the industry has a problem is just incorrect. Some employers might have a problem — but employers in all industries have problems. The best industry in the world has shitty employers and the worst industry in the world has great employers.
Any normal working class person would laugh at this. It’s like first class travelers complaining about quality of the champagne at the airport lounge. We are immensely lucky to get to do this job. I get close to burnout from time to time, but then I remember what it was like before I got into this industry when I got evicted and slept in my car while DJing at dirty strip clubs just to be able to afford food. I would have given anything for the chance to burnout sitting in an Aeron working with all this incredible technology.
Perspective.
From what I've seen, people have a limited... chain...? Regardless of how "good" their situation is. Some people shoot for "luxury" jobs because they know they won't survive otherwise. It doesn't really make their situation "good", and I see absolutely nothing gained from "it could be worse".
Do we all want to be like refinery workers?
If a person burnt out at an office job ends up committing suicide, while the refiner worker is just mad at life, it raises questions.
Doctors really are committing suicide, but it’s still better than landscaping, so do you just laugh?
I've had to deal with vindictive bosses, black fridays, rush hours, sweltering buildings, running all over the factories and buildings, jerk customers, bad press, and all sorts of other crap I've long since forgotten about.
But I've never had anywhere near as much stress in any of those as I have as I have as a software engineer. When you have 10+ different people hounding you to do different things, have tasks in 6 different programs this iteration while having to juggle tasks by other developers, when an architect thought something would take 8 hours but neglected to take into account five different complicating factors and it ends up taking you a full week with increased pressure placed on you to get the damn thing working, when there's a totally esoteric error that you and everyone else in the company or on the internet has no idea how to identify, let alone fix, but you're expected to figure it out anyway. Or figuring out how to get 12+ different technologies (frameworks/languages/platforms) to play nice together all at once, etc.
I'm sure there are other industries that have similar issues, but, software engineering is a more unique than most, because you can work around the fuzziness of people in just about every other industry. With computers if you don't get the incantation exactly right, the computer will not work with you, period. It just won't work, until you eventually find a way that it does.
I still enjoy the logic puzzle to a certain extent, but the shine of the industry is starting to go away and I'm tired of being stressed out all the time, to the point where I pretty much have to take three months off in between jobs just to feel sane again. I've been working my current job for the past three years and I'm pretty much fried. Every day I have to fight the urge to quit, remind myself I can't afford to do that right now.
I’ve done manual labor and dead-end fast food service work, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I currently find myself gainfully employed in a comfortable office.