I disagree. That only makes sense if you assume you (and everyone like you) are politically powerless and the rot and decay are inevitable.
There's also another option: redirect that excess effort you're expediting to hoard for the failure into fixing the system before it fails. Your personal efforts to fix it might fail, but some other group that heeded the same call might succeed, and that's all it takes.
Hoarding wealth might seem like a safer bet, but it's just as prone to failure. The kind of wealth you could accumulate through hard work might not be enough to give you the security you want, and to get more you have to take big risks anyway.
We need a way for improving things where, when a community improves its own space, the gains don't immediately get privatized.
Other public infrastructure issues could be lack of cheap, affordable internet access, clean water, and health care.
Go down to Figure 53 of this: http://www.nzchildren.co.nz which shows only 1/3 of the poorest 20% attain a high enough level of education to even enter university, while 3/4 of the richest 20% do (the relation is fairly linear for the rest).
Financing the education of children with poor parents helps, it just doesn't equalise on average. Of course it does help a few outlier children a lot.
In NZ we add extra subsidies to schools with poor parents through a system of deciles - but it doesn't offset the difference that much.
I think the idea with funding education more equitably is to remove existing barriers that are created by policy, not about creating totally equal outcomes.
I think that's the trap: you can't work yourself to the bone then have energy to work more to be active in your community, volunteer, run for office, pester politicians with letters, etc. Those are the kind of activities that I think could avoid the decay and perhaps even lead to some improvement.
I think it's a mistake to view "donating money" as meaningful response to many current social problems. Many of them are caused or propped up by people with more money than you could ever dream of having. Thinking that mere donations can win is like thinking a group insurgents could win in a stand-up direct fight against the US Army. The insurgents have different advantages than the US Army, and if they're smart, they'll use them rather than futilely attempting to reach parity with the US Army's strengths.
There's definitely some minimum amount of donations that will be required to really change things, but at a certain point I think the returns diminish.
I think it's a mistake to view "donating" as
meaningful response to many current social problems.
A guy on minimum wage can ladle out soup at a soup kitchen every bit as well as I can.
But can he convince my elected representatives that I care about soup kitchens? Or make soup kitchen users into my personal friends? Not so much.
Keeping people busy with real or artificial work is extremely common in dictatorships.
Not sure if this counts but this image of a soldier mopping in the rain comes to mind.
They all disliked unemployed people and often forced them into work or in the military, loathed artists and writers that were able to work independently. They glorified "work for work's sake".
Created work artificially through gargantuan public works, bureaucracy and... war - the ultimate instrument to keep people busy and give them a common purpose.
Another approach is to build security through self sufficiency and community based initiatives. For example, growing your own food wherever possible, or community gardens on common land.
There is a long list of examples and ideas where future security, defining that as decent quality of life, health and education, doesn't need to be based around monetary wealth.
Growing your own food is work; where is the retirement plan? What if you're not able? Even if you are, many people want to do things other than farming when they retire.
It feels like the ultimate defeat: what have I achieved in this lifetime of work, when I'm reduced to land-to-mouth existence, like an ancestor tens of thousands of years before me? Where is the progress?
Theft is a problem in community gardens. If you just grow enough to sustain yourself and someone steals your produce, you're back to fucked.
There are simply too many of us to revert back to an agrarian society. We have to create food at a very large scale. Which means we have to become better at sharing it.
Like it or not we're all in it together and we're doing kind of a sucky job of it right now.
Healthcare and education are areas where a common option could make a major difference in people's lives. But I think the "community" has to be pretty large to make a meaningful impact.
Hunger is further down Maslow's pyramid. You can't even begin thinking about things like education until you are able to adequately eat.
We face many problems, to be sure, but this is nothing new.
For that matter, many of my non-tech friends (in their 40s) are already only one health crisis away from being homeless. I only have two couches and they all can't stay with me. I am doing relatively well and even I feel the pressure to overwork and "make hay while the sun shines", so maybe I can help support them when they need it.
It doesn't matter what the data says, the feeling that our society is crumbling is palpable, and that is what drives this overwork.
There is an interesting conflict of interest buried in there, "someone" who is benefiting from your work figures out that if you "believe" that society is crumbling, you will work harder (which generates them more benefit), and so they arrange it so that in spite of the data to the contrary you are left feeling that society is crumbling.
Even the most intelligent and rational person will take action against their own self interest if they believe that such action is necessary. You can see that principle in action all too often today as people get caught up in a conspiracy theory and then decide to take action on their own.
However:
1) I have seen it become commonplace to have several generations of a family living in the same house.
2) I have seen my grandparents struggle to afford prescriptions even with 2 pensions and social security.
3) I have seen a sibling fall into poverty despite making bi-weekly efforts to establish an emergency fund. A totaled car was all it took despite full coverage.
4) I have been a part of the crowd commuting 4+ hours round-trip a day to jobs they can't move closer to.
It definitely feels as though institutions are failing us. I don't think social security will fail, but I do think they'll move the goal post on when we can retire.
There are conspiracies and there's anecdote..
Also the perceived society crumbling is self-imposed. Raging culture wars, terrorism as an excuse for totalitarian paranoia, freely accessible firearms, school shootings, obesity epidemic, trade tariffs, monopolistic corporations lobbying for laws, ecological disasters.
Frankly, I'm happy with my European backwater if the cost of getting off well after WW2 would be the list above. No wonder the US collectively is stressed out to the extreme.
This is true for people all across the board: blue-collar workers, office workers, and doctors.
When they don't get a commensurate benefit form extra work, they won't do it. If there are societies sliding downward it is because they are extracting too much wealth from the people who produce it. Among other things, just eliminating rent seeking would be a boon.
Given that the US is wealthier than most of Europe and yet people work much longer hours with little worker protection, people could could demand much better.
When I was in advertising, stories of people working and staying (as in sleeping over) during the weekends was not uncommon. Clients would call me at 11pm asking for a concall with my staff. 12 hours a day for weeks on end, including working weekends, were common place.
We were able to hire great talent just by promising that we'd never ask our staff to work weekends and hardly ever after 7pm on a workday. We had mostly US clients so that was an easy thing for us to day.
This culture shifted a bit when stories of young agency people in Hong Kong and other Asian cities dying from exhaustion became a big deal 4-5 years ago. But its still very workaholic culture.
Don't get me wrong, Americans work insane hours compared to Indonesians or the French, but parts of Asia is a whole other level of madness.
Our customers don't try to micromanage as long as we're getting results. I think our approach to work just comes down to me setting the tone. I was very lucky to have a teacher all the way back in elementary school who drilled the "Work smarter, not harder" mentality into my head from an early age.
And I've maintained 100% ownership of my company, therefore I exert the main influence over the culture. The way we do things works so I have no desire to change it.
If you can't compete with others at school, in the workplace, or as a business based on intellectual superiority the gap has to be made up somewhere. Usually that leads to hard work and then a vicious cycle.
In other words it comes down to good management -- this is just my pet theory, but as a ruminating introvert, when I did live and work in the US I felt that I witnessed a lot of extroverts get promoted into positions of authority because they were popular, and proceed to make poor decisions.
It's pretty similar in London (UK), for example.
Here, it's about the fact that most people are hilariously, almost comically underpaid.
The cheapest 1 bedroom flat I can find within an hour of the centre is going to be in the ballpark of 200K.
So if you don't have established wealth, or earn at least 50K (4x mortgage), you're a prole.
Unsurprisingly, people don't want to be proles, so they work their bollocks off to get out of that category.
For Americans, I imagine NYC or LA is similar. The traffic alone would keep me out of LA.
For example, in Clermont-Ferrand, which is roughly to Paris what Albany is in NYC, there is a well-established tram system that can get you to many places you'd want to go to without a car. This is especially essential if you're low income. Albany in contrast, just has buses (the CDTA), and pretty crap buses at that. The only other city in New York State with anything even remotely approaching the utility of the subway system is the light rail system in Buffalo, which is mostly useless since it only comprises one marginally useful line.
Believe me, as someone not involved in finance in NYC, if I could get the same services I get here in a mid-sized city like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or Buffalo, I'd strongly consider relocation.
Strongly disagree with this. It might be better than the US, but to call it "decent" I think is a bit of a stretch.
Most journeys, in most cities, will be 3x faster by car or more. The exception is usually rush hour commuting into the city centre.
In my hometown for example the buses used to run on a 20 minute timetable in the middle of the day. I could cycle or drive into the city before the bus even arrived.
Inner city London is the exception. In the suburbs public transport is mostly useful for going in to Central London.
Underpaid compared to what? To what they might earn elsewhere? To the cost of buying a house or flat?
I live in an region where the population density is at least 50 times less than that of greater London. We have few Michelin-starred restaurants, a distinct lack of opera houses, and no top-ranked universities. I'm not bothered in the slightest.
Living in London (or NYC, or the Bay Area) is, just like so many other things in life, a choice.
Of course now the industry is digital there are a lot of people out of water and don't really get the internet an di am talking about people decades younger than me.
1) Working 40 hours a week does not support my long-term goals (house fund, retirement, vacations, etc). Which is another way of saying my job doesn't pay enough.
2) Companies will gladly have someone perform the work of 3 people and replace them when they burn out. It is rarely in the budget to increase staff with additional work (hah).
I only wish I had done it even sooner!
"Hustle" is almost always BS. And real hustle is a red flag. If people can't get what needs to get done within predefined work hours, it's either a reflection of incompetency or poor time management.
I worked at one of the ad holding companies mentioned for a few years, and the magic behind the curtain is that there's no magic behind the curtain.
Agencies by and large blow smoke up the clients' behinds as a matter of standard practice. And the clients typically know this (though I'm not sure they know the full extent of it), but put up with it because the work they are engaging an agency for makes more sense to outsource to the agencies, and since all agencies are posturing, they simply pick who they think BS'ed best (as if that's a reflection of what will actually get done).
When I was there, it was all about BSing digital competency and foresight. Everyone was trying to claim a better finger on the pulse of change. Now that change has somewhat slowed down (no major hardware upsets in the past few or next few years), it makes sense to start behaving more like a commoditized service and trying to brand oneself as offering greater efficiency than one's counterparts.
Which is why if I was still in the industry today, my pitch deck would probably include a slide about how you won't hear us talking about "hustle" because it should only be necessary if you're not optimizing your work day (and including out of country examples of functioning companies working even less than standard hours and doing great work, and numbers about productivity tanking as hours go up). "So you could pick a 'hustle' agency, but are they spending their 'productive' hours on you, or are they billing you for those extra hours operating at lower efficiency? If you see an agency claiming to 'hustle', personally we'd suggest hustling in the other direction ASAP."
I think he's right. So many of these companies that value hustle are up to something ethically suspect. But if you go fast enough and apply enough pressure, nobody really has time to stop and say, "Wait, are we doing the right thing here?"
So although it'd definitely bad for worker health and generally also harms productivity, I think it's great for the profitability of whoever's at the top. And also for sweeping any ethical questions under the rug until after their pockets are filled.
It's what happens when economic inequality increases continuously for decades. The slope of the line between the haves and the have-nots gets steeper and slipperier every year. Every year, the bottom end of that line gets ever more grim.
When there are fewer jobs to go around, fewer safety nets for people who can't find jobs, and being unemployed means losing health insurance and possibly dying, yeah, people are gonna hustle. It's awful.
Intense competition among labor and companies’ willingness and ability to squeeze value out of employees.
Life is not getting any cheaper, but there is a perpetually larger and larger supply of labor willing to do your job for less. Employers are very efficient at capturing that value, so if you want to keep your job from someone willing to be paid N% less, you need to be N% more productive. The most visible proxy for doing that is to work longer hours. Or, be willing to work for less and work multiple jobs. Lots of people do that too.
A phrase by John Cleese in another context comes to mind: "operating at a very, very low level of mental health." Most people would find that offensive if they heard it head on, but then complain they're not happy in the same breath. But it should be considered an opportunity, "unhealthy" can also be another word for "a lot of untapped potential".
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
> For instance, what would you say is happening to man, American man, in relationship to his work?
> FROMM: I think his work is to a large extent, meaningless, because he is not related to it. He is increasingly part of a big machinery, social machinery, governed by a big bureaucracy......and I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it...imprisoned by it... because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.
I would say people don't really breed well in captivity, and that's it. Even people who consciously want it, who are so broken they embrace captivity, are not exempt. They die in some way or other, sooner or later, in one generation or another, sometimes by creating the catastrophe that kills them. Maybe the additional "complexity" is really just invented by a.) prison wards and b.) prisoners who don't dare to meet their gaze, for obvious reasons in either case.
> There is a goal, but no way; but what we call a way is hesitation.
-- Franz Kafka
We have too many yes, but's. They kill the soul, and then the body leads a derpy life.
So create your own meaning. tell your own story. What's wrong with "i take in a job that feed me and my coworkers" for meaning ?
As for autonomy - that's different.
Different as in separate from meaning? I disagree.
Autonomy = the level of freedom of choosing your own actions , under the constraint that your goal must be met.
Meaning = knowing your work has some positive value, which means you can tell yourself(maybe subconsciously) that you are useful, which increases your motivation.
Example : a doctor that is forced to use an expert-system to guide him, would feel a lot less autonomy,even though he may understand that he's more useful to his patients - i.e. ,a lot of meaning.
> Example : a doctor that is forced to use an expert-system to guide him, would feel a lot less autonomy,even though he may understand that he's more useful to his patients - i.e. ,a lot of meaning.
Then why would they be "forced"? Either it makes their work easier/better or it doesn't, where does the force come in?
Autonomy doesn't just mean being able to do random things and not being subject to thermodynamics and gravity and everything, in the context of a human being's will to live, it simply has to do with being subject to the will of another human being, and the reasons for that.
As Hannah Arendt said in an interview:
> The whole of Kants morality boils down to the fact that every human has to consider if each of their actions could be general law. This means.. it's the the extreme opposite of obedience, so to speak! Everybody is lawgiver. No human has the right to obey according to Kant. [..] We obey in this sense, as long as we are children, because it is necessary. There obedience is a very important thing. But this should end at the latest at age fourteen or fifteen.
In that sense, I would also make a distinction between discipline and coercion. E.g. choosing (and keeping to reflect on and affirming) even the most rigid principles and living by them is not a reduction, but an expression of autonomy. If you are your own captor -- and you're aware of it, and it's a voluntary choice, rather than a rationalization like like with drug addiction or mental problems -- then you're not really a prisoner.
When I work on something I love, I sometimes work my ass off. I could never ever work this hard on command, outside of a slave camp with actual guns pointed at me. There is simply no way. But when I'm in "in the zone"? I love it, because there isn't just pressure, there is also grip that translate it into motion in a direction that fulfills me.
The same goes for helping people or doing chores that I agree need to be done. E.g. once I and people from an FB group helped clean the flat of a woman who was lethally scared of an upcoming landlord inspection.. and so ashamed of the state of her flat that she actually wasn't even there while we did it. I cleaned nicotine stains from surfaces with baking soda for two days and it felt good then, and still feels good thinking back on it. According to her best friend who had organized the thing she broke out in tears of joy when she saw the result. If I had to do it for money for someone who then complains about the result, it would have been degrading. Same work, different context, completely different result. Extend that to a lifespan and it's really no wonder.
I think people can't care deeply about things they don't have some kind of ownership of, and doing things we don't or can't care deeply about makes us sick. Which is good, because it also means doing things we care about makes us happy, so let's do that :D
This drives people who are not independently wealthy, to try and build that wealth in excess of what they might actually need for survival, and even for a happy life.
Is it good for productivity? I measure my productivity in terms of what I produce for my family.
I believe it all started when the Church of Pavlina opened and easy access to personal development blog fueled by Ferris and others. The ubermensch was promoted. At the same time Amazon and Facebook showed that you could make it big or be a slave so.. fear of doom and american success stories à la "you too can do it if you want" ?
It's all right there in his book, but like anything that inspires people, most people read what they want to read and not the actual words on the page.
The secret to this is that this doesn't require capital at all. You don't need anything to learn how to arbitrage, money, goods, or time.
People do this all the time with 14 day invoices etc. You have to be a little creative and very skilled but it's possible to make something out of nothing because you're providing value- especially when you get paid up front with a deposit.
It's still about being super efficient though (4 super efficient hours a week. Let's be honest anybody who could do that would do it more than once a week).
Steve Pavlina is one of the first superstar of the online self-help world (dating back to 2004 or 2006). It started with an article on a famous website for programmers (can't remember the name atm) about how he dig really deep with his first game and so others were playing catching up but he was raking in a steady monthly income (see where we are going and who would be interested ?).
Then he started his personnal weblog (yeah, we used to call'em weblog in my days) about self help and how he experimented with polyphasic sleep (sleeping 3 or 4 hours a days in twenty minutes increment, see the kind of folks that would bite that bait ?). So far, so good.
Then he went full crazy with psychic powers like talking to bird, being a telepath, reality shaping (aka the secret), etc.
His article were 10 or 12 A4 pages long (wonder how that goes nowadays) and it was kind of mesmerizing to see all that happening in real time (I admit I got first intrigued with his time management article and I kept reading for the crazy).
There was a funny experiment with polyamory and it ended with a divorce.
See http://edificial.blogspot.com/2006/08/church-of-steve-pavlin... for the church of pavlina and https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steve_Pavlina for links and stuff.
Of course they guy was kinda successful (financially).
Americans have been convinced (largely by republicans) that the reason so many americans are struggling financially is because they're lazy and stupid. One of the side effects of this is people being proud of working non stop as proof that they're not lazy and stupid like everyone else.
And yet, American workers still hold fast to the dream that if they just work harder, they'll be more successful.
That dream doesn't exist. The nightmare that does is that workers are continuing to work for less and less each year.
It wasn't that long ago when agriculture was a very big employer. I have a lot of farmers in my family and basically, if the sun is up, they are working. When something needs to be done, they DIY-it mostly because that's all they can afford.
Or perhaps it's because a single income isn't sufficient anymore to support a household, and people without a partner still need to pay rent/mortgage.
I am sitting in a hotel bed as I write this, killing time before leaving to catch a plane home. Yesterday I extended my stay by a day; I noticed the front desk clerk was wearing a union button, and complimented him on it. When he mentioned their contract is up for re-negotiation at the end of the month, I wished the union the best of luck in getting a fair chunk of the profits they’re making for the owners. It felt great to be able to say things like that.
How is it possible that a political ideology which should appeal to the bottom 50% of the workforce has no representation?
In recent years when I meet other Americans who are visiting my city, I often get this vague feeling that they're just trying too hard in one way or another. Maybe they're working too hard, or trying too hard to impress someone, or get attention, or assert themselves. I don't know if I've changed or if America is changed or if it's something else entirely.
What I do wonder is, what's with all these Americans working themselves to the bone? I own an agency which is one of the types of businesses called out in this article. I tell all my employees very clearly, whenever possible, work 40 hours and then call it a week. We also happen to be mostly remote so I tell them, within reason, respecting a small number of important calls/meeting times etc. you can put in those hours whenever you want, preferably after a great night's sleep.
There's nothing like "you're measured by how many hours you bill out," nor does there need to be, if we have more than 40 hours of work per person per week, we hire more people.
Where does this all come from? This is an honest question. Why are people working themselves to death in the US and having this crazy mindset that doing stuff which puts you on the verge of a breakdown is good? When did this start?
Is it good for health/happiness? Definitely not
Is it good for productivity? Maybe, but I doubt it