If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer.

Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.

Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.

> to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer

Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.

Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.

- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering. - Four hour shift isn't suffering - Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful. - Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).

- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?

- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.

Nobody should be taking a bus for an hour to a minimum wage job. One of the reasons a job is MW is that they are everywhere.

You don’t commute that far for minimum wage.

Anecdotally, this is not true.

Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.

Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.

When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.

If you don't have a car, and the bus runs infrequently, I bet many people spend an hour getting somewhere.

Anecdote, not data, but

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/low-pay-long-p...

You could argue the person in the story should get jobs closer to home, but it is probably more common than you think.

You're right, we probably should have said longer, maybe an hour and a half. I definitely know people that commute a long time for low wages. Or did. They're in better places, now.

One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.

If you work in one of the US tech hubs, ask your janitorial staff how long their commute is.

When I was younger, I worked a job at a car wash. There was only one thing I really did all day long- vacuum cars and wipe them down.

This got repetitive quickly, and the managers got really upset whenever you slacked off in the lulls. Groups of more than three people chatting while we had "downtime" were more or less immediately disbanded. Checking your phone, even to text your family, was a big no-no on company time. There was no such thing as a "smoke break" (I don't smoke, but man a five-minute break occasionally would've been really nice.)

I hated that job. I dealt with a bout of depression because of that job. The turnover there- among people who were talented- was exceptionally high (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.

It would've been better than staying at home and playing games all day long, but I'm sure that I could've done something more productive, without pay than I did with pay.

> (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.

That sounds like a good outcome though. If the job weren't so bad you might have stuck with it. You could say that you (and others 'talented') were lucky it sucked so much.

But the job still needed to get done. Just in terms of basic human decency, maybe we shouldn't encourage abuse and exploitation of workers just because "they can just get a better job."

Who is 'encouraging abuse and exploitation'? I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity. Along those lines we all know of people who grew up poor and that was the thing that made them work hard. Also what makes many immigrants want to come here. This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'. My point was more if things are comfortable it can keep people around and prevent them from seeking a better life.

>I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity.

But it doesn't. Occasionally it spurs on action, but just as often, it traumatizes.

>This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'.

That's just what you said, it's simply the flipside of the following sentence, and it's untrue. If we have limited time and energy on this planet, every moment in the work you describe is wasted.

A lot of people become unhappy with their jobs and develop mental health issues. Some people never recover from having worked in destructive work environments.

Having work one finds valuable is.

Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.

Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.

IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.

You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.

Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".

I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.

I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.

There might be someone who can rotate one tire and not four.

I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."