I think you're right - the average person absolutely works more hours than is healthy or most beneficial to the true, human experience.

I would bet many people agree with you, too! Even many people in these threads.

I think what you may be seeing (I'm speaking for myself, I suppose?) is people who've thought about it for a long while, and we have to think about it in ways we can introduce and fight for that stance with our bosses, or with our shareholders, etc, since those are the people we have to convince, not the people in the trenches doing the work.

For myself, I have to operate as both my boss - trying to make enough money to continue or elevate my desired way of life - and myself the person - trying to live life to the most joyful and fullest.

People spend all their lives doing pointless work, accumulating wealth, then have nothing to spend it on so buy something like a car they don't need (like an SUV).

It's odd there aren't more people questioning this. Wouldn't they rather enjoy their lives while they're young and not worry about having tons of disposable income when they're old?

I guess there's something about security that drives people to the latter. Also I feel like there's an addiction and/or conditioning element to it. I think people are scared of what will happen if certain people (thick people) no longer have to work. What will they do during the day etc?

Henry Ford claimed his motivation for instituting the five-day week was so that people would want to go out driving on their newly available Saturdays, and buy a Ford for their leisure time. Which is some weird voodoo when you think about it. Produce extreme volumes, lower margins, lower production (per worker) and increase demand - huh?

> It's odd there aren't more people questioning this.

I’ve been questioning this for a long time. It’s not an enviable position: it’s isolating (very few people understand), it’s very hard to keep any kind of salaried position (since you’re not a devoted doormat), and it’s mentally challenging because you can’t ever really feel safe nor fit in.

> not worry about having tons of disposable income when they're old?

Who is going to take care of you if you are sick?

Well it won't be your SUV.

It won't be my kids even if I have them; they won't have the money to take care of me if wealth inequality in my country doesn't improve dramatically and rapidly

There might be nobody, regardless of what you do.

It's so internalised that people gatekeep working long and hard...

I assume the "commute -> work -> chill -> sleep" cycle is doing a lot of work, you basically have no time to even think about what you're doing. Add some kids, a mortgage, health issues, it's the perfect cocktail. The "work -> vacation" cycle is also a good one, you can rationalise wasting 3-6 months in a work you don't enjoy to have a few weeks of peace (and spend all your money so you have a "good" reason to go back to work)

In a way it's also more pleasing to be fully invested in the rat race, once you start to want get out of it you'll hate every single second of your work week wondering where we as a specie fucked up so bad

I'd like to believe this too, but given that medieval peasants and antique slaves worked more or less the same hours as we do I'm quite pessimistic. Whenever we automate something they just come up with a new bullshit job that adds nothing to the standards of living, instead of reducing the workload for everyone.

Land and therefore the cost of everything that depends on it (i.e. everything) just gets more expensive.

The standards of living are far better now than they were 80 years ago.

When people didn't have ipad pros but could afford rent/mortgage and 3 kids on a single paycheck ?

We're flooded in useless shit but can't afford the basics. So yes, underfloor heating, smart light bulbs and google maps are great but is it really all there is to life

80 years ago was ww2, not the 60's.

I couldn't afford my great grandparents house on either side of the family, I'm in tech and don't have kids (they had 5 and 2). I can't even qualify for a mortgage for an equivalent house today in the same city

Get off your fucking ass and move like everyone back then did. They didn’t all sit around and cry that they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan where their great grandparents lived.

Listen up, you little shit, why don't you back the fuck down and have a little fucking respect for your fellow commenter?

See how you like it? Assume good faith and have some goddamn manners.

The real cost of food has steadily decreased for the last 200 years. (Much of the decrease was before 1980, though.) Here in Canada, one hour of labour at minimum wage, will buy you a 10 kilogram bag of flour, or 4 litres of cooking oil. That's enough calories for days. That is insane buying power compared to the historical norm, right into the 20th century.

This is the cost of food as % of household income in the USA over the last century: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/foodnew.jpg

My grandfather was born in western Europe, in what is today one of the wealthiest countries in the world. He was one of 14 children (of whom 8 survived), born to an illiterate peasant on a rural farm. This was pretty normal. You may have a retroactively gentrified image of what America was like in the 1940s - nearly half of homes didn't have an indoor toilet or electricity at the start of that decade.

Ok but again, housing is the exact opposite:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

and worker productivity vs income:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tobias-Arbogast/publica...

I'm 200% positive that both my grandparents and great grandparents had it better in pretty much every aspect (job security, housing, future perspectives) than we currently do. We have unlimited bread and circuses but scratch the surface and we're worse in every other aspects: I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.

Housing is insanely expensive. in US, healthcare costs are through the roof as well.

The only way I see long term housing becoming affordable is heavy taxes on single family homes as investment properties. Also open up zoning and allow builders to build.

Also naturally less kids, means less humans, means less demand.

Unless your great grandparents were born after world war 2, they had it worse in every aspect. People starved in the Great Depression. The only people who starve today are those who refuse to ask for help.

Infant mortality back then was atrocious, my grandpa had two (out of 13) siblings die at birth. He grew up working on the small family farm that was the family’s primary food source with the little excess produced sold to buy supplies for it. A bad harvest meant the whole family starving for months. Healthcare was essentially non-existent.

Step into the 50s during the baby boom and the huge economic boon that came from the post war rebuild and things started to look up, but they were still crap compared to today.

The houses they could so easily afford looked quaint but were absolutely trash quality on average. The ones left today are the nicest from that era. The average ones were gone by the 70s. That’s available today too, go get a manufactured home and it will be roughly the same quality but with better insulation, plumbing and electrical.

>I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.

You absolutely could if you fed, housed, treated, and schooled them the way they were back when this was common.

Job security was also terrible back then. There was a reason unions were more popular.

You’re really getting a rose colored view of the past and I’m not sure where it’s from.

There are people starving now in my community in Canada and it's not a problem of pride or asking for help... It is due to multiple issues interacting and compounding. Limited pools of volunteers for the food bank to be open, lack of funding for non profits that help with food security, increased costs of food due to remoteness, lack of appropriate housing and transport esp. for elders who end up isolated, kids bullying each other when accepting free meals at school (that was solved by making meals free for all at least) etc. I myself only started scratching the surface of the problem really.

Sure, but what quality of food? It's not affordable if you pay for it later with health issues.

Just need to finally tax the rich, all major human affecting industries made publicly owned or heavily regulated; water, food, housing, internet, healthcare, etc.

I just wish people would vote for this.

Imagine if the standards of living goes up even more, we have x50 better medicine, huge houses for everybody, fine silken clothes, wall-sized TVs, and gourmet truffle soup every day of the week. But everybody is still working long hours, and only get to see their kids in the morning and a few hours before bedtime.

But no worries, even more improvements are on the horizon. Within 20 years, you'll get all that, but it's gold plated, and encrusted with diamonds too. People live until they are 200, houses rotate to always face the sun, and TVs are now so big they wrap 360 degrees around the entire room's walls. But you still gotta spend most of your waking hours in an office, copying numbers from one excel to another.

Is that really that good of an improvement? Do we measure quality of living purely in material wealth, and not in the time we get to spend with loved ones, or our passions?

In the distant past, a huge proportion of our lives was spent just making sure you had food to survive on. The part where we "spend a huge portion of our lives" seems to stick, even though food is no longer scarce.

I don’t disagree with your statements, but anyone at anytime can choose to opt for more time and less gold plating. There are lots of people making these choices - check out the r/FIRE, r/LeanFIRE, r/FatFIRE communities on Reddit.

Check out the book “Your Money or Your Life” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78428.Your_Money_or_Your...

> I don’t disagree with your statements, but anyone at anytime can choose to opt for more time and less gold plating.

"Anyone" unless you're part of the bottom 80% earners, unless FIRE means being homeless you'll need more money than what most people can attain if they saved 100% of their paycheck for 30 years

You can live on half the space as average people and eat half as expensive food, that lets you FIRE on an average wage. Doing that puts you much closer to typical living standards 60 years ago where people ate home cooked food and lived in much smaller homes.

> You can live on half the space as average people and eat half as expensive food, that lets you FIRE on an average wage

Not even close, unless your version FIRE is retiring at 63 instead of 67 and still get 80% of your pension

Average salary in germany: 42k gross, 23k net

Renting a small place : 500 euros (let's say it includes heating, electricity/gas)

Let's say you only eat potatoe and drink rain water: 3 * 1kg * 2 euros/kilos = 180 euros

Good job, after 15 years you have 210k euros you can retire at ~35 years old. This money will allow you to buy a flat in a ghost town and to continue your potatoe fuelled life until you die of old age at ~90

Now remember you have to pay water/electricity/gas, health insurance, property tax, &c.

I don't know about Europe, but in the US, there are various social safety nets that work perfectly with early retirement with some planning (a topic which comes up in "povertyFIRE" circles). There's been a shift (especially in Democrat-run states) over the last decade or two toward getting rid of asset tests for subsidies, so with planning you can get things like free healthcare, reduced electricity bills, free internet, subsidized home renovations for energy efficiency, etc. while having your assets grow in tax-shielded retirement accounts. Universities for your kids generally have asset tests for subsidies, but many of them exclude your home+retirement accounts.

e.g. in New York state, this is available:

https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2024...

You can also switch to part-time in a low-stress role rather than retire completely ("baristaFIRE" or "coastFIRE"). The trick is that you don't want health benefits from your employer so that you can get much better ones from the state instead. Usually part-time doesn't qualify for benefits so that works well.

"free" health care and other benefits aren't free though, they're paid by taxes on working people, if everyone (or even 10%) retires early and ask for them it doesn't work

I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly isn't "anyone at anytime". In France for example 48% of people earn bellow 2000 euros per months. If you play the game you have an OK life with health care, a good flat, a car, whatever... but if you want to retire before the legal age it's next to impossible, you just can't build enough savings. If you work in a big city you'll never be able to afford a flat there, if you buy cheap property far away you'll need to pay rent in the city + mortgage.

Best case scenario you'll need a 20 years mortgage, most likely 30. You cannot be in debt to more than 30% of your net income, meaning 2k net per month gives you a 600 euros mortgage, assuming 0% mortgage you can't even afford a 150k euros property over 20 years

https://fr.statista.com/infographie/25111/distribution-des-s...

But nowhere close to as good as they hypothetically should be given the explosion in productivity.

Agreed, I find it astounding how so many people seem to be ok with devoting almost all their useful hours of life to work (although maybe they aren't ok but cope / convince themselves somehow).

My weekday: get up and immediately go to work, come home, have about 2 -3 hours spare time, sleep, repeat. In that 2-3 hours I'm supposed to source healthy food, exercise, contact family, maintain friendships, maintain a romantic relationship, do laundry, keep the house clean, volunteer / contribute to society, meditate, read, do endless life admin, plan for the future, and finally relax. Then on the weekend, at least 1 day catching up on all the garbage that inevitably couldn't be done during the week. And maybe I'm left with 1 day out of 7 to do things I actually want to do (if I have the energy left).

And let's not even discuss the range of crap tasks that must be done during the 0 business hours I have free: posting mail, going to the doctor, getting an electrician or plumber, contacting the real estate agent, contacting any business really. Lucky I can work remotely or else do any of these I need to take half a day off work.

It's no wonder people have trouble with anxiety and sleep in modern times. There's literally not enough fucking time in the day to do everything which needs to be done. Even if you try to minimise and optimise every part of your life, you still barely have enough time to enjoy yourself.

And we are living this life for what exactly? So in 50 years I still won't own a home and the environment will be irreparably destroyed?

Yeah it sucks.

How many hours a day are you working and what kind of commute do you have? Just curious how that math works.

Me personally I get up at 6:30, start work at 8 (from home), work until 4:30 usually and go to bed at 11:30-12.

4 day work week? Sure! And if the rich weren't allowed to weasel and corrupt their ways into 0% tax rates it'd be even better!

This is a cultural thing, I think. I'm proud to work more hours than my boss expects. My relative never brag about the number of days off they have, but will quickly tell you that they only took one week off last year. The expected reaction is: wow, you're a great worker.