The problem is the fact that any couple, of any combination of sex or gender, now cannot afford a decent life without 2 full time salaries (or more, in many cases. That's a bad result of natural market forces that should definitely be addressed.

We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.

What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.

You need to read up on your history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the link, as mentioned earlier.

But it remains that 6 days per week was the norm prior to 1938, so 48 hours would be typical. We're talking about 40 hour weeks being typical. Stay on topic, my man. The 40 hour work week was not won, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by a labor uprising?

However, if you would have taken the time to read the thread, you'd have known that I already pointed all that out in my very first comment. The forest was seen all along. The only reason that other thought it wasn't seen was due to not understanding basic math.

These arguments were omnipresent at the time but they suddenly faded away when Hitler got his ass kicked. I wonder why?

I have no idea what you are trying to get at. If it is that wars can be won by working 40 hours per week, that is highly unlikely to be true. The 40 hour work weeks went by the wayside during the war. The US, for example, mandated a minimum of 48 hour workweeks in manufacturing during the war.

The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.

That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.

Dig deeper.

When HN comments talk about tech jobs they often mean specific, high-compensation or highly competitive companies.

When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.

It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.

At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems that I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.

Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.

Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.

Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.

Let me fix that for you.

The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]

So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.

Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.

In specific bubbles like Silicon Valley startup culture or FAANG this is true.

Greater than 40 hour weeks has been the expectation at several non-FAANG, non-Silicon Valley, non-startup companies where I've worked.

But I don't think people in those jobs realize how uncommon it is. The jobs in the middle of the curve, even tech jobs, are not all that demanding. They also don't pay the high salaries that we correlate with demanding tech jobs, but that goes with the territory.

It's a weird feeling if you've only known hustle-and-grind companies and then you stumble into a more traditional company where nobody is in a rush to get anything done and few people even work for more than 2-4 hours that they're in the office. These jobs are everywhere, though.

To keep perspective, that is illegal in many countries. Not everyone has it so bad. You can make it better.

You explained the symptom but not the root cause, which I did in my heavily downvoted comment.

Every student is conditioned from K to work hard like a robot. Those who refuse to work hard fail out of the school system.

Um. What? That can't be typical. It's not even legal.

I have never worked significantly over 40 hours.

Is this true? It does not matter if Bob works 100 hours a week if his output is not desireable. We are in this state because we WANT more, and there's apparently people out there that are willing to work to give us that.

Also, the West is quite literally living on the backbone of other industrial economy for the past 20 years. So you "luxury" is completely unsustainable with the amount of "work" that you put in because you outsourced all of the labors out.