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Why Do We Work So Hard? (1843magazine.com)
An anonymous reader points us to a fascinating piece at The Economist that tries to explain the elements that drive people to work so hard: Working effectively at a good job builds up our identity and esteem in the eyes of others. We cheer each other on, we share in (and quietly regret) the successes of our friends, we lose touch with people beyond our network. Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group's distinguishing vices as virtues. This reminds me of an article by Om Malik, veteran reporter and founder of the GigaOm news outlet, who wrote this when announcing his retirement. From his piece: "I relate to Jeter's desire to find life outside of work. Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news. It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life."
When you have very little money and lots of free time, yes. As your income increases and free time decreases, time becomes more valuable at some point. One of the goals of our economic system is removing the choice of working only to the tipping point, and only leaving the options of not working at all (and being destitute) or working nearly all of your waking hours.
We work so hard because it's in the best interests of our rulers that we do, because they get to gather the fruits of our labour. That's all there is to it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Because those older than us and those with better access to credit, have driven asset prices to the highs of human history. No longer are housing prices a normal 2.5x annual salary -- they are 5-7x and in some areas even higher. Access to government credit for educational costs has led to the highest education prices in world history. And a wholly sinister cartel of pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical equipment manufacturers, insurance companies and their Washington DC puppets, has led America to the highest healthcare costs in the history of mankind.
Prior generations would have called the current state of economic serfdom which Americans find themselves living under, "Tyranny". We just call it "things are getting really expensive".
In other countries, when the native inhabitants of a city could no longer afford to live in their home towns, they burned the houses of the rich to the ground and sent them packing.
Today, it is the ousted natives that go packing. But everywhere the same game is being played: Those with access to credit are quickly driving up asset values and creating a two tiered society. The "landed aristocracy" and the "you dummies should have bought real estate" camps. For millennials that distinction is compounded by whether or not mommy and daddy paid for education, or if the shackles of student debt are binding you to your workstation.
Why do we work so hard?
What kind of a privileged, ivory tower question is that anyway?
Only because you're really ignorant, but hiding that from yourself. There is an imbalance in the earnings from labor and those from equity that isn't justified by anything except social and corporate structures. In truth work beyond the real level of achievement adequate to fuel leisure only fuels the class divide supporting the ultra-rich, and dupes the poorer into believing they need it for their own security. Puritan ethic is "work is good", but said another way "arbeit macht frei" - the implication is the same.
Funny, as one born in a communist country, I can tell you don't know shit about socialism/communism and how they worked.
The rulling class, elected by the free will of the people (yeah, right), was supposed to think for the unwashed workers and peasants. The unwashed had to work as hard as they could in order for the whole society to be able to beat back the class enemy (capitalism). Wehn that happened and socialism/communism would rule the world, we would all live in paradise where everybody would work according to their abilities (rulling class thinking, workers working) and everybody would get a share according to their needs (rulling class a bigger one as they have to be free of troubles in order to guide the society, working class enough to be able to work another day).
It's the same message every rulling class is promoting to the unwashed: work your ass off so we (as in we, the rulling class, not in we, as a country) would have enough to live happily ever after.
Just over five years ago, my wife and I were overjoyed to bring a baby girl into this world.
By the time she was two, she was diagnosed as autistic. Not the mild kind where the kid turns out to be really into one hobby; the more severe sort where she was markedly disabled.
So we put her into therapy, into a program that uses scientifically identified treatments; which measures every goal, every progress, and charts and records every bit of minutiae to inform further therapy. We get some government funding, but my wife and I put an extra $40k/year into her therapy of our own money. And neither of us come from wealthy backgrounds, so this isn't pocket change for us by any stretch. We get by by doing without so many of the things our own peers take for granted, including basic things like home ownership. We don't get to go out much, and don't go on fancy holidays. We don't buy things that aren't essential. We have no retirement savings.
And you know what? Our little girl has made progress. She can't speak. I clean piss and shit out of our rugs several times a day. But she is very affectionate, and loves nothing more than to hug and kiss us. She likes to lead the people she loves and trusts by the finger to her favourite toys and activities so we can play together. She loves to laugh. She has an amazing capacity for processing symbols, including letters and numbers, well above her typically developing age group. She can read and spell. She is quite surprising at her ability to use electronics, and carries an iPad with software on it to help her communicate with others. She is exceptionally happy all of the time (we count our blessings that she doesn't have any of the behavioural issues often connected to children with autism).
Beyond the therapy, we set money aside in trust for her for when she is an adult. It's unknowable at this time whether she'll be able to function independently when she's older. My wife and I are very well aware that we won't live forever, and barring any sort of tragedy she'll easily outlive us. So on top of the therapy expense, we put away what we can into investments in her name for the long term -- we're talking 15 - 80 years (based on current life expectancy). We have to plan way ahead, as we can't stomach the idea of her being placed into an institution with nothing when we're gone to dust.
(She has no siblings to help take care of her when we're gone. When your first child is disabled with a disability that most probably has a genetic component, you start having to have conversations and make decisions you would never ever have to worry about otherwise. Will the next child also be disabled? Will they be even more seriously disabled? How could we ever afford to care for two disabled children, when we just scrape by with the one we have? Can we afford to take that risk, knowing that both children may suffer because of it? The idea of having a baby shouldn't be fear inducing, and yet that's what the concept holds for my wife and I. There is currently no genetic testing the can be done for autism. We as parents can't be tested. A gestating fetus can't be tested. It's a crap-shoot, and we don't even know the odds).
So why do I work hard? I do it for her. It's her one and only chance at ever having any sort of life. I'll probably never be able to retire -- I fully expect to die at my desk. This wasn't at all what I had planned for my life, but it's the life I have before me. What's more, she's worth it. My reward is when she knows it's time to go to bed, and she leads me by the finger to her bed for a story, a song, a cuddle, and a kiss goodnight.
(Posted anonymously for obvious reasons)
Yeah, things are way more complicated than that.
I'm near or at the bottom. I can't tell anyone what to do. I manage nothing, even the use of my own skills or time without talking first with my supervisor (who to his credit is likely to accept any ideas I might have - up to and including small software projects if it'll improve the workflow.)
This is normal, I'm not complaining.
My supervisor manages me and a few others in our department. His job is really stressful, in part because a lot of the time the people asking him to make stuff happen don't fully appreciate the amount of work involved, nor the time necessary to complete the task. That gets delegated to us to some degree, though he has a lot of similar work to handle as well. He manages us, but is also one of us.
He's not my ruler, but he is my boss.
His boss is also my boss, but not all of his bosses are also my boss - the one I answer to often speaks directly to me, and the ones my supervisor has to deal with often involve tasks that don't involve me. This is kind of a relief, because my boss's boss is a cool guy and we get along fine. He's probably rich, but he doesn't flaunt it and he's not at the top or anywhere near it - not that I care about that sort of thing.
HIS boss - my boss's, boss's, boss, I rarely speak to and does work I don't fully understand. I think he communicates with the people we do business with - the property owners we work for. These owners are what I consider the real bosses. Donald Trump "builds" his buildings the same way these guys do - with people like us. We never see them, not at my level anyway. We just make their desired thing happen - but I'm okay with that. These guys aren't the ones responsible for time management.
If your gripe is that all your time is spent working, it's probably a middle manager's fault (or yours). Not some distant "ruler", and definitely not an actual one (unless you live in North Korea). Though admittedly I work in a relatively flat organizational structure and a small one at that. I can and do see where the real time constraints occur - when other people make promises of performance on your behalf. If they do it poorly, you're just as f-ked as if you were the one to make that promise.
Because money improves your quality of life more than extra time does.
Wrong. Beyond 'minimum' needs like food, shelter, health, security, and perhaps some good sex thrown in, income basically is disposable. What humans need beyond that is to feel loved, competent and a sense of enthusiasm for what they strive for. Which all has nothing to do with 'physical' wealth. Money in those latter areas is nothing but a shallow substitute, and mostly a bad one at that. That's why most people are quite unhappy with their lives, even though they're doing well by any outward metric. Depression is the first world disease that comes with that.
By any historic measure we live in times of infinite abundance. 80%+ of work done in first world societies are bullshit jobs and superfluos work. Most of which can be done by robots, better planing or, most of the time, simply left out all together.
I work part time for more spare-time, and while I sometimes moan that because of my compareatively lower income I have the feeling I am - to most women of my social herachy - not suitable for long-term relationship because of that (especially with the values our society to wrongly pursues), I repeatedly run into situations that can only be described as plain an utter envy over my freedom compared to my peers. By men and women alike. I'm only suitably as a dance partner and a lover to most. ... A situation I will probably have to learn to live with. ... And, yes, I'm going to cry you a river now. :-)
Conclusion:
You Sir need to get yourself a copy of the 4 Hour Workweek. Or, better yet, the original: Senecas Letters from a Stoic., read it and get a life (Hint: It is *not* about dependant income-work.) Stoicism: The optimised wester variant of zen-buddhism as you might call it. Get with the programm and start enjoying you life like never before. Welcome to the club.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We used to pay people to do things we do now: pump our gas, do our laundry, etc. Not only do we work our job, we do jobs other people used to.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/