I like being busy, but I like having agency over how I am busy. I don’t want to be “busy” because I have a bunch of arbitrary and meaningless paperwork to turn in that my boss won’t even read, but I like being “busy” in that I’m happy to spend my time doing things that have an immediate impact.
Give me a 12 hour day cleaning up a homeless shelter over paperwork.
Long live the 4-day work week.
I mean, it’ll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
Joke’s* on you
(The joke is on you.)
It’s not that we’re too busy. It’s that we’re too busy without purpose. What’s the point of being busy when it doesn’t proportionately translate to having our needs met?
We have more abundance than ever before in all of human history, and yet we work harder than hunter-gatherers just to feed ourselves, and we have less leisure time than they did. We work more hours per day and have fewer days off per year than medieval serfs. And for what? What’s the purpose? So some asshole who was born on third base can buy another mansion?
Thats our monetary policy. People must consume more every year to create more inflation, as technology actively reduces the price of goods.
If goods get cheaper we have deflation, they create more money supply via lower interest rates, and the price of inelastic shelter gets bid up, and asset holders receive a value windfall until prices rise. Which is why we are at a higher price to income ratio than 2007.
People born closer to the gold standard are richer, they got in when currency wasnt tethered to consumption.
Exactly! I work in a group home, so my work is very easy, but I want to go into IT, so I can actually go into a field I love
Preach.
I don’t think it’s the level of busy - for most of human history mere survival took a lot more time than it would take us today if we worked directly on actual survival. The problem is that we do the survival by working on too much irrelevant shit that enriches other people, who keep making our share less and less.
From historical anthropology and studying modern hunter gatherer groups, I believe the current consensus is that these people work or worked between 20-30 hours a week. Please correct me if there is more recent information.
By golly you’re right, the consensus is that people in simple foraging societies worked about 6.5 hrs/day. Scholars seem to believe medieval peasants worked more like 8-16 hrs/day, depending on how long daylight lasted - but taking frequent rest breaks, festivals and other holidays.
The key part is that there was a massive amount of plant and animal life, so there was plenty to forage. Like 80% of all life compared to 10k years ago is dead now and we just have scraps left now.
False, we have plenty of life. It’s just that it’s mostly humans who are basically earth cancer
I’m currently unemployed, and I was not expecting to be so busy. I thought I would have a little more leisure time, might be able to catch up on a few things that I never seemed to have time for, like catching up with family, playing some video games in my back log, and doing a small bit of travel. That hasn’t materialized. It’s like as soon as I stopped “working”, more things came up that needed my attention. I’m basically busy from the time I get up in the morning until I wrap up for the night and veg out in front of the TV for an hour before bed. I swear I had more me time when I was working. Not sure how this happened.
Would you mind sharing what kinds of things are taking up your time?
This is common, it’s because there was a huge backlog of things you just never got around to doing because you didn’t have enough time. When you’re working you prioritize some relaxing time because you have to go back to work soon. Now you have to do all the tasks you’ve stored up.
Especially in USA
As long as groups of people (states?) are locked in deadly competition, there can be no slowdown, anyone who does gets conquered or obliterated.
There is no reason why taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens. But if everone no longer had to worry about survival, no one would put up with corporate abuse from rich cunts and plus if they’d paid their fair share of taxes and couldn’t just steal tax money to gamble with, they’d never be as filthy rich as they are to begin with.
What you describe is more or less the Nordic economic model, except the basic income. Corporate abuse is low, because it is not unthinkable to “not work” in response to such abuse, but also because unions are strong. Nevertheless, a lot of people still work a lot, so it doesn’t completely change the work/life balance oddity op is posting about.
taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens
Well that’s how it’s done in most rich and even some poor countries. So I assume you are talking about the US which is indeed in a terrible situation with human rights for it’s wealth. And sadly voting red/blue won’t ever change it.
Not the basic living income part, at least not anymore.
There is Social Security but it’s generally pretty miserable and nowadays not even enough to pay for rent (thanks to insane housing inflation all over the place) plus most supposedly developed countries haven’t been building much social housing in the last couple of decades (which is partly why the house price inflation is insane - less state built housing means less Supply but the Demand for new living places is still roughly the same).
Neoliberalism has been exported from the US to even the most Developed nations out there and that’s definitelly screwed up the Social Safety net (also Healthcare, even in countries without a national health service, as well as in some cases the quality of Education).
Also even when things were at their best, there was always this coverage gap for the lower end of the working class: the poor were the ones helped by the social safety net and above a certain income point which was in the area of blue collar work, people could live a pretty decent life from working, but there was a segment of the working class with people having to work shit jobs, juggling multiple jobs and so one just to make ends meet and were the help from social security wasn’t enough.
Even in the best countries this gap has been made much worse by decades of Neoliberalism, both by shrinking even further down the social safety net coverage (to just the trully miserable) and because on the upside income growth didn’t keep up with price growth so even parts of the middle class now have to work shit jobs and count their pennies to the end of the month.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
I think this is accurate. We may be the most “intelligent” animal on this planet, but we’re still animals. We’ve been pulled out of a natural order and forced into systems the worst of us came up with to keep said worst ones happy. At the exact same time we also have the capacity and potential to make this planet a habitable, utopia for all creatures, but those systems, man…
Yeah, I feel this. We’ve been forced into a system that treat life like a nonstop grind instead of something we’re meant to actually live. Real connection got replaced by control. It’s crazy how unnatural all this ‘normal’ really is.
It’s extremely unpopular in the American business world. This world is so fucked up on so many levels. People wonder how things can be so bad over here… This is a big piece of that puzzle, along with our terrible and underfunded education system, and our lack of affordable healthcare.
Just these three things are bad enough, but then there are so, so many more problems. The United States is a gilded dumpster fire we’ve somehow been convincing the world is a beacon of prosperity.
The parts of the Nazi “economic recovery” from the Depression besides refusing to pay the rest of the Versailles debt and deficit spending financed by futures in tooth gold and slave labor was literally just making people work longer hours.
For many of us not working full time could mean the death or ruin of us and our family. That degree of anxiety allows for abuse in the work hierarchy, and I think this is at a minimum something we need to work to improve for everyones sake. Regardless of your work effort do you want to be around people scurrying around for no other reason than that they fear death or crippling debt? It doesn’t bring out anyone’s best.
You can’t just state facts and then call it an unpopular opinion for likes
Is this your first day on the internet?
no but I’m getting tired of this “unpopular opinion but I think the sky is blue” shit
I often find this aggravating, but in some cases, I think that stating an opinion as being unpopular is a defence mechanism that may stem from previous responses to said opinion.
On the topic of everyone being busy, for example, a friend once shared a similar opinion at work and their colleagues jumped on that opinion and argued against it in a manner that was effectively dick-measuring about how tired and burnt out they are, but how they’re going to take on more work nonetheless. It was an especially toxic work environment, but it’s not abnormal to find people who seem desperate to sacrifice themselves on the altar of capitalism.
I speculate that some of this bizarre defense of hyper productivity arises from people who are forced to work that way for so long that they start to think of it as a thing they choose to do. My friend was fortunate enough that he was able to quit his job to stay home with his newborn child, but far too many people don’t have that opportunity. I wonder if some of the men who mocked him for quitting the job did so because they wish they had been able to do the same thing, but given that that ship had long since sailed, pretending that they chose to stay at that shitty job helped them to weather the stress.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I sympathise with people who hedge their beliefs with saying an opinion is “unpopular”. I think that sometimes, it’s a way of saying “this is something I believe, but I’m not actively trying to change your mind about it”. There may also be an element of someone hoping that people will say “idk what you mean, that’s not an unpopular opinion”, in search of validation. That’s annoying, but I’m sympathetic towards someone fishing for validation in this topic, at the very least.
But then how is someone supposed to argue about how how the sky is red sometimes?
Got 'em.
Some people basically hibernated in the past. Slept for most of the day in winter to conserve energy(ignore the part where they slept a lot because they were hungry, we have food).
Modern “work ethics” is a scam.
