Kinda sorta.
It is more that the things we are busy doing are not fulfilling. Half of everything we do is because we are forced to do it to survive.
Contrary to popular belief, people actually like to do things and to keep busy/be productive… when we have control over what those things are
I agree. That’s why I said ‘fuck the system’ 13 years ago and haven’t spent a single second being a slave since then. Every day I wake up and don’t have to pay a house scalper is another victory against crapitalism.
If you don’t mind sharing - how are you getting by? Social Security? Food Stamps? Section 8? Inheritance?
I have a routine day job and a part time night job which I do from home on contract basis. I had vacation from my day job last week, because I have a sweet union job and get loads of vacation so some of it is just hanging out at home, but it’s AMAZING how job 2 expands to fill all that time, as well as every errand thing I have no time for, like haircuts. And my dork assed loser ex I still have to live with is like “well you can get these things done while you’re off”. I’m never off. Never ever.
Ugh that sucks. Is it not an option to drop that additional responsibility? Just say you can’t because of “prior obligations” (taking care of yourself)?
I find empathetic people are often the worst at letting things break so they can have one.
Not that I fully know your situation, so pardon my perscriptivising.
No, unfortunately I need the money, and my ex is a bad situation that I have to grey rock through.
Is it really that crazy to think you might have more time to do things when on vacation from your day job?
I do “productive vacations” mostly too, but sometimes you need a real break. I’m not even talking about going anywhere, but giving yourself time to just laze about and read and make meals and just do basic tidying, or whatever.
I don’t even have a paying job right now, but I can’t wait until I do, so I can take a week off to actually relax.
You might not need that, but I do.
It is actually. The amount I work is insane.
You honestly sound bitter
Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve worked at least 60 hours a week for 20 years, while he sits on his ass and watches hours of TV.
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.
So yeah… I noticed you haven’t filed your TPS reports this week.
When we got to UML diagrams I dropped out of programming and CS. I’d rather eat fucking glass.
My bullshit poison paper work was lesson plans. Like, what other profession expects you to tell them what you are going to do a week in advance? I planned my lessons, but I didn’t do it in a way that matched their paperwork. Like, bruh, can you trust that the stack of books on my desk with notes on them indicates something?
Like, I don’t know what vocabulary or math skills I’ll be teaching this week - because sometimes I’d find out they didn’t know how to use a calculator or the same dickweeds that wanted me to have my entire future planned out decided to have a random fire drill.
I like teaching without a plan and I’m damn good at it. Making me spend my Sunday evening (you know, time I’m NOT AT WORK) filling out some dumbass form made for english and social studies teachers which doesn’t realize that science spends months on the same standards…. When I know my shit. Put 20-25 teenagers in a room with me for an hour and they will know the quadratic formula or how to balance a chemical equation. Just fucking let me do that instead of staff meetings and discipline (ie, spending 1-2 hours after school calling every parent of a kid that stole my shit/refused to put their cell phone up/called me a fucking [will be removed if written out]) - just let me TEACH.
My wife is a middle school teacher and I 100% feel your pain through her.
Lesson plans are like of bullshit paperwork, invented because a minority don’t do shit without being tightly monitored and a rigid structure to follow.
Good teachers can just wing a class based on whatever needs covering from the curriculum on that day, bad teachers don’t care whats on the curriculum that day, terrible teachers don’t care and couldn’t even teach it without following a detailed plan.
Its because of those two groups that lesson plans exist.
In an ideal world you would just performance manage those two groups and sack them, but because teaching is underpaid there are a shortage of teachers (plus most people suck at putting people properly through performance management), so its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
Kinda a positive feedback loop there. Teaching is a hard job which is going to require lots of work beyond your contract time and pays shit compared to other jobs which require the same level of education and training. Adding the additional work and micromanagement drives people away. Especially when that micromanagement is pointless and ineffective.
They’d pay these consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell us to do things, when those consultants had no understanding of the fact that you cannot teach a physics class like an English class. (Maybe use that money to hire more staff? There’s a huge difference in the work when the class average is 25 and not 32.)
And yeah - the district I worked in was primarily staffed by emergency certified teachers. I taught my colleagues subatomic structure and wrote their assessments, because they often had degrees in things like physical education. I get, if you’re hiring people off the street because you’re desperate you probably do need to watch them more, but at the same time if the vice principal is taking me aside my first day of teaching and saying “you actually have a degree in this, so you are going to have to step up and take one for the team” - idk, if I’m going to have to work Sunday nights, let it at least be in a way that acknowledges that I’m a professional and have my own system.
You not going to break the loop till you pay dramatically more to teachers, poor pay usually attracts under motivated people in smaller numbers, so you cant be picky. These people eventually get promoted, an you end up with poor quality managers running the school who take advantage of good teachers.
Its so self defeating as high quality teaching as you do results in better engaged students with better results that lead to life long improvement to the entire economy. Instead we have ladder pulling from the rich who want to kneecap state funded schools while enriching their own private schools to create a barrier for the majority to compete.
Long live the 4-day work week.
Which has been proven to improve both productivity and profits. Same as home office. But petty people still prefer to take away freedom from people they consider beneath them, I guess.
deleted by creator
or a CEO themselves
LinkedIn somehow has the world’s worst takes. Actually filled with leaded boomers.
Those fuckers want an eight day week.
I’m all for it if we get half of them off.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
Joke’s* on you
(The joke is on you.)
Helping their employment prospects one correction at a time.
Humans weren’t “meant” for anything. Your particular sub-brand of cell clumps just failed to go extinct fast enough, so now here you are.
So true! If you are too depressed to have any offspring you simply quit the game of evolutin and the world goes on. Delicious, delicious nihilism. Keep scrolling ;)
Hey, not thinking you’re railroaded by some higher power into having kids or whatever else is not nihilism. You just do what you wanna do, man, nature and fake deities can’t stop you.
But if that’s nihilism and you’re cool with it, nature can’t stop you from doing that, either.
Accepting that there is no meaning of life or that no one is ment for anything is pretty nihilistic. But that is OK, I have nothing against nihilism.
Back to your point, reproducing should be everyone’s concise choice. Going “quietly into th night”, choosing extinction, being selected out by evolution has always been an option. Just becouse trillions of your ancestors, dating back to single celled organisms reproduced doesn’t mean you have to.
Putting all tomfuckery aside, depression and extreme anxiety is likely lowering human diversity and we don’t even know how dire this will be. Humanity as a whole will probably adapt to this environment, as people too susceptible will have no kids. I did come close to removing my self from the game my self twice. Got lucky; got some good medication; pull my self out of that mass. Though I got old and somewhat infertile, almost missed my window. When you thinkig about stepping in front of a train, you don’t think about having kids. That doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind later.
But you should make your own decisions. You can read the opinions of internet randos like me, but the decision will always be yours.
I never said there is no meaning to life. I said humans aren’t “meant” to do anything.
There’s tons of meaning to life. You just get to choose what it is. There is no single unified thing you’re naturally “designed” to do. If your goal in life is to fold a million paper planes and throw them all off a cliff then go nuts. If it is 2.1 kids then go nuts, too.
Hey, I’m glad you got the help you needed. That’s good. That’s meaningful. That meant something. To you, almost certainly to the people in your life that care about you. Very likely to the people who helped you. Helping others IS a very popular meaning people get from life.
That’s the stuff that’s worth caring about, in my book. Couldn’t be further from nihilism.
Got a bit intense in the “maybe people should take more time off” thread, but hey. It’s true.
Good talk MudMan. Sorry that I dumped this on you! I have these episodes sometimes. You are a wonderful person.
Dedicating your life throwing paper planes down a cliff sounds very nihilistic though… Agree to disagree?
Agreed.
Humans weren’t “meant” for anything.
Hi, it’s me, the creator. Your purpose is to create entertaining content, but your output has been slipping lately. You live in a simulation created by my multiversal corporation, which didn’t meet growth expectations this cycle, so we’ll be making some cuts to your simulation’s fidelity — just a few fingers and toes for now. Try refocusing your civilization on pumping out Boss Baby movies (they’re very popular here!) and we can talk again in 172 of your years.
This is how I know you don’t exist.
I’ve been delightful.
I think you’re agreeing with the premise without realizing it. We weren’t meant to have the norms and expectations that society places on us to just survive. We’re not expected to just retain homeostasis and survival, part of that has been predicated on your “personal productivity” towards the systems that we live under. Access to community and group resources is something we’re made to seek out, but it’s been blocked behind paywalls and monetary requirements effectively.
No, I’m not.
We’re not expected by whom? Weren’t meant by whom?
Who’s doing the meaning and the expecting and the making?
Even beyond the weird metaphysical and iusnaturalist implications, this train of thought is how you end up with people drinking raw water and eating just boiled meat. We weren’t “made” to seek out community any more than we were “made” to not have antibiotics or die from appendicitis. Stop it.
No, I’m not.
👍 my bad sorry
We’re not expected by whom? Weren’t meant by whom?
Not sure what you mean here, to me I’m interpreting this as I was implying some kind of intelligent or intentional design which I think is a misunderstanding of most of the conversations in these comments
I don’t say “meant” as in there was an intent behind the design, neither did the original post. “Meant” as in what something was adapted for, like wild animals being “meant” to live in their habitat and not in a cage. Their biology and psychology was most suitable for their own habitat and moving them out of it is distressing just as the original post was illustrating. Our bodies weren’t optimized for this environment and it causes some distress in some regards. It’s kind of a neutral statement expressing dissatisfaction that our needs aren’t being met by our environment
This isn’t my field, but I remember a lot of these convos during Covid about the parallels of zoochosis and what people were feeling at the time, seems similar to the original discussion
Just thought it was interesting and semi-related
Even beyond the weird metaphysical and iusnaturalist implications, this train of thought is how you end up with people drinking raw water and eating just boiled meat. We weren’t “made” to seek out community any more than we were “made” to not have antibiotics or die from appendicitis.
You lost me here sorry, dunno how we got to raw milk or appendicitis. Obviously these are bad things, but I don’t think we were trying to connect every societal ill to this hot take on twitter.
Stop it.
didn’t know I was doing anything sorry bro 😭
Yeah, sure. It’s not that I care that much about it, it’s just a pet peeve of mine.
There’s this overlap between conservative, traditionalist takes on how things are “meant” to work, as per some intended design and a new-agey, lovey-dovey take on the same thing diguised as progressivism that hides the same restricting, prescriptive attitudes behind a façade of ecologism or pseudoscience.
I find it annoying. Can’t help it. Don’t really want to, either.
Incidentally Dr. Wilkins there is a ringing all the alarms on that front so badly I want to go find a firehose.
You’re so right on that overlap. It’s incredible how this alt-right propaganda machine has like colonized so many ideas into itself. I don’t blame you for having that habit, it’s fucking everywhere and it’s infuriating.
Also I can def see that about Dr Wilkins, I just thought the concepts were interesting but definitely that’s one of the, not maybe a fallacy but some kind of slope to those ideas
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.
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.
100% I’ve been off work for months and like you I originally thought I’d have more time for R&R, but I’ve only played like 3 levels (Doom 2 Master Levels) in all that time.
Whereas on my last actual work vacation, I played through the entirety of God of War. I couldn’t imagine doing that now.
Would you mind sharing what kinds of things are taking up your time?
Well, initially there were a whole slew of things I needed to take care of before my job’s benefits were officially cut off. So many calls, appointments, emails, research, paperwork, applications, and so on trying to get things situated before I was officially, fully unemployed.
On top of that, my life as of this past year could be summed up as “one thing after another”, so losing my job was part of that, and it didn’t end there. Deaths in the family. Major medical issues. Major accident/injury (that literally wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t unemployed b/c it was a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing). The list of stuff that’s happened since losing my job goes on.
Some things boil down to personal choices I’m making. For instance, now that I have more time than income, things I might’ve paid a professional to do, I’ll just handle it myself when it makes sense to do so. Similarly, when friends and family need help with stuff, I’m making myself available for that. Things like taking care of pets for people when they have to travel for work, helping a friend put together a shed, helping move heavy furniture, etc.
In my own home, I’m taking on a much larger chunk of the day to day chores. My partner is having to shoulder more of the financial burden and having to deal with lifestyle cutbacks because of my situation, so I take a lot of pride in being able to relieve him of as much housework as possible. I’m the one doing the bulk of the dinner prep, a lot of the daily clean-up stuff, and things of that nature.
I’m also doing some things to help insulate us in case of a severe financial down turn. For example, I’m building and planting a larger garden this year than originally planned. I’m prepping all my canning and preservation equipment to make the most of whatever I’m able to grow. I’m clearing out old junk and reorganizing our storage spaces so we have more room to stock up on necessities.
Although I’m not devoting a ton of time to job hunting yet, I am still spending time doing some light networking, looking at job postings, investigating new skills, and things of that nature for when I do inevitably get back into the rat race.
Keep in mind, my days run together now and if you asked me what I did yesterday, I could probably only recall about 10% of it. Plus, this is already turned into a novel of response even though I’ve kept things high level, but know for sure, it’s all this stuff and so much more.
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.
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.
