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.
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.
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.
I mean, it’ll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
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.
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?
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.
yea, “unpopular” because we’re all indoctrinated from preschool onward that it’s “natural” to be yanked out of sleep by an alarm, bust our asses to show up at work, move on to things at the sound of a bell for all the daylight hours, then get minimal, if any, sleep in order to do it all over again tomorrow. god forbid you get an opportunity for a nap in the middle of the day
thank the industrial revolution: slavery dressed up in “freedom and opportunity” – same as the other familiar phrase “arbeit macht frei”
you exist to generate value for your owners. that’s it.
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.
I think about this a lot. We have essentially, purely through accident tbh, created a society that we are evolutionary unprepared to live in. So much of our typical day to day is actually horrible for our bodies and often antithetical to their good function.
In a strange way, it’s almost incredible. We have invented a rock that we cannot lift.
Eh, agreed except it’s no accident. A small group of people have managed to convince everyone else to do all the lifting in exchange for crumbs and little green pieces of paper. We have allowed ourselves to become our own worst enemy rather than unite and explore the stars
Competition is good for a lot of things, but it also becomes a day-to-day race to the bottom that rewards whoever is willing to sacrifice more of their life for the sake of their job than others.
The logical consequence is exactly this: we back ourselves into an increasingly uncomfortable corner that leaves less room for living than we could easily enjoy with our current technology.
That’s because you don’t lift the rock, you grind it. Try waking up earlier!
(jk)
B-b-b-b greed is human nature!
Yeah, go check out how any society outside of Europe worked before colonization. Winner writes the history!
The colonists were able to easily defeat most of the natives by out-arming them. But does anybody ever stop to think about why none of these societies ever invented guns? 🤔
I have a friend who is probably going to become a nun, and the place where she seems likely to join is a convent which has very little contact with the outside world (it’s even on an island). It struck me that the monastic life seems like a pretty good escape from conditions that are objectively antithetical to humanity, especially if you’re someone whose faith is already a huge part of how they cope with the world.
Hell, I’d be tempted by it, if I had a compatible religious belief. Alas, I think that if I had a “vocation”[1], it would probably require me to stick around and work alongside others who are trying to build a more humane world. I can’t do much, but my sense of duty is greater than my desire to escape.
[1]: As I understand it, “vocation” has a particular meaning for Catholics. Here’s a definition I got from Google: “vocation in a religious context is how God calls you to serve Him in the world.”. “Vocation” came up a lot when my friend was discussing her plans. Despite me being hilariously far from being a Catholic, the concept resonated with me — perhaps because I’d loosely describe myself as an agnostic theist. I don’t believe in a God, per se, but the sense of duty I feel to things like Truth, Justice, Beauty etc. (all of which I feel the need to capitalise) — things which a more religious person might just call “God”.
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It’s only unpopular for the 1% extracting wealth from the 99%
Sort of, but there really are huge swaths of Americans that grew up learning about “work ethic,” putting in those extra hours, etc… I still struggle to turn it off sometimes myself. And then have to learn over and over and over again that “put in extra unpaid work and it’ll pay off” is horseshit every single fucking time and I’m a fucking idiot.
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.
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.
Humans used to have a much more direct connection between what they did and their survival. Gather enough food and you won’t starve. Keep an eye out for other tribes/clans/families competing for the same resources and you don’t get killed. Processing TPS reports all day doesn’t seem like it does much of anything even though it gives you money. We’ve lost the connection and our brains can’t handle it.
So modern life is simulating an impending death scenario for the brain. All the time.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Like the panic that occurs when layoffs happen.
If your work isn’t mentally stimulating, then get another job that is.
If you’re being complacent then that’s up to you.
I flat out tell my employer to automatise the monkey work because I’m not doing it adequately.
If you want me to perform, make the work release dopamine etc when I competitively complete it.
