I worked 55+ hours a week for years. During the pandemic I became a stay at home mom. I suddenly, never sped while driving and any road rage tendencies vanished, nearly overnight.
While I feel quite isolated and lonely sometimes, as everyone I know works and are busy all the time, I can't stress enough how much of a change my driving habits went through when I was no longer in "workmode".
I used to break an average of 3 traffic laws every morning getting to my 6am shift. Then, the rush to just.get.home.
To a point now, I don't like driving during rush hours, or shopping after the work crews get off. 10am on a weekday at the grocery store? Everyone is pleasant and polite."excuse me" I say, and we have a polite interchange. I'll give a compliment to a womans dress, and I've passed some good on to a fellow human, sometimes I even receive compliments from the little old ladies, I've learned from them after all.
If I go to the shop after 4pm or on a weekend? I can feel folks souls have been ripped out and stomped on, knowing what they feel.. I say excuse me as i have to scoot pass their cart, and I don't even get a response just a glare. Then I return home sad.
Work/life balance is crucial. Ideally, everyone should be guaranteed a healthy work/life balance, while still being able to live comfortably. With one job.
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.
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 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.
Competition is essential in almost all (if not just all) human interaction, as its what pushes us to better ourselves and our species. healthy competition has rules in place that all parties know, and if someone is hurt or confused the competition is stopped to assess and adjust if needed, like sports n shit. We forgot to add that to the economy, whoops
I think the commenter is focusing on the idea of 'competition for what?'. 'Better ourselves' how, and for what purpose? I struggle with this myself, specifically in terms of motivating myself at work. i.e. What is the goal of all this (our working society, at large, not just my role as a cog).
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".
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.
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.
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.
Yeah this is one of the reasons labor needs to organize.
There's one boss telling 500 workers that they all need to work themselves to death? Fuck that. We outnumber him. We could be productive without burnout and things could be fine.
Unfortunately there is a pyramid scheme in place filled with fools that think they can become that one and are willing to fight against those "beneath" them.
True. There are also many idiots who think like, "I work hard and when I take a break it's well deserved. When they take a break, they're lazy good-for-nothings".
There's a name for this I can't remember right now. Something more specific than "stupid" or "no empathy".
Under the table were the fatcats are sharing slices of the cake, squirrel the little mice living of the crumbs that fall down, and once in a while one of the mice catches a bigger crumb, proudly raises it above its head and shouts: "See, the System works!"
Thanks for the recommendation. I am heartened by recent pushes towards unions. In particular, tech workers are beginning to understand that they are workers (as opposed to the narrative that tech workers exist at a level above the kind of people who need unions).
I haven't heard of the IWW, but the website for the UK branch has the headline "Bigoted bourgeoisie courts never cared about workers, whether cis or trans" (regarding a recent UK supreme court ruling). I haven't read the article, but that headline has given me a strong first impression of these guys. They seem pretty based
I've been excited at that development as well. It's honestly a bit baffling it took them so long, especially game developers, where extreme crunch time and post release seasonal layoffs are the norm.
The IWW is the only union that leans heavily anarchist, with a rich history going back to 1905. :)
I retired from my software developer job right before COVID hit, bought a very small (and very inexpensive) fixer-upper house for cash, and started driving a school bus. I make like 1/5 as much as I used to and I'm as happy as I've ever been in my life. I work less than five hours a day and I have a big break between my morning and afternoon runs so I can ride my bike, have a leisurely lunch and a nice nap in the middle of my day. If the school board would just take my suggestion to send all the middle-schoolers to the Antarctic for three years, my life would be perfect.
I'm in a similar job but I only bought my house about 2 years ago. The mortgage is ridiculously high even for my salary. If things are already tough for me, I'd hate to think how the average person can afford basic necessities. Good on you for being able to buy a cheap house though, I wish that was an option for me.
Nancy Birtwhistle has some great books that can help a bit with the cost of living. They include recipes for your own cleaning products and toiletries. It's only a few £s here and there but they start to add up into some real savings, plus you get the benefit of knowing exactly what's in your products, peace of mind from potential health effects, as it's all vinegars, citric acids, and alcohols instead of (to the layman) mystery chemicals.
And to save even more money they are available on the high seas, although she's put considerable care and attention into them so I've purchased the real things. But for getting started, they are available is all I'm saying.
Obviously that doesn't help with buying a house or anything as they're crazy prices everywhere but it'll save you on your shopping bills each week at least.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a balance. Not being busy is good sometimes; it's called "resting" and it's important for mental health.
But yes, to what I believe you're trying to get across, being forced to be stagnant for extended periods of time (such as solitary confinement) can have deleterious effects on one's mental and even physical health.
The point is also more about having agency over whether or not you have to be doing something and how you get to do it.
Your statement does a poor job in its addition and neglects certain important nuances by being overly generalized in its phrasing.
"Not being busy" doesn't make you braindead and depressed. It is an important distinction between simply "not being busy" and "being forced into stagnation to the point it becomes hazardous to your health"
Undertones are entirely social concepts and depend on the culture of a region, and usually involve nonverbal communication in things like tons and body language to discern differences. Adding the language barrier just complicates things even more.
Most people unfortunately don't consciously consider this stuff and just assume everyone is like them.
So, as you said, commenting online is a risky game.
30 years in the forest, surrounded by family and friends, a life spent close to nature, around a fire, below skies that have not yet be tainted with light pollution. A naturally human schedule, based on natural cycles. Or a long life spent under a hazy sun and enough toys to distract you from how alone you are, surrounded by strangers and neighbors who have no reason to learn your name. I wonder which is longer, and which is more full.
A life of chemicals, to extend your productivity and to extract what it can from you. A life looking for distractions, when the meaning was there. In the woods. In the plains. In the mountains, the valleys, in a natural garden of eden. We traded it all and all we got was a clock to make us all slaves.
I'm not a primitivist, but you're also not wrong. For my part, I wish we could just make a better trade. We don't need all the toys — just the ones that directly impact our flourishing.
I don't think you understand what busy means, you are clearly busy spending time with your family and doing things to make them happy, helping friends, making fire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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've only gotten one minute into the video and already it's hit me with truth.
I'm a sahm, used to work in manufacturing. I enjoy keeping house, ..mostly. The beginning of the video it's stated in the stone age, people would usually have one day of heavy work, followed by a day of less work.
When I'm left to my own devices on planning and keeping house, this is exactly how my days go. I clean like hell for one day or do an outdoor project, and the next, I just do the bare minimum, maybe a load of dishes and a meal that requires more effort, but nothing else. I thought it was just part of my neurodivergencies. But I really do enjoy working in this manner. I actually get to enjoy the fruits of my labor for a minute.
Maybe thats what humans are missing, basking in a job well done is important to keep us motivated imo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Yeah there's something to that. Like I feel as though we should always be doing stuff but not what it is that we're currently doing?
Like, we should be waking up and having tea with our neighbors or helping out in our communities and stuff .. perhaps just building, planting, fixing things that we'd like? I don't feel as though we should be fighting deadlines constantly.
Me too. I enjoy my job, and I'd do it for free if I wouldn't need money for almost everything, from my daily commute to breakfasts that both guarantee I can work at all. My paycheck is ignorant of this secret taxation.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, historically, the majority of humans were meant die shortly after being born, with women dying in childbirth, and men dying young in wars. Those that lived those parts may have died from malnutrition or diseases/injuries today that are annoyances instead of being fatal.
With current use of antibiotics in farming; disease and injury will soon be very fatal again. At least we can hope for a reset of the infinite growth issue.
The OP picture says "humans were never meant to be" something. That language suggests that either we're biologically designed to be something else (which I don't think that person was saying) or that human society was designed to support something better that is less anxious or depressed. I'm pointing out (not too seriously) that that isn't the case either and that prior human societies were actually "designed" to be far far worse.
Realistically no one designed anything, so I'm having a lighthearted poke at the premise of OP's picture.
Depression isn't only "when you don't do anything." That's one of the forms severe depression can take, but it's better generalized as persistent lack of positive emotions and/or motivation resulting from decreased brain activity in key areas
Also people diagnosed with anxiety can "handle stress," just not to the level demanded by modern society without significant impairment and distress
Nah we cannot handle stress. The difference before and after anxiety medication is tremendous. I went as far as having stomach damage from anxiety. Losing 20 kg because the anxiety kept worsening the condition. Trust me, we cannot handle stress.
Depression's enemy is serotonine and dopamine. If you aren't stuck in your room, then you're able to workout. Able to get going. It doesn't feel like life's worth living at those moments. Life's on a pause button. But once you get that energy surge. Grab it with both hands and make sure that the motor doesn't stop running.
Medication against depression is basically the same thing as you get from being active.
I took Amisulpride for a while against depression after losing the 20 kg, then now am on 10 mg sipralexa. I feel 0 depression whatsoever. Quite the opposite. I have too much energy.
never going back to anxiety disorder, it has nothing to do with the amount of work. It's just how my brain is wired. I'm very productive right now because I'm not anxious.
I think how well anxious people cope with stress varies. I'm a pretty anxious person, but I'm actually incredibly good to have on hand in a crisis. I also bizarrely enjoy these situations, because of how much calmer I feel. Like, it's not that I'm not anxious in these scenarios (there is at least one point where I had someone else's life in my hands, and that was fucking terrifying), but it felt like good anxiety.
I've heard similar experiences from some others with anxiety (and one friend who effectively "solved" her anxiety by becoming a paramedic). it blows my mind how much variety there is in how ill mental health manifests, and how much we still have to learn about how things work.
I'm glad to hear that your medication has helped you. It's awesome to find something that helps, and to be able to blitz through tasks that were previously impossible to do. I felt a similar thing when I started ADHD medication.
Wouldn't that be adrenaline or such helping you be calm?
Personally the way I cannot handle stress would be: deadlines that aren't feasible. I'd be scratching heart area because it would feel weird.
When I'm overly stressed, I can't keep myself from scratching certain areas. As my mind is going wild.
In such situations I am completely useless to others. It should be illegal for me to drive on the road with a car in such moments too. It feels like I'm more impacted than when drunk.
It makes more sense to me if I consider the potential impact of hypervigilance — "the elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you". It's associated with PTSD, and whilst my paramedic friend doesn't have a diagnosis of that, I know that their family were abusive, and they identified that much of their anxiety stemmed from hypervigilance.
It makes sense to me that if someone's anxiety is being driven by hypervigilance (a chronically dysregulated stress response), that some people may find it beneficial to put themselves in genuinely high stress situations, to sort of channel the stress into a sensible outlet.
Another related example is that I have a friend who goes for a run when she feels very anxious. She says that she's found it ineffective to try logicking her way out of feeling anxious, or trying to calm herself down, and that going for a run feels like saying to her body "you're absolutely right, there was something scary here, but now we have escaped it, and can relax". I always find it interesting how people sometimes speak about their bodies and brains and existing separately from themselves, often in an attempt to reconcile the tensions between different aspects of ourselves
Going for a run is good against anxiety. Mostly because of the hormones in releases.
Endorphins and serotonine. Anxiety medication is about increasing the amount of serotonine or dopamine that gets used by your body/brain.
That's why I said earlier that people should workout when they are depressed. The problem with depressed people is that they are too depressed to work out.
Hence, when they finally get some energy back, they better get active and workout to prevent a future episode as harshly.
I have absolutely no idea about traumatic experiences. Can't relate how that would feel.
My experience is just due to genetics, it's not anything that my environment did to me.
That's a pretty fucking stupid take, our ancestors had to be busy all the time just to survive.
We are living in a time of 24/7 news and access to way too much information that's a way better explanation.
In fact I even like the explanation of anxiety being a result of abundance of calories more than this shit. That theory posits that our brains can go into overdrive simply because it has access to so many excess calories whereas in the past it didn't.
There is also the move towards white collar work, work that's not physically demanding, that we didn't evolve to deal with. Try going to the gym/exercising regularly and you will notice a significant drop in anxiety even on your worst days.
I worked 55+ hours a week for years. During the pandemic I became a stay at home mom. I suddenly, never sped while driving and any road rage tendencies vanished, nearly overnight.
While I feel quite isolated and lonely sometimes, as everyone I know works and are busy all the time, I can't stress enough how much of a change my driving habits went through when I was no longer in "workmode".
I used to break an average of 3 traffic laws every morning getting to my 6am shift. Then, the rush to just.get.home.
To a point now, I don't like driving during rush hours, or shopping after the work crews get off. 10am on a weekday at the grocery store? Everyone is pleasant and polite."excuse me" I say, and we have a polite interchange. I'll give a compliment to a womans dress, and I've passed some good on to a fellow human, sometimes I even receive compliments from the little old ladies, I've learned from them after all.
If I go to the shop after 4pm or on a weekend? I can feel folks souls have been ripped out and stomped on, knowing what they feel.. I say excuse me as i have to scoot pass their cart, and I don't even get a response just a glare. Then I return home sad.
Work/life balance is crucial. Ideally, everyone should be guaranteed a healthy work/life balance, while still being able to live comfortably. With one job.
It would be healthy for everyone to live comfortably, and then, work how and if they want to
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.
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 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.
Competition is essential in almost all (if not just all) human interaction, as its what pushes us to better ourselves and our species. healthy competition has rules in place that all parties know, and if someone is hurt or confused the competition is stopped to assess and adjust if needed, like sports n shit. We forgot to add that to the economy, whoops
Actually capitalist competition hinder progress, by not allowing humanity to have a goal other than profit
So you just didn't read my comment or what
I think the commenter is focusing on the idea of 'competition for what?'. 'Better ourselves' how, and for what purpose? I struggle with this myself, specifically in terms of motivating myself at work. i.e. What is the goal of all this (our working society, at large, not just my role as a cog).
But they’re better at lefting than you and they really need you to know it!
No it's not, people naturally wants to do better each day by themselves, for people they love and care.
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".
That's because you don't lift the rock, you grind it. Try waking up earlier!
(jk)
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.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
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.
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.
Yeah this is one of the reasons labor needs to organize.
There's one boss telling 500 workers that they all need to work themselves to death? Fuck that. We outnumber him. We could be productive without burnout and things could be fine.
Unfortunately there is a pyramid scheme in place filled with fools that think they can become that one and are willing to fight against those "beneath" them.
True. There are also many idiots who think like, "I work hard and when I take a break it's well deserved. When they take a break, they're lazy good-for-nothings".
There's a name for this I can't remember right now. Something more specific than "stupid" or "no empathy".
Fundamental attribution error
Yes! That's it! Thank you
Wiki on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Arrogance? Greed? Being a clueless asshole?
"recursive bulling"
Under the table were the fatcats are sharing slices of the cake, squirrel the little mice living of the crumbs that fall down, and once in a while one of the mice catches a bigger crumb, proudly raises it above its head and shouts: "See, the System works!"
For anyone else reading this: you could be the one to make that change, and gain you and your coworkers better pay and time off.
Seriously consider joining the IWW. They'll train you on how to organize your coworkers and form a grassroots union, no matter what your job is.
Thanks for the recommendation. I am heartened by recent pushes towards unions. In particular, tech workers are beginning to understand that they are workers (as opposed to the narrative that tech workers exist at a level above the kind of people who need unions).
I haven't heard of the IWW, but the website for the UK branch has the headline "Bigoted bourgeoisie courts never cared about workers, whether cis or trans" (regarding a recent UK supreme court ruling). I haven't read the article, but that headline has given me a strong first impression of these guys. They seem pretty based
I've been excited at that development as well. It's honestly a bit baffling it took them so long, especially game developers, where extreme crunch time and post release seasonal layoffs are the norm.
The IWW is the only union that leans heavily anarchist, with a rich history going back to 1905. :)
I'm so tired of working. I just want to live modestly in a bought off house but the ever inflating cost of living will make it an impossible dream.
I retired from my software developer job right before COVID hit, bought a very small (and very inexpensive) fixer-upper house for cash, and started driving a school bus. I make like 1/5 as much as I used to and I'm as happy as I've ever been in my life. I work less than five hours a day and I have a big break between my morning and afternoon runs so I can ride my bike, have a leisurely lunch and a nice nap in the middle of my day. If the school board would just take my suggestion to send all the middle-schoolers to the Antarctic for three years, my life would be perfect.
I'm in a similar job but I only bought my house about 2 years ago. The mortgage is ridiculously high even for my salary. If things are already tough for me, I'd hate to think how the average person can afford basic necessities. Good on you for being able to buy a cheap house though, I wish that was an option for me.
Yes I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter please and thank you.
Nancy Birtwhistle has some great books that can help a bit with the cost of living. They include recipes for your own cleaning products and toiletries. It's only a few £s here and there but they start to add up into some real savings, plus you get the benefit of knowing exactly what's in your products, peace of mind from potential health effects, as it's all vinegars, citric acids, and alcohols instead of (to the layman) mystery chemicals.
And to save even more money they are available on the high seas, although she's put considerable care and attention into them so I've purchased the real things. But for getting started, they are available is all I'm saying.
Obviously that doesn't help with buying a house or anything as they're crazy prices everywhere but it'll save you on your shopping bills each week at least.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
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.
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.
Is this your first day on the internet?
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.
Those fuckers want an eight day week.
I'm all for it if we get half of them off.
LinkedIn somehow has the world's worst takes. Actually filled with leaded boomers.
or a CEO themselves
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Not being busy will make you braindead and depressed too = shorter lifespan
It's a balance. Not being busy is good sometimes; it's called "resting" and it's important for mental health.
But yes, to what I believe you're trying to get across, being forced to be stagnant for extended periods of time (such as solitary confinement) can have deleterious effects on one's mental and even physical health.
The point is also more about having agency over whether or not you have to be doing something and how you get to do it.
Yes I was merely adding to your earlier comment
Your statement does a poor job in its addition and neglects certain important nuances by being overly generalized in its phrasing.
"Not being busy" doesn't make you braindead and depressed. It is an important distinction between simply "not being busy" and "being forced into stagnation to the point it becomes hazardous to your health"
Not a native speaker and living in different culture, commenting online is always a risky game. I wish people would understand the correct undertone.
Undertones are entirely social concepts and depend on the culture of a region, and usually involve nonverbal communication in things like tons and body language to discern differences. Adding the language barrier just complicates things even more.
Most people unfortunately don't consciously consider this stuff and just assume everyone is like them.
So, as you said, commenting online is a risky game.
30 years in the forest, surrounded by family and friends, a life spent close to nature, around a fire, below skies that have not yet be tainted with light pollution. A naturally human schedule, based on natural cycles. Or a long life spent under a hazy sun and enough toys to distract you from how alone you are, surrounded by strangers and neighbors who have no reason to learn your name. I wonder which is longer, and which is more full.
A life of chemicals, to extend your productivity and to extract what it can from you. A life looking for distractions, when the meaning was there. In the woods. In the plains. In the mountains, the valleys, in a natural garden of eden. We traded it all and all we got was a clock to make us all slaves.
I'm not a primitivist, but you're also not wrong. For my part, I wish we could just make a better trade. We don't need all the toys — just the ones that directly impact our flourishing.
I don't think you understand what busy means, you are clearly busy spending time with your family and doing things to make them happy, helping friends, making fire.
That's a productive life where you add value.
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.
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.
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.
My wife is a middle school teacher and I 100% feel your pain through her.
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.
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.
👍 my bad sorry
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
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bear-in-mind/202106/enculturated-captivity-zoochosis-and-collective-trauma
Just thought it was interesting and semi-related
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This would be terribly unpopular on LinkedIn.
Gotta keep up that 24-7 365 grindset.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
(The joke is on you.)
Helping their employment prospects one correction at a time.
Completely accurate.
Historia Civilis has a fantastic video on how conventional working hours have changed over recent history.
I've only gotten one minute into the video and already it's hit me with truth.
I'm a sahm, used to work in manufacturing. I enjoy keeping house, ..mostly. The beginning of the video it's stated in the stone age, people would usually have one day of heavy work, followed by a day of less work.
When I'm left to my own devices on planning and keeping house, this is exactly how my days go. I clean like hell for one day or do an outdoor project, and the next, I just do the bare minimum, maybe a load of dishes and a meal that requires more effort, but nothing else. I thought it was just part of my neurodivergencies. But I really do enjoy working in this manner. I actually get to enjoy the fruits of my labor for a minute.
Maybe thats what humans are missing, basking in a job well done is important to keep us motivated imo
There are actual differences in the brain and it's not about capitalism.
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.
Look at any other mammals our size.
Specifically other primates and great apes.
They lounge in heards and eat plants.
Some of them fart 100s litres every single day. Fucking legends.
Once saw a gorilla shit a log as big as my head and then fling it ~30ft into a window that a family was viewing it from
Absolute legends
What a hero! Bless!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I'm depressed if I'm not
Yeah there's something to that. Like I feel as though we should always be doing stuff but not what it is that we're currently doing?
Like, we should be waking up and having tea with our neighbors or helping out in our communities and stuff .. perhaps just building, planting, fixing things that we'd like? I don't feel as though we should be fighting deadlines constantly.
Me too. I enjoy my job, and I'd do it for free if I wouldn't need money for almost everything, from my daily commute to breakfasts that both guarantee I can work at all. My paycheck is ignorant of this secret taxation.
As long as groups of people (states?) are locked in deadly competition, there can be no slowdown, anyone who does gets conquered or obliterated.
Especially in USA
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?
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 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.
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.
Homeless?
Super Rich?
I mean, historically, the majority of humans were meant die shortly after being born, with women dying in childbirth, and men dying young in wars. Those that lived those parts may have died from malnutrition or diseases/injuries today that are annoyances instead of being fatal.
With current use of antibiotics in farming; disease and injury will soon be very fatal again. At least we can hope for a reset of the infinite growth issue.
The world did indeed used to be a brutal place. I guess I'm trying to understand what conclusion you're trying to draw.
The OP picture says "humans were never meant to be" something. That language suggests that either we're biologically designed to be something else (which I don't think that person was saying) or that human society was designed to support something better that is less anxious or depressed. I'm pointing out (not too seriously) that that isn't the case either and that prior human societies were actually "designed" to be far far worse.
Realistically no one designed anything, so I'm having a lighthearted poke at the premise of OP's picture.
Stress causes burnout. That's something else.
Depression is when you don't do anything. You won't be "too busy". You're not even leaving your bedroom.
Anxious people can't handle stress.
Depression isn't only "when you don't do anything." That's one of the forms severe depression can take, but it's better generalized as persistent lack of positive emotions and/or motivation resulting from decreased brain activity in key areas
Also people diagnosed with anxiety can "handle stress," just not to the level demanded by modern society without significant impairment and distress
Nah we cannot handle stress. The difference before and after anxiety medication is tremendous. I went as far as having stomach damage from anxiety. Losing 20 kg because the anxiety kept worsening the condition. Trust me, we cannot handle stress.
Depression's enemy is serotonine and dopamine. If you aren't stuck in your room, then you're able to workout. Able to get going. It doesn't feel like life's worth living at those moments. Life's on a pause button. But once you get that energy surge. Grab it with both hands and make sure that the motor doesn't stop running.
Medication against depression is basically the same thing as you get from being active.
I took Amisulpride for a while against depression after losing the 20 kg, then now am on 10 mg sipralexa. I feel 0 depression whatsoever. Quite the opposite. I have too much energy.
never going back to anxiety disorder, it has nothing to do with the amount of work. It's just how my brain is wired. I'm very productive right now because I'm not anxious.
I think how well anxious people cope with stress varies. I'm a pretty anxious person, but I'm actually incredibly good to have on hand in a crisis. I also bizarrely enjoy these situations, because of how much calmer I feel. Like, it's not that I'm not anxious in these scenarios (there is at least one point where I had someone else's life in my hands, and that was fucking terrifying), but it felt like good anxiety.
I've heard similar experiences from some others with anxiety (and one friend who effectively "solved" her anxiety by becoming a paramedic). it blows my mind how much variety there is in how ill mental health manifests, and how much we still have to learn about how things work.
I'm glad to hear that your medication has helped you. It's awesome to find something that helps, and to be able to blitz through tasks that were previously impossible to do. I felt a similar thing when I started ADHD medication.
Wouldn't that be adrenaline or such helping you be calm?
Personally the way I cannot handle stress would be: deadlines that aren't feasible. I'd be scratching heart area because it would feel weird.
When I'm overly stressed, I can't keep myself from scratching certain areas. As my mind is going wild.
In such situations I am completely useless to others. It should be illegal for me to drive on the road with a car in such moments too. It feels like I'm more impacted than when drunk.
It makes more sense to me if I consider the potential impact of hypervigilance — "the elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you". It's associated with PTSD, and whilst my paramedic friend doesn't have a diagnosis of that, I know that their family were abusive, and they identified that much of their anxiety stemmed from hypervigilance.
It makes sense to me that if someone's anxiety is being driven by hypervigilance (a chronically dysregulated stress response), that some people may find it beneficial to put themselves in genuinely high stress situations, to sort of channel the stress into a sensible outlet.
Another related example is that I have a friend who goes for a run when she feels very anxious. She says that she's found it ineffective to try logicking her way out of feeling anxious, or trying to calm herself down, and that going for a run feels like saying to her body "you're absolutely right, there was something scary here, but now we have escaped it, and can relax". I always find it interesting how people sometimes speak about their bodies and brains and existing separately from themselves, often in an attempt to reconcile the tensions between different aspects of ourselves
Going for a run is good against anxiety. Mostly because of the hormones in releases.
Endorphins and serotonine. Anxiety medication is about increasing the amount of serotonine or dopamine that gets used by your body/brain.
That's why I said earlier that people should workout when they are depressed. The problem with depressed people is that they are too depressed to work out.
Hence, when they finally get some energy back, they better get active and workout to prevent a future episode as harshly.
I have absolutely no idea about traumatic experiences. Can't relate how that would feel.
My experience is just due to genetics, it's not anything that my environment did to me.
That's a pretty fucking stupid take, our ancestors had to be busy all the time just to survive.
We are living in a time of 24/7 news and access to way too much information that's a way better explanation.
In fact I even like the explanation of anxiety being a result of abundance of calories more than this shit. That theory posits that our brains can go into overdrive simply because it has access to so many excess calories whereas in the past it didn't.
There is also the move towards white collar work, work that's not physically demanding, that we didn't evolve to deal with. Try going to the gym/exercising regularly and you will notice a significant drop in anxiety even on your worst days.
You are 100% correct.