Why are we okay with long work hours?
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Anonymous
Well you will fund it, you will die young with lots of money that will be taxed harshly and there you go... thanks for your service. |
Anonymous
I mean, how are you still hanging on? |
Anonymous
Doubt it. You seem really bitter. You want a life of leisure - go for it. Just find an easy job. You just need to accept the financial trade offs. |
Anonymous
NP - Nah. The trade off is not worth my life and my happiness. I get the career v job are 2 different things and somewhat easier to grind it out if you are developing a career. Growing your own business is meaningful as well. But ultimately, I think very very very few people are confident or lucky enough to have that path at age 21. I get some older people who had to do the 9-5 in office grind feel that kids now should also be subject to that because it didn't kill them but honestly, aren't we all trying to make life better for ourselves? Don't we all want to be happier and healthier and improve as human beings? I think 9-5 is hard to change because human nature is hard to change. We still have daylight savings. We still do a lot of stupid things even in this day and age when we have tech supporting us. It's hard to know what makes sense but I agree with that new grad on Tik Tok that it's really hard and totally stupid. Working isn't what we're made to do, esp if it's job centric and for 95% of us, work = job. Even when it's a career, you should try to work smarter not more hours. I just don't see people changing because tradition is hard to break. |
Anonymous
Nah. People have to work to live well. The 40 hour workweek is amazingly easy by the standards of humanity. People have to work to live. We are effectively made to work because if we don't work we starve to death. It's that simple. What do you want? A nice life with everything paid for by the government? Then who has to work to fund this? |
Anonymous
First of all, people have moved from physical labor to non-physical labor. See how people who do the former desperately want to move to the (US) countries that favor the latter? Next, the government does not have to pay for someone to have a "nice" life. You can choose to work less and still survive and moreover, you can choose to live to work v work to live often by working "smarter" aka not as much as you can just because you're supposed to or because you want a "nice" life. I say this as someone who makes $250k and is able to focus when I work my ass off yet do not work more than 30 hours or so per week. I say this as someone who wants to work the least amount and make the most I can. I say this as a small business owner. People who feel that work must be a grinding activity are doomed to be unhappy. |
Anonymous
Your post does nothing but change the goalposts. You are still working. I agree with you that work doesn't have to be a grinding activity but face it, very few of us work at a job that can truly be called a grinding activity, whether it's 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week. So your babble is meaningless and doesn't add to the conversation beyond boasting that you can work "only" 30 hours a week for your 250k income while ignoring that you are still working. |
Anonymous
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Working is not the issue. Duh - of course we are all going to have to make a living and I don't think either OP or the TikTok girl are complaining about this.
But how our society prioritizes a job aka how long we work to our detriment or impact it has on doing anything else, that's a problem for a lot of people who work 9-5 white collar jobs. If you commute, that's adding more hours on to the day and when you have other commitments that have to do with real life including raising a family - that becomes a real problem. Even without raising a family, being gone from your house from 8a-7p only leaves you 2-3 hours of free time to have a life and it's sad. Over years, that's not something that I'm betting is enjoyable to most people. The question is why do we make this the reality and people like you who feel there's nothing wrong with it are weird. |
Anonymous
It's the reality because it has to be the reality. That's what it takes to earn a good income and to live. People do make tradeoffs all the time, choosing a larger house further away instead of a smaller house or apartment closer in. But that's outside the work itself. If everyone dropped suddenly to 30 hours a week it would have significant implications for the quality of life we enjoy through a sudden reduction in the supply of labor available with ramifications in just about everything. That the consensus is 40 hours for a standard work week is driven by the market and people's willingness to embrace it. And, by the standards of human history, 40 hours a week even with commuting time added to it, gives people way more leisure time than most of the post medieval era. It's worth pointing out that the areas in the world where people work less hours more typical of the pre industrial West are also typically the much poorer parts of the world. Western and developed society has clearly decided the benefits of working "long" hours is worth it due to the quality of life we get in exchange. Individuals within the Western society are perfectly free to find alternatives. It may or may not work out. |
Anonymous
What industry and level do you work at? |
Anonymous
40 hours was not determined by the market. It was popularized by Henry Ford because that was the most he could extract out of workers before there was a cut off in productivity. And that was with repetitive physical labor work, most people doing skilled labor aren’t able to actually focus and have productive output for 8 solid hours per day. Some employers just can’t move away from this butts in seat for 40 hours per week mentality, but it’s archaic and not the best use of time. For skilled labor there should be task based work hours. Some weeks may be long when a big project is due with slower weeks in between. Set core hours for meetings and let people work independently for the length of time/when works with their schedule. The 9-5 is inefficient and an unnecessary time suck. |
Anonymous
Because Corporate America runs on face time. Being early doesn't count. Working efficiently doesn't count. What counts is showing your face after 6:30 as a mark of being a dedicated company person. |
Anonymous
It’s actually very hard to find an easy job. |
Anonymous
This is an obvious lie, unless you work from home. When I worked 9-5 (before I had a child), I got up at 5am, left the house at 6:30 to clock in by 7:30 with no chance of being late, which was a big deal at my workplace), Worked until 4:30pm, then worked another 30 minutes or so because no one could get out of that place on time without looking like a clockwatcher, got home by 6pm, exercised until 7pm, ate dinner about 7:30, then showered and went to by 9 or 10. If I had 30 minutes to read a book it was a lucky day. And that was before I had a kid. So there is no way someone with kids can do anything besides work, eat, and sleep unless they wfh or the kids are teens maybe. |
Anonymous
| India works 70 hours per week |