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.
Humanw 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.
No, I’m not.
👍 my bad sorry
We’re not expected by whom? Weren’t meant by whom?
Not sure what you mean here, to me I’m interpreting this as I was implying some kind of intelligent or intentional design which I think is a misunderstanding of most of the conversations in these comments
I don’t say “meant” as in there was an intent behind the design, neither did the original post. “Meant” as in what something was adapted for, like wild animals being “meant” to live in their habitat and not in a cage. Their biology and psychology was most suitable for their own habitat and moving them out of it is distressing just as the original post was illustrating. Our bodies weren’t optimized for this environment and it causes some distress in some regards. It’s kind of a neutral statement expressing dissatisfaction that our needs aren’t being met by our environment
This isn’t my field, but I remember a lot of these convos during Covid about the parallels of zoochosis and what people were feeling at the time, seems similar to the original discussion
Just thought it was interesting and semi-related
Even beyond the weird metaphysical and iusnaturalist implications, this train of thought is how you end up with people drinking raw water and eating just boiled meat. We weren’t “made” to seek out community any more than we were “made” to not have antibiotics or die from appendicitis.
You lost me here sorry, dunno how we got to raw milk or appendicitis. Obviously these are bad things, but I don’t think we were trying to connect every societal ill to this hot take on twitter.
Stop it.
didn’t know I was doing anything sorry bro 😭
Yeah, sure. It’s not that I care that much about it, it’s just a pet peeve of mine.
There’s this overlap between conservative, traditionalist takes on how things are “meant” to work, as per some intended design and a new-agey, lovey-dovey take on the same thing diguised as progressivism that hides the same restricting, prescriptive attitudes behind a façade of ecologism or pseudoscience.
I find it annoying. Can’t help it. Don’t really want to, either.
Incidentally Dr. Wilkins there is a ringing all the alarms on that front so badly I want to go find a firehose.
So true! If you are too depressed to have any offspring you simply quit the game of evolutin and the world goes on. Delicious, delicious nihilism. Keep scrolling ;)
Hey, not thinking you’re railroaded by some higher power into having kids or whatever else is not nihilism. You just do what you wanna do, man, nature and fake deities can’t stop you.
But if that’s nihilism and you’re cool with it, nature can’t stop you from doing that, either.
Accepting that there is no meaning of life or that no one is ment for anything is pretty nihilistic. But that is OK, I have nothing against nihilism.
Back to your point, reproducing should be everyone’s concise choice. Going “quietly into th night”, choosing extinction, being selected out by evolution has always been an option. Just becouse trillions of your ancestors, dating back to single celled organisms reproduced doesn’t mean you have to.
Putting all tomfuckery aside, depression and extreme anxiety is likely lowering human diversity and we don’t even know how dire this will be. Humanity as a whole will probably adapt to this environment, as people too susceptible will have no kids. I did come close to removing my self from the game my self twice. Got lucky; got some good medication; pull my self out of that mass. Though I got old and somewhat infertile, almost missed my window. When you thinkig about stepping in front of a train, you don’t think about having kids. That doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind later.
But you should make your own decisions. You can read the opinions of internet randos like me, but the decision will always be yours.
I never said there is no meaning to life. I said humans aren’t “meant” to do anything.
There’s tons of meaning to life. You just get to choose what it is. There is no single unified thing you’re naturally “designed” to do. If your goal in life is to fold a million paper planes and throw them all off a cliff then go nuts. If it is 2.1 kids then go nuts, too.
Hey, I’m glad you got the help you needed. That’s good. That’s meaningful. That meant something. To you, almost certainly to the people in your life that care about you. Very likely to the people who helped you. Helping others IS a very popular meaning people get from life.
That’s the stuff that’s worth caring about, in my book. Couldn’t be further from nihilism.
Got a bit intense in the “maybe people should take more time off” thread, but hey. It’s true.
Good talk MudMan. Sorry that I dumped this on you! I have these episodes sometimes. You are a wonderful person.
Dedicating your life throwing paper planes down a cliff sounds very nihilistic though… Agree to disagree?
Agreed.
Humans weren’t “meant” for anything.
Hi, it’s me, the creator. Your purpose is to create entertaining content, but your output has been slipping lately. You live in a simulation created by my multiversal corporation, which didn’t meet growth expectations this cycle, so we’ll be making some cuts to your simulation’s fidelity — just a few fingers and toes for now. Try refocusing your civilization on pumping out Boss Baby movies (they’re very popular here!) and we can talk again in 172 of your years.
This is how I know you don’t exist.
I’ve been delightful.
yea, “unpopular” because we’re all indoctrinated from preschool onward that it’s “natural” to be yanked out of sleep by an alarm, bust our asses to show up at work, move on to things at the sound of a bell for all the daylight hours, then get minimal, if any, sleep in order to do it all over again tomorrow. god forbid you get an opportunity for a nap in the middle of the day
thank the industrial revolution: slavery dressed up in “freedom and opportunity” – same as the other familiar phrase “arbeit macht frei”
you exist to generate value for your owners. that’s it.
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
i noticed a similar benefit to my mental state regarding the rat race. i’d been living in city/urban areas pretty much my whole life ~40 years. when i moved to a rural area and could travel 25 miles in 20 minutes instead of 10 miles in 45 minutes, the difference was indescribable. like 3 traffic lights instead of 12, people know what driving etiquette is, no road rage, etc.
now, even when i occasionally approach the nearest “city,” which is tiny by city standards, i feel the stress and irritability level rising right when i start to see more tail lights than road. it’s insane. and people do this all day every day. fuck. all. that.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
Joke’s* on you
(The joke is on you.)
Helping their employment prospects one correction at a time.
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.
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 welk. 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. :)
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
Fundamental attribution error
Yes! That’s it! Thank you
Wiki on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
“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!”
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.
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?
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
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.
Preach.
I don’t think it’s the level of busy - for most of human history mere survival took a lot more time than it would take us today if we worked directly on actual survival. The problem is that we do the survival by working on too much irrelevant shit that enriches other people, who keep making our share less and less.
From historical anthropology and studying modern hunter gatherer groups, I believe the current consensus is that these people work or worked between 20-30 hours a week. Please correct me if there is more recent information.
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.
I’m currently unemployed, and I was not expecting to be so busy. I thought I would have a little more leisure time, might be able to catch up on a few things that I never seemed to have time for, like catching up with family, playing some video games in my back log, and doing a small bit of travel. That hasn’t materialized. It’s like as soon as I stopped “working”, more things came up that needed my attention. I’m basically busy from the time I get up in the morning until I wrap up for the night and veg out in front of the TV for an hour before bed. I swear I had more me time when I was working. Not sure how this happened.
100% I’ve been off work for months and like you I originally thought I’d have more time for R&R, but I’ve only played like 3 levels (Doom 2 Master Levels) in all that time.
Whereas on my last actual work vacation, I played through the entirety of God of War. I couldn’t imagine doing that now.
Would you mind sharing what kinds of things are taking up your time?
Well, initially there were a whole slew of things I needed to take care of before my job’s benefits were officially cut off. So many calls, appointments, emails, research, paperwork, applications, and so on trying to get things situated before I was officially, fully unemployed.
On top of that, my life as of this past year could be summed up as “one thing after another”, so losing my job was part of that, and it didn’t end there. Deaths in the family. Major medical issues. Major accident/injury (that literally wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t unemployed b/c it was a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing). The list of stuff that’s happened since losing my job goes on.
Some things boil down to personal choices I’m making. For instance, now that I have more time than income, things I might’ve paid a professional to do, I’ll just handle it myself when it makes sense to do so. Similarly, when friends and family need help with stuff, I’m making myself available for that. Things like taking care of pets for people when they have to travel for work, helping a friend put together a shed, helping move heavy furniture, etc.
In my own home, I’m taking on a much larger chunk of the day to day chores. My partner is having to shoulder more of the financial burden and having to deal with lifestyle cutbacks because of my situation, so I take a lot of pride in being able to relieve him of as much housework as possible. I’m the one doing the bulk of the dinner prep, a lot of the daily clean-up stuff, and things of that nature.
I’m also doing some things to help insulate us in case of a severe financial down turn. For example, I’m building and planting a larger garden this year than originally planned. I’m prepping all my canning and preservation equipment to make the most of whatever I’m able to grow. I’m clearing out old junk and reorganizing our storage spaces so we have more room to stock up on necessities.
Although I’m not devoting a ton of time to job hunting yet, I am still spending time doing some light networking, looking at job postings, investigating new skills, and things of that nature for when I do inevitably get back into the rat race.
Keep in mind, my days run together now and if you asked me what I did yesterday, I could probably only recall about 10% of it. Plus, this is already turned into a novel of response even though I’ve kept things high level, but know for sure, it’s all this stuff and so much more.
This is common, it’s because there was a huge backlog of things you just never got around to doing because you didn’t have enough time. When you’re working you prioritize some relaxing time because you have to go back to work soon. Now you have to do all the tasks you’ve stored up.
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.
Especially in USA
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.
As long as groups of people (states?) are locked in deadly competition, there can be no slowdown, anyone who does gets conquered or obliterated.
There is no reason why taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens. But if everone no longer had to worry about survival, no one would put up with corporate abuse from rich cunts and plus if they’d paid their fair share of taxes and couldn’t just steal tax money to gamble with, they’d never be as filthy rich as they are to begin with.
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.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
I think this is accurate. We may be the most “intelligent” animal on this planet, but we’re still animals. We’ve been pulled out of a natural order and forced into systems the worst of us came up with to keep said worst ones happy. At the exact same time we also have the capacity and potential to make this planet a habitable, utopia for all creatures, but those systems, man…
Yeah, I feel this. We’ve been forced into a system that treat life like a nonstop grind instead of something we’re meant to actually live. Real connection got replaced by control. It’s crazy how unnatural all this ‘normal’ really is.
