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Discussion Work is kind of crazy right?

Obsonet

Obsonet

Moblin
Founder
So ok you go to work for maybe 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and that’s only if you’re lucky since a lot of jobs make you work more hours than that.
But anyway then you also have to get to work (which you don’t get paid for) and get ready and all that crap.

So really like 10 hours of the day just gone doing something that most people don’t get paid very well for considering how much the company actually makes.
And when your old you better hope you have enough saved up or else you’ll be working until you die.

I know I’m all over the place but I’ve just been thinking about it recently and it just seems crazy everyone has just accepted this.
 
life's a bitch and then you die
that's why we get high
cause you never know when you're gonna go
 
Obsonet said:
So ok you go to work for maybe 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and that’s only if you’re lucky since a lot of jobs make you work more hours than that.
But anyway then you also have to get to work (which you don’t get paid for) and get ready and all that crap.

So really like 10 hours of the day just gone doing something that most people don’t get paid very well for considering how much the company actually makes.
And when your old you better hope you have enough saved up or else you’ll be working until you die.

I know I’m all over the place but I’ve just been thinking about it recently and it just seems crazy everyone has just accepted this.
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Capitalist realism is a hell of a drug
 
Obsonet said:
So ok you go to work for maybe 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and that’s only if you’re lucky since a lot of jobs make you work more hours than that.
But anyway then you also have to get to work (which you don’t get paid for) and get ready and all that crap.

So really like 10 hours of the day just gone doing something that most people don’t get paid very well for considering how much the company actually makes.
And when your old you better hope you have enough saved up or else you’ll be working until you die.

I know I’m all over the place but I’ve just been thinking about it recently and it just seems crazy everyone has just accepted this.
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This is why I'm incredibly split on the latest WFH boom.

As someone who has worked more than half of his job from home for nearing 10 years, I've always heard a lot of "oh you're so lucky" or "you have it easy" regarding that but it's always been a double-edged sword because you live with your work. If someone asks you for something small after hours, especially if you're new to the job, it's easy to feel lazy for not doing it. It's incredibly hard to disconnect.

However, in an ideal world, it's good for people in that they don't have to lock themselves near major cities for good jobs. It's good for towns that have cheaper real estate where people working virtually with decent-paying jobs can go to get homes and live within their means. But it all comes back to the nature of the work and your employer, and whether or not the employer respects work hours. It requires a lot of self-discipline.

But on-location work? Yeah that shit is crazy. My fiance's dad used to work in Philly from NJ and that commute was an hour and 45 minutes each way, and he worked a 9-hour day. Missed a lot of his kids' childhoods because of it.
 
I agree with you OP, and it's hard to try to implement a change for reducing hours or a day (4 day week) when you have this hustle culture (not accounting for those that, unfortunately, have to work a second job so they can pay the bills) and workaholics that makes the rest of us look bad.
Some of us have trouble accepting that but we still need to conform to that to get our paycheck; the best i can do is to avoid working extra hours and accepting a job that would imply a longer commute (at the moment i'm WFM but the commute it's 40 min...which is a lot for me, but it's tolerable).
 
I'm very fortunate to have a stable career with a great salary, but I'm not passionate about it at all. I have a family to provide for, and cost-of-living is sky high here, so I have to prioritize the stability over the passion. It makes it really tough to accept that I'll be devoting so much time worrying about work for the next few decades. And I've always struggled with imposter syndrome and work related stress/anxiety, which makes everything much harder than it should be. Our culture is built on so much unnecessary stress and pressure.

When I retire and people ask me to reflect on my career, I'll probably say that everyday was a struggle lol

Thanks for making this thread and allowing me to vent. These last couple years have been mentally draining and I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed lately.
 
But you'd be doing some kind of work regardless. If everything was feudal and you were a subsistence farmer you'd be tilling your patch of the field and hoping to hell the harvest doesn't rot all year. Working in retail is a piece of cake compared to that.

As with money, it's taken something that makes sense (you have something I need it value, what's it worth to you) and made it more abstract
 
Obsonet said:
But anyway then you also have to get to work (which you don’t get paid for) and get ready and all that crap.

So really like 10 hours of the day
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For me the total is usually 12 hours, which is really sobering to think about considering that's literally half of the day gone NOT EVEN factoring sleep into the equation.
 
Phantoon said:
But you'd be doing some kind of work regardless. If everything was feudal and you were a subsistence farmer you'd be tilling your patch of the field and hoping to hell the harvest doesn't rot all year. Working in retail is a piece of cake compared to that.
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Feudalism and capitalism have only existed for a tiny fraction of human history and are not the only conceivable forms of labor. For most of humans' existence they actually didn't toil away most of their lives doing busywork where they wouldn't even see the results of their labor, or sit at computers for 40 hours a week letting their bodies rot. Humans worked collaboratively for the benefits of their communities, and their labor was to keep their communities sustained, not to drive up profit for corporations whose only purpose is to constantly expand their growth and income. They also would participate in a lot of different labor activities. Humans sang and danced and played and hunted and fucked and told stories. Any dive into sociology and anthropology that isn't Eurocentric would tell you that. And the future of humanity certainly doesn't have to be capitalism either.

The amount of labor necessary to run a global society is a fraction of what is done today. Not every person alive would actually have to do labor to survive. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."

Also, with the way capitalism is going, we might as well live under feudalism. Shit, Ancient Rome's ruling class had less hoarded wealth than America's.
 
Yes, but you'd be doing some kind of work, and chances are it would be physical. If you're sustaining your community, you'd be hunting, or farming, or making clothes and so on. And if you weren't prepared to do the work you'd get booted out of the community pretty quickly.

Unless non-European communities can photosynthesise and nobody told me.
 
Phantoon said:
Yes, but you'd be doing some kind of work, and chances are it would be physical. If you're sustaining your community, you'd be hunting, or farming, or making clothes and so on. And if you weren't prepared to do the work you'd get booted out of the community pretty quickly.

Unless non-European communities can photosynthesise and nobody told me.
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Also not true. We have evidence that humans took care of their disabled community members as far back as 500,000 years ago.

Here's one from 12,00 years ago!

The overall point is, it doesn't have to be this way. There is a future for mankind beyond wage slavery.
 
Mekanos said:
Also not true. We have evidence that humans took care of their disabled community members as far back as 500,000 years ago.

Here's one from 12,00 years ago!

The overall point is, it doesn't have to be this way. There is a future for mankind beyond wage slavery.
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I didn't say anything about disabled people. I said "if you weren't prepared to" which is quite different.

There's a future beyond wage slavery, because when automation hits there will be very little to do. Then things could get even more uneven.
 
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Phantoon said:
Yes, but you'd be doing some kind of work, and chances are it would be physical. If you're sustaining your community, you'd be hunting, or farming, or making clothes and so on. And if you weren't prepared to do the work you'd get booted out of the community pretty quickly.

Unless non-European communities can photosynthesise and nobody told me.
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I think my main problem is work is too long. Like nearly half of a lot of peoples day is just for work which is insane.
And also I just think most people aren’t paid enough for what they do.

I’m not against work but I do think those two things need to be fixed
 
Obsonet said:
I think my main problem is work is too long. Like nearly half of a lot of peoples day is just for work which is insane.
And also I just think most people aren’t paid enough for what they do.

I’m not against work but I do think those two things need to be fixed
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Oh, absolutely agreed. Add travel and it's worse. And modern work is divorced from the benefit - if you've been grafting in the field or building something, at the end of the day you can see what you've done. There's little emotional payoff to most modern work. In the Industrial Revolution in Britain there was a movement for 8 hours work, 8 hours play and 8 hours sleep, and I think that's sensible. You're not getting quality work out of someone after 8 hours.
 
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Entertainers are weirder to me, they'll find 10 people to give them money but then they don't get 10 times richer than someone being paid the once.
 
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I also hate how in many jobs (like in mine) you aren't actually working 8 hours a day, you don't need to. Working 5-6 hours a day would be suffice for many jobs and way healthier for both the body and psyche.
 
Especially in todays world, where a single person doesn't make enough income du to the endstadium of capitalism, so both partners need to go to work, while still having an entire household to take care of, including shopping, cleaning and cooking.
And if you're a parent, it is even more absurd, given how little time you have for your kids or to just relax.
 
It's terrible. I work in a manufacturing environment and it's regularly 50 hour weeks. I feel like I have no time to do anything in my free time.
 
True. And that's coming from someone in a country that has decent worker's protection laws, whose overtime gets recorded and mostly never surpasses 10 hours before she gets a chance to take a day off to balance it out, and gets paid decently.

I still hate it more every day that's going by and it's taking me a while but I really wanna find a way to live and not have to do this when you're not a rich kid or winning the lottery.
 
I work around 60 hours/week now, sometimes all the way up to the max of 70/week that's allowable because that's how heavy shipping is still and how low we are on couriers and loaders and pilots. I'm supposed to work 5 8's but I haven't worked an 8 hour day in around 3 years now. It's just 100% constant movement run run run from 6am to 7pm every day.

I've gotten real bitter over continuing to work so hard when people who are wfh answer the door in their pajamas at like 2pm or they don't bother shoveling any of the snow. The separation between working worlds was always there but it's never been more stark than it is now.
 
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Work weeks should be like 30 hours. Either four day weeks or six hour days. 40+ hours is just so unnecessary. Bad for our physical and mental health, and it's not even more productive
 
I'm not a capitalist, but in our current culture that we live in I don't think it's that crazy. We're told growing up that work is THE most important thing in our lives. If I didn't have to work I'd probably devote at least 40 hours a week to some productive hobby that I don't always enjoy, and I know people who get bored with what free time they have even after working 40 hours a week.

The pay scales, working conditions, inequality between workers and executives, and the fact that people don't really own what they do during work is 100% bullshit, though.
 
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GamerJM said:
I'm not a capitalist, but in our current culture that we live in I don't think it's that crazy. We're told growing up that work is THE most important thing in our lives. If I didn't have to work I'd probably devote at least 40 hours a week to some productive hobby that I don't always enjoy, and I know people who get bored with what free time they have even after working 40 hours a week.

The pay scales, working conditions, inequality between workers and executives, and the fact that people don't really own what they do during work is 100% bullshit, though.
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The thing is it’s not actually 40 hours a week, because you have to get to work and back, and make dinner and whatever else and then you only have a few hours of free time left in a day.
 
I hate it. That simple. Started looking for a new job recently. Trying to find something that I somehow enjoy a bit.
Obsonet said:
The thing is it’s not actually 40 hours a week, because you have to get to work and back, and make dinner and whatever else and then you only have a few hours of free time left in a day.
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so true
 
As a contractor, I sometimes let myself and my colleagues clock out early wherever I can if the work is done. Being productive matters more to me over sitting around wasting your life away waiting the extra half hour when you've done your quota (and let's face it, beyond) for the day. The commute is already hell depending where you work and if you can WFH, then distractions can happen, everyone knows this. I've worked some contracts where people I work with run to their cars after lunch and drop off hours early. Never reported them. Never will.
 
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