What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.

They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.

That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.

I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.

But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.

I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.

I had a few years of relaxed work, and I had to learn to fill the extra time. It was not so hard for me, but it was lonelier than I expected at first.

I think here what becomes apparent is that it's not loss of specific activity (work) that causes the decline but activity in general which is very much duuuh - obviously.

There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.

As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.

Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.

A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).

There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.

I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.

Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.

We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.

It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.

No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.

No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.

Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.

I'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.

What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.

Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.

Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.

You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.

Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".

Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!

I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.

If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...

The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'

https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...

I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.

But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.

But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.

I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.

You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).

This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.

I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.

People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.

> He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.

It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.

> The poor health came after being forced to quit.

I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.

But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.

Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!

Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.

I worked for a silicon valley company that graciously offered its employees a month or two of unpaid vacation every five years. And people who had worked there a long while agonized over it, if they should take it, and whatever should they do with all that free time??!?

Meanwhile, my European ass and my European colleagues were so incredibly bewildered by it, because we were used to 5-6 weeks of paid vacation per year, and being used to that means you have no issues finding stuff to do outside of work.

Corporate American produces the weirdest drones ever, people are so incredibly conditioned to work work work.

My maternal grandmother lived to 97, while my grandfather is still with us at 99. Interestingly, their next door neighbours are also alive and in their late 90s.

The one thing they had in common was living four floors up without an elevator. Curiously, in that block, people started dying starting from the lower floors.

Realistically I think they were born in an unique moment in history, which allowed them to have a childhood of running around barefoot, barely ever seeing a motor vehicle[0] and an adulthood with modern sanitation and post-war healthcare.

[0] Grandpa recalls how bewildered everyone was by the arrival of the nazis, with their tanks, motorcycles and, closer to the end of the war, bicycles(that part he found hilarious). They've never seen such a huge motorcade in their lives.

When the mind exhaustion hits, the day ends. I go ride my bicycle. I stopped pretending I can be productive on another person’s schedule. This is good if your job allows it.

BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.

So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w351...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable

Not perfect, but less vulnerable to the correlation issue you mentioned.

Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.

any suggestions?

As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.

Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does.

What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.

Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health.

We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them.

[1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.

But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.

I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.

There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.

But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.

OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.

There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.

Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.

The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.

Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.

On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.

To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.

I schedule it first thing, every morning.

I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”

Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.

Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.

Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...

Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.

Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.

There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.

> No time for being a governor at the local school

The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.

Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.

Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.

> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?

This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week

I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.

But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.

I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.

It's simply much easier to walk to a coffee shop, or park, or wherever for those who have maintained their mobility (probably in part by living in a walking-centric environment) than it is to hop in a car, sit in traffic, for small things. It's less of a barrier.

Respect to you and all others doing similar service.

You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).

"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.

They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.

If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.

Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.

Hourly employees have it even worse. When your schedule varies week to week and even on your "day off" your employer may be constantly reaching out trying to bully you into taking another shift, it's very hard to maintain regular non-work activities. Perhaps you have friends who work similar schedules to you, but good luck going to a sports team or club that meets Thursdays at 6 when you don't know if you'll be available then until 12 hours before if ever.

I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.

(I'm not thinking of a making-money-from-my-hobby side gig, but an actual business.)

You can do a side-hustle in spare time, but an actual business, one that pays salaries every month takes enormous effort.

This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.

Otherwise people would indeed do the exact same stuff they would do in their free time. In certain perspectives, that is maximising productivity in essence.

If anything I wasted less time because I did not finish the day needing to recover from a demanding job.

Wrong.

> I know many people with a lot of free time...

Not a valid argument for, or against anything.

You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.

What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.

So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.

And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.

But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.

You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape. Make the experiment with a clean slate: a group of children raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot. Did I just describe rich kids? Anyway.

And what’s “a lot of free time” anyway?

I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.

I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...

There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.

I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.

- Caretaking

- Community and organization

- Art ventures

- Political involvement

All of which are meaningful parts of as functioning society, but almost invisible to the capitalistic eye. Some of these (caretaking for example) are obstacles to one industry being maximally profitable, so sometimes they're structurally pushed out by the simple act of prioritizing company interest over decades.

You'll notice they were also kind of stereotypically married women's activities when women used to be homemakers in majority, and that went away when women of working age joined the workforce, i.e. lost control over how they distributed their working day.

Part of it is just time and energy freed up from my commute. I always felt wiped out after fighting through traffic to get home. But if I lived in a small apartment in a place that wasn't good for walking, I'd probably hate it.

It's good to have options, I suppose.

Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.

And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).

All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.

I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable

1. They are "dumb" and the original statement stands

2. They are not "dumb" and a role that is actually useful is a necessary condition for them feeling useful and the original statement stands.

They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.

He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.

I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate.

> Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week

It depends where you live. If you're in a country with low population growth then the housing cost increase from 2-earner families isn't a big deal. You might be slightly lower down in the house affordability tier, but you will get a house. If you're not (e.g. the UK) you basically have to both work to get a dwelling.

And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s, and their parents could in their early 20s. The trend is obvious, and its conclusion has arrived.

If you can do significant community-strengthening work while also doing a normally 40-hour-a-week job then I'd be pretty surprised. Maybe you only sleep 4 hours a night.

edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.

It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).

The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.

Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.

Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.

For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.

I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)

In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.

> What you are describing is working for someone else

That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.

But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.

It is. But looking ahead, knowing what we know now, choosing to age in a car-centric place comes with known health effects.

This is so good I feel the need of framing it!

Then I got a job I liked, and while some of the hobbies were still quite active for the first two months or so they've all come to rest now. Still trying to figure out how to get a better work-life balance again, because I quite liked those hobbies

None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.

I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.

Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.

The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.

There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.

You just described Lord Of The Flies.

Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.

Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_J._Bartik

Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.

Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?

Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.

Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.

I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.

Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.

Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.

Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.

In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.

All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".

And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.

Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!

VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.

- Low UBI, short term

- Low UBI, long term

- High UBI, short term

- High UBI, long term

Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.

High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.

High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.

I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.

Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.

Especially when real life instances of groups of young children being stranded without adult help exist and play out in ways directly opposite of the novel’s central thesis.

Lots of jobs (both physically and mentally) require slacking off half the shift. I've seen quite a few that on paper require 8 hours of top tier athletic performance. It might be possible to train a person to accomplish that. The work schedule looks nothing like a training program.

To grow, mental and physical challenges have to push people to their limit for X hours over Y days where X and Y depend a lot on what it is one does and their point of exhaustion. If you are not exhausted you aren't growing. When you are exhausted you should be resting. Rest should be exactly the right duration.

If people are never challenged physically, mentally (and perhaps socially) they will decline and eventually the lack of physical fitness will eat away their mental performance just like a lack of mental challenge will ruin physical performance.

There is no discussion about the duration or frequency of shifts.

If you look at it strictly from a greed and exploitation perspective it is a dumb idea to pay someone for 8 hours if it isn't possible to do more than 5 hours of work. It is dumb to have people work 5 days if they are used up after 3. It is dumb to have 2 days of weekend if the employee is not recharged. The collective goal was to exploit them until retirement. If they cant even be allowed to grow stronger it is a truly dumb schedule.

I had a job once that involved a weekly truck full of 75 kg bags of flour. About 10 employees were unable to do a single bag, about 10 could do 1-5. Then there was one guy who did the other 150 bags. Not a coincidence it was the same guy who put them in the mixer. Say 10 000 kg. The world record most weight lifted in a day is half a million kg or say 6500 bags.

They calculated top memory sports people are on average 5000 times better at remembering things than untrained people. They weren't born like that nor did it just happen suddenly.

Lots of people want to start their own business but they are terrified by the amount of work and level of uncertainty. It doesn't seem like we want people to start their own business. We need them to but it looks more like we've made it intentionally complicated. Complicated enough that you probably shouldn't invest in them.

There is also the angle of people able to support you. If everyone has 4 day weekends you really should ask them to help you. If it is only 2 days you'd best not bother.

This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.

> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.

I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.

Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.

Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.

What is the fundamental human nature in your opinion?

*confused in European, again*

Hey, if only there was an entire continent of hundreds of millions of people who typically have 5 weeks of paid vacation per year or more so that we could check this and see what happens?

It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.

Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.

A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.

After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years

> Saudi Arabia

I have some news for you.

There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.

“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...

There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.

If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.

While it's true that there are some positive factors causing it (e.g. housework has been made far easier through inventing/factorying/delivering/installing of appliances like vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers, and the world has just become easier and safer to be in for women through things such as reliable cars with power steering, mobile phone, and policemen who respond) there are a lot of negative factors that just push those time-rich, more society enriching-capable women into the world of work.

The main one being what I already mentioned: house prices force them to work to pay a bank back for paying a boomer a massive price for a house, to keep up with the other two-income house bids.

https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-peasant/

Hint: it's not 150 days.

However, what the work time estimates are missing in this discussion is that you maintained relationships with all your neighbors and most of the village.

Exactly the opposite of the modern world, your work was solitary and your leisure time was social.

I don't think there's a lot of things that one could do in 5 weeks, but where 4 weeks would be too short.