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Kinda sorta.
It is more that the things we are busy doing are not fulfilling. Half of everything we do is because we are forced to do it to survive.
Contrary to popular belief, people actually like to do things and to keep busy/be productive... when we have control over what those things are
I like being busy, but I like having agency over how I am busy. I don’t want to be “busy” because I have a bunch of arbitrary and meaningless paperwork to turn in that my boss won’t even read, but I like being “busy” in that I’m happy to spend my time doing things that have an immediate impact.
Give me a 12 hour day cleaning up a homeless shelter over paperwork.
So yeah... I noticed you haven't filed your TPS reports this week.
When we got to UML diagrams I dropped out of programming and CS. I’d rather eat fucking glass.
My bullshit poison paper work was lesson plans. Like, what other profession expects you to tell them what you are going to do a week in advance? I planned my lessons, but I didn’t do it in a way that matched their paperwork. Like, bruh, can you trust that the stack of books on my desk with notes on them indicates something?
Like, I don’t know what vocabulary or math skills I’ll be teaching this week - because sometimes I’d find out they didn’t know how to use a calculator or the same dickweeds that wanted me to have my entire future planned out decided to have a random fire drill.
I like teaching without a plan and I’m damn good at it. Making me spend my Sunday evening (you know, time I’m NOT AT WORK) filling out some dumbass form made for english and social studies teachers which doesn’t realize that science spends months on the same standards…. When I know my shit. Put 20-25 teenagers in a room with me for an hour and they will know the quadratic formula or how to balance a chemical equation. Just fucking let me do that instead of staff meetings and discipline (ie, spending 1-2 hours after school calling every parent of a kid that stole my shit/refused to put their cell phone up/called me a fucking [will be removed if written out]) - just let me TEACH.
My wife is a middle school teacher and I 100% feel your pain through her.
Lesson plans are like of bullshit paperwork, invented because a minority don't do shit without being tightly monitored and a rigid structure to follow.
Good teachers can just wing a class based on whatever needs covering from the curriculum on that day, bad teachers don't care whats on the curriculum that day, terrible teachers don't care and couldn't even teach it without following a detailed plan.
Its because of those two groups that lesson plans exist.
In an ideal world you would just performance manage those two groups and sack them, but because teaching is underpaid there are a shortage of teachers (plus most people suck at putting people properly through performance management), so its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
Kinda a positive feedback loop there. Teaching is a hard job which is going to require lots of work beyond your contract time and pays shit compared to other jobs which require the same level of education and training. Adding the additional work and micromanagement drives people away. Especially when that micromanagement is pointless and ineffective.
They’d pay these consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell us to do things, when those consultants had no understanding of the fact that you cannot teach a physics class like an English class. (Maybe use that money to hire more staff? There’s a huge difference in the work when the class average is 25 and not 32.)
And yeah - the district I worked in was primarily staffed by emergency certified teachers. I taught my colleagues subatomic structure and wrote their assessments, because they often had degrees in things like physical education. I get, if you’re hiring people off the street because you’re desperate you probably do need to watch them more, but at the same time if the vice principal is taking me aside my first day of teaching and saying “you actually have a degree in this, so you are going to have to step up and take one for the team” - idk, if I’m going to have to work Sunday nights, let it at least be in a way that acknowledges that I’m a professional and have my own system.
You not going to break the loop till you pay dramatically more to teachers, poor pay usually attracts under motivated people in smaller numbers, so you cant be picky. These people eventually get promoted, an you end up with poor quality managers running the school who take advantage of good teachers.
Its so self defeating as high quality teaching as you do results in better engaged students with better results that lead to life long improvement to the entire economy. Instead we have ladder pulling from the rich who want to kneecap state funded schools while enriching their own private schools to create a barrier for the majority to compete.
It's not that we're too busy. It's that we're too busy without purpose. What's the point of being busy when it doesn't proportionately translate to having our needs met?
We have more abundance than ever before in all of human history, and yet we work harder than hunter-gatherers just to feed ourselves, and we have less leisure time than they did. We work more hours per day and have fewer days off per year than medieval serfs. And for what? What's the purpose? So some asshole who was born on third base can buy another mansion?
Thats our monetary policy. People must consume more every year to create more inflation, as technology actively reduces the price of goods.
If goods get cheaper we have deflation, they create more money supply via lower interest rates, and the price of inelastic shelter gets bid up, and asset holders receive a value windfall until prices rise. Which is why we are at a higher price to income ratio than 2007.
People born closer to the gold standard are richer, they got in when currency wasnt tethered to consumption.
I mean, it'll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
or a CEO themselves
Long live the 4-day work week.
Which has been proven to improve both productivity and profits. Same as home office. But petty people still prefer to take away freedom from people they consider beneath them, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. That's why I said 'fuck the system' 13 years ago and haven't spent a single second being a slave since then. Every day I wake up and don't have to pay a house scalper is another victory against crapitalism.
If you don't mind sharing - how are you getting by? Social Security? Food Stamps? Section 8? Inheritance?
Homeless?
Super Rich?
I think about this a lot. We have essentially, purely through accident tbh, created a society that we are evolutionary unprepared to live in. So much of our typical day to day is actually horrible for our bodies and often antithetical to their good function.
In a strange way, it's almost incredible. We have invented a rock that we cannot lift.
Eh, agreed except it’s no accident. A small group of people have managed to convince everyone else to do all the lifting in exchange for crumbs and little green pieces of paper. We have allowed ourselves to become our own worst enemy rather than unite and explore the stars
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.
I have a routine day job and a part time night job which I do from home on contract basis. I had vacation from my day job last week, because I have a sweet union job and get loads of vacation so some of it is just hanging out at home, but it's AMAZING how job 2 expands to fill all that time, as well as every errand thing I have no time for, like haircuts. And my dork assed loser ex I still have to live with is like "well you can get these things done while you're off". I'm never off. Never ever.
Ugh that sucks. Is it not an option to drop that additional responsibility? Just say you can't because of "prior obligations" (taking care of yourself)?
I find empathetic people are often the worst at letting things break so they can have one.
Not that I fully know your situation, so pardon my perscriptivising.
No, unfortunately I need the money, and my ex is a bad situation that I have to grey rock through.
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.
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.
It's extremely unpopular in the American business world. This world is so fucked up on so many levels. People wonder how things can be so bad over here... This is a big piece of that puzzle, along with our terrible and underfunded education system, and our lack of affordable healthcare.
Just these three things are bad enough, but then there are so, so many more problems. The United States is a gilded dumpster fire we've somehow been convincing the world is a beacon of prosperity.
You can't just state facts and then call it an unpopular opinion for likes
I'm so tired of working. I just want to live modestly in a bought off house but the ever inflating cost of living will make it an impossible dream.
Humans used to have a much more direct connection between what they did and their survival. Gather enough food and you won't starve. Keep an eye out for other tribes/clans/families competing for the same resources and you don't get killed. Processing TPS reports all day doesn't seem like it does much of anything even though it gives you money. We've lost the connection and our brains can't handle it.