[toomanybeersies]

We need to work less. Society has become more and more productive, but we still work 40 hours a week. There's this obsession that everyone has to be constantly working and then using this money to pay for things. We work to live and live to work.

People used to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. One of the effects of the industrial revolution was the 40 hour work week.

It takes less man-hours to create physical products than ever before. A man and a horse used to be able to work an acre a day, a man and a tractor can do 150 acres in a day, and the tractor drives itself.

That's a 15 000 % increase in productivity.

Clothing production has seen similar increases in productivity, so has mining.

We as a society are literally making work for the sake of it.

[bobthedino]

I agree, and am intrigued by where the 40 hour/5 day work week came from and what the consequences would be of reducing it. Why can't we aim for a world in which people can live happily by only spending half their time working, freeing up more time to actually enjoy ourselves? Is it because some people will always out-compete them by willingly working longer hours? Or something else?

[thatfrenchguy]

Historically, union-drived pressures and left wing politicians is what made the 40 hour week a thing from the previous 48/56/whatever. That's also how most European countries got paid vacations, ...

They have been completely neutralized since, especially on the "asking better conditions for everyone" front (a perfectly valid strategy when you think about it, companies will in the short term, especially for low skilled workers, make less money (that's ignoring the positive externalities from working less of course) ) hence why you don't see better living and working conditions.

Also, there is more mainstream media penetration, which leds people to be more exposed to the "working more is better" ideology.

[misja111]

Reducing the 40 hour working week still doesn't solve the problem of providing a means of living to uneducated workers whose jobs are taken over by AI. Some people suggest basic income as the solution: well forget about working less hours then for those people who still have a job, they will have to earn the money to pay for the part of society that can't get a job anymore.

[teddyh]

Basic Income is a large discussion in itself, and can’t be dismissed so easily, but this thread is not the place for such a discussion. You’ll have to wait until the next Basic Income thread comes up here on HN (as it has many times before), and try to make your simple dismissal then, and see what happens.