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by claudiawerner
1631 days ago
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>What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40? I can't speak for others, but I'd be less stressed, and I'd be more easily able to savor the moments when work isn't coming. I'd have more motivation to program rather than play video games, just as I used to do before I got my job. To say "we have more time off" when the comparison is the generation that came before me, never mind the standard from 150 years ago - to me means pretty much nothing. It's very similar to how people sometimes say "what are you complaining about? Compared to the standard of living in medieval times, you're living like a queen!". Who's that really going to convince? The second point is that there's a tension. Many of the same people who subscribe to some variant of utilitarianism still want to moralize about how people use their time, by dividing things into higher or lower pleasures, without being able to justify it. For example, they say a high pleasure is programming or (maybe) chess. A lower pleasure is, as J.S. Mill described it, something for pigs revelling in their own filth (today, people will say this amounts to video games or 'media consumption'). When people say "things are better than they've ever been", I'm inclined to agree, on most fronts. When people use that as an argument to tell me to shut up and deal with my lot in life, it's profoundly sad. |
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moreover with the coming automation of many jobs, working on improving our lives is pretty much the only thing that's going to be left to do. (and any kind of exploration of the universe)
it's one thing to not just complain and sulk about how bad our life is right now, as if earlier generations had it any better. but it is quite another to actually work on making life better.
as long as there is a single living being that is not well for whatever reason, we have an opportunity to make the life of that being better.