[riebschlager]

It's an important question. Leisure to me is to be freed of the obligations of productivity. I think framing it as "what do you DO for leisure" transforms leisure into consumption.

I don't agree that high productivity is the price of leisure. If that were the case, when do we get to cash that check? We've achieved record levels of productivity, so when do we get record levels of leisure?

I'm writing this as an American workaholic. So I'm in it as much as anybody. I'm just getting old and starting to ask a lot of questions. :)

[r3trohack3r]

> so when do we get record levels of leisure

"The children have inherited a world their ancestors could only dream of. A more equitable and luxurious existence. But the problems of the past have widely been forgotten, and their solutions have brought about new classes of problems."

Going to take America for example, since that is the culture I grew up in.

Children don't work in factories or sweep chimneys anymore. Childhood is now free of labor. School is broken but conflating that gulag with labor isn't fair.

Prime working age is 18-65. Mid-to-late 20's with extra school. Compare that to a few hundred years ago and 50% of humans were dead before the age of 5, and 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30. You lived to work and you worked until you died.

The amount of time we spend on food prep, house hold maintenance, etc. is down significantly. The "hours worked per unit X" for consumption is down substantially, meaning you work less to accumulate the same standard of living compared to 100 years ago. The 40 hour work week is also relatively novel.

Life generally sucked for our ancestors. Our world is a utopia in contrast and we take it for granted.

From video games, to TV, to art, to resteraunts, to climate control, etc. Luxury is everywhere. Luxury is more abundant. We just moved the goal posts.

[staringback]

> 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30

Not really, most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

[JumpCrisscross]

> most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years...if a person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years" [1][a].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

[a] http://sirguillaume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Old_Age-H...

[bhhaskin]

We don't get to cash that check, the next generation does. Just like how we cashed it from our parents, and our parents cashed it from their parents.

We have far more leisure time than our parents did, and way more than our grandparents. Our kids will have far more leisure time than us.

[rnk]

This is an interesting article, because I "feel" like my leisure time is less than my parents and grandparents. This is in part because they retired at earlier ages than my current age, with pensions for my grandfather, and better financial situations overall. I feel like I have less leisure time than say people in the 1950s, up to 2000 maybe. But where is the data? This article says for the US, hours worked are around 40/week from 1960 through to 1988 (+/- 1 hour), table 5 https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

It's hard to compare in part because there are very different lifestyles. As a member of the fortunate "programmer class" I have high pay, health insurance, easy job portability. This leads to pretty reasonable vacation schedules, good lifespan. Overwork expectations and stress are the downsides, but these are within my control somewhat and I can just get another job.

This research paper says leisure time increased noticeably from 1965 to 2003 - an increase of 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w12082. This is a surprise to me and goes against my intuition. Maybe we always feel like we are getting a bad deal.

Don't forget the sizable number of lower hourly wage Americans where some people work many hours at low pay and barely support themselves. Americans seem to work significantly more than our European peers https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product....

[staringback]

Just because someone is paid for 40hrs doesn't mean they are actually doing 40hrs of work. We are both posting on HN during a weekday after all

[rnk]

Hey, I'm compiling! I guess we need a new 2023 joke/true statement. How about "I am taking a break because chatGPT seems to be down". I can't translate that code from Java to Rust by myself.

[eatsyourtacos]

>We have far more leisure time than our parents did

I dunno. When my parents got home from work, they were done with work except for rare exceptions.

Now a lot of people have to deal with working with technology that is supposed to have 100% uptime but of course that never happens so random freakout fix something. And even if you don't work directly in tech, everyone wants to be able to get ahold of you because nothing can possibly wait. We deal with things around the world timezones way more than in the past so that just increases the chance that someone needs to get ahold of you because something in another country where it's the work hours need something.

So I'm not really sure about your theory that we have more leisure time.. maybe(?) we have a little more time, but it's certainly not true disconnecting. I can't go on vacation without having to worry I will have to work or check in on things. Even it's only a little bit, it's still there.

[luckylion]

And haven't we already partially cashed it? We have so much free time on our hands, we need Netflix and countless other things to fill it. #NotAll, of course, but if the average can spend 3 hours per day watching TV & Netflix, and an additional 2.5 hours on social media, then they must have that time.

[falcolas]

My mother and father also both had the ability to spend 6+ hours a day watching TV or doing other hobbies in their working years. They're currently in their 80's, and my dad did blue-collar work as a telephone lineman.

Having leisure time isn't new to our generation (any of them).