[sneak]

People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.

It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.

It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.

A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.

Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.

> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.

If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.

It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.

[mereck]

> It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.

Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.

[sneak]

I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.

[cookiengineer]

> I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.

That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.

Question to you:

Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?

If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?

[komali2]

> People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.

I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.

I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!

You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.

Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.