Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric
theguardian.comHyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work.
Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?
It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.
Sure, work is changing, and many people are lucky to be able to detach from such schedules with exciting and unknown results for the future workplace. But those of us fortunate enough to have had access to 9-to-5 jobs would be tone deaf to act like it's such a traumatic experience, when so many people in the world would be so grateful to have such an opportunity.
> Really, barbaric?
Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say,
> It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag...
edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0].
[0]: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...
> > Really, barbaric?
> Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is.
It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem.
But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make.
> awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic
Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.
Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?
I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".
"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"."
As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this time period their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough. Not to mention many of these hunting trips often spanned multiple days from what I gather. I suppose militaries had a lot of cohesion, as long as you don't mind defining "loved ones" as "my squadmates". Family farms still generally would end up with the family cut in half between the women and men, assuming the men even stayed together. Etc.
I can't off the top of my head think of a time period where there wasn't a large portion of the population separated from at least half their family for long periods of time.
The current situation isn't perfect, but let's be precise about what we're comparing it to, and when exactly it supposedly existed and was widespread.
1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies.
2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it.
Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies.
The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.
"Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist."
Yes, they do, even now. Of course, they're so inconsequential on the world stage that you don't hear about them much, but yes, they exist.
Now, you have the problem that they probably won't accept you, and will probably eventually try to kill you if you seriously set up next to them and start truly doing the hunt-gather routine.
But then, that's the authentic hunter-gatherer experience too.
(I don't believe the garbage about how peaceful they supposedly were. It is logistically ludicrous.)
No one is claiming that hunter gatherers were peaceful. It weakens your argument to try to put words into people's mouths. I might as well say, "well, why are you claiming that there's no crime or inequality in modern society? There obviously is!!!1!"
And no, they don't. Sure, you can find a random tribe in the barren wastelands of the Kalahari that's ostensibly "hunter gatherer," but they are much more integrated into the economy of South Africa than any hunter gatherer society would have been two thousand years ago. Most people born into those hunter gatherer-lite societies spend at least some time working in the capitalist economy.
Compare that to millenia ago, where hunter gatherers occupied some of the most economically productive regions of the world. It's an apples and oranges comparison.
That is an extraordinary claim you're making, that people had to be forced to remain within agricultural societies. Of the scholarship in this area that I'm familiar with, nothing supports this. If you're aware of research that suggests otherwise, please share it.
I often see this nostalgia about how much better things used to be, compared to how bad it is now, whether that time period is 5, 25, 100 or in your case, 10000 years ago. This usually glosses over the very real downsides of living in any of those time periods. In the case of hunter gatherer societies here are some problems that we no longer have to deal with once we moved to agricultural societies with central authority. In no particular order
1. Vagaries of food. You had to constantly find food, because storage wasn't easy. You could have a few months where you had plenty of food but a difficult week could see some friends and family die of starvation. This was a very real danger. Compare that with what a difficult week looks like today. This led to
2. Constantly moving. You could never stay in one place too long. You really like the area you're currently at? Too bad, move on before food sources dry up here. What if the new place is not as good and food is difficult to find? Too bad, keep moving. This led to
3. Leaving behind people. If a person could not walk at the pace of the group, they would be left behind to die. There was no quiet corner they could retire to, they had to walk or die. Not just old people. If a person broke their leg, and couldn't walk for a couple of months, they would be left behind to die.
4. Safety. If you lived in a large group with strong fighters this wasn't a problem. But if you didn't, or encountered a larger or more skilled group of fighters, you could see everyone in your group killed except for younger women. That's less of a problem in societies where a central entity has a monopoly on violence.
There is absolutely no doubt that all of these factors led to a high mortality rate. Once people moved to agricultural societies that were relatively safer and had relatively stable sources of food, the population exploded. The choice that people made was not forced upon them. Indeed it would have been difficult to do at a time when society had just started to change and central authority was still weak. Rather it was just people choosing the safe, stable option rather than the interesting one.
The interestingness of being a hunter gatherer is what modern societies find attractive - eating different things everyday, moving to a new place every couple of weeks, almost like a constant vacation. But it ignores the constant spectre of death that hangs over every such society.
My understanding of this topic is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I highly recommend it.
Off the top of my head, there's Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" [1] (popular writing, so grain of salt) and James Scott's more academic "The Art of Not Being Governed" [2]. From the first reference, "One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5'3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors."
So a few points. First of all, you elide between comparing hunter gatherer societies to early sedentary societies and contemporary industrialized societies. They are very much not the same, and I prefer contemporary industrial societies over both. This was purely a statement of leisure time, which was higher in HG societies than contemporary ones.
The comparison between early sedentary and hunter gatherer societies is where hunter gatherer societies have a pretty attractive value proposition. Some points: the threat models between agricultural and hunter gatherer societies are different, and you can sustain a higher population per acre with agriculture, obviously. But people never wholeheartedly embraced sedentary, centralized societies. They germinated in particularly fertile areas where states could most effectively maintain themselves and extract excess value from highly productive land and labor.
But if being agricultural and sedentary were an obvious, natural course of events that everyone would choose, you'd see agriculture and sedentary states rapidly spreading to the boundaries of the geography that can support people via agriculture. That's not what you see: you see constantly fluctuating exteriors in a contested relation with borderlands. The people living in those areas constantly switched sides depending on convenience and what was best for them at a given time. For instance, sometimes, Han China would offer incentives for people to take up sedentary agriculture (no taxes!), and they did. But this wasn't stable, and people would be more than happy to switch back to other lifestyles depending on the state of the economy and the incentives they faced.
Over time, the total area of those borderlands shrunk as a result of technological progress and more capable states. But this took literally millenia.
[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed
> ...while many people use their words to sing the praises of [hunting-gathering] their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough.
I think you're overestimating how much you can have that if you wanted it. I realize many people would reject that life (or at a minimum want modern medicine alongside it), but basically no one actually has the choice.
Hunting-gathering became steadily less 'appealing' as it became impossible to do effectively. In America, start from the near-extinction of bison. Add the privatization of most land, mass agriculture destroying the great plains habitat completely, fenced cattle farming destroying western spaces. (That also destroyed the semi-hunter-gatherer vaquero lifestyle, which people were mourning mere decades ago.)
You can do this anywhere - urbanization of the American East, desertification of the Southwest, the list goes on. And if you want a less-nomadic version, since the open spaces for nomadism are gone, you run into more modern laws actively preventing it. I know people who grew up (not at all as hunter-gatherers) in houses out in the woods that are now completely illegal because electricity and running water have been mandated.
I'm on a soapbox here, yeah. But I know people who do want this lifestyle, people who've tried for this lifestyle, and the simple answer is that it's not actually available. For most people, that choice is gone. It can't coexist with modern civilization, and that might be a price worth paying but we ought to admit we paid it.
I wrote a long response, taking a wider and wider perspective, and trying to be nuanced and yet opinionated, until I realized that if all this climate change stuff that's been posted on HN these past weeks/months is true, and I have little reason to doubt it, the only discussion worth having to me seems to be on the level of 'should be work towards a global government, and if so, how tyrannical can it be to still be worth the alternative of mankind disappearing?'
I'm not being snarky or theatrical, or judgmental; this is something that's cropping up all the time and I'm kind of wishing someone wise would tell me I shouldn't be as worried as I am about climate change fucking shit up on a level that dwarfs pretty much everything else.
And to be clear, I personally love spending time discussing the ins and outs of, say, The Lord Of The Rings, and I'll keep doing that to stave off depression. But for both good and bad I'm starting to wonder if I should go all-in on working toward solutions - if any - to playing a part in preserving humanity.
Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die.
And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.
So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.
"Forced" doesn't seem like exactly the right word.
It seems pretty fitting to me. Work or don't eat. Technically you could decide to starve of course, but it's at the very least coercive.
I wouldn't go to work if I didn't have to. It can feel like prison some days. Forced is the right word.
Why can't everything just be free? Life is so unfair.
Even the US has plenty of support programs that you can survive without a job.
You can bum around and live off welfare. Quite a few people have pulled that off and seem to enjoy it.
Enough so that in Hawaii, for instance, they are providing airline tickets to those who will volunteer to leave the island (and its welfare system) and go be a burden on the mainland, instead.
And every weekend. And evenings and mornings. And the kids are at school anyway.
This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.
Many of us work 14 hours a day, plus occasional weekends, don't yet have kids or a house, and are at the top of our field.
You can call it whatever you want, but its not adding up to a "better life."
Chained to a desk from 9-5 is inhuman if the work is not intrinsically motivating. From quality of life perspective I'm not sure if it's much better than generic hunter gathering.
The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept.
The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better.
Sadly, it's the status quo. Yes, calling it barbaric is hyperbolic - but the end is not to find out the specific philosophic understanding of the condition but to create propaganda and motivation to find something better.
Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line.
To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done.
Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains.
UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.
Most of HS class did not go to college. They knew with alarming certainty that whatever they did for work was not going to be enjoyable, was not going to pay enough, and for some of them would even be physically dangerous. It was just a fact of life. Work was something shitty that you did so you could put a roof over your head and food on the table, and what you did outside of work was your life.
The privileged few on HN (myself included 100%) who find their work rewarding, fulfilling, and extremely lucrative, are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what "work" is like in the real world.
"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..."
I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale.
There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lots of the conventions our civilization has are tradition based and eminence based. They are not the pinnacle of human development.
Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.
>Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.
Who are "we", though?
Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo. The people capable of making such decisions already enjoy a very high quality of life.
"A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo."
Generally, providing better wellbeing for employees is profitable. Or, that's at least what trendy management books tell us. I don't have a clue, I'm just a frontline coder. See for example Hamish "Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't"
Early agriculture was indeed the worst. But look further back, to a time before agriculture. Hunter gatherers spent significanly less time actually hunting and gathering that we do working today. And while off work we have a hard time mentally letting go of it, hunter gatherers instead had pure free time. I'm not saying life was perfect back then, but in terms of work we can clearly strive further. Agriculture has been fairly brief time in the history of our species, so perhaps we shouldn't be using it as a base line.
I think he made the mistake of ignoring half the connotation of the word. "Barbaric" really implies a combination of two underlying ideas. He's right insofar as the 9-5 is backwards and unsympathetic to human beings, which I think is his point. He's wrong in that it isn't physically brutal. The problem is he picked a word with a complex connotation when he needed a simpler one.
That's true, but language is constantly evolving. I actually think we need a cultural shift in how we perceive work. The high intrinsic and extrinsic value we place on it served a lot of communities really well for millennia, but things really are changing these days with robotics and narrow AI. Language is one of the main tools we have to work with.
> It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival,
It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era
> the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.
We should have never left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. :)
Because nothing beats dying at the ripe old age 30 with a toothless mouth, body failing of undernourishment and disease (especially parasites), common death in childbirth, the slightest infection becoming a death sentence, and so on.
Well... These things are not inherent characteristics of hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They were the same until very recently :).
I think his ego gets in the way of his argument. I was thinking about how melodramatic he sounded about all of this, and then I got to the picture of him standing cruciform under a spotlight, and all I could do was roll my eyes.
I doubt he chose the photo. While a great writer, Coupland is a bit shy & awkward as a speaker.
I understand that he didn't choose the photo, but the body language strikes me strange, what with the arms outstretched. I'm probably being a bit harsh, because it's not his event, and he didn't set up the stage, or the lighting.
Regardless, I view speakers who make gestures like that with skepticism, since I associate the posture with grandiose self-interest.
I've no idea about the guy, but photos from live events can be very out-of-context, so I wouldn't put too much weight in this.
That's fair, but the context I'm using is the rest of the article, which is rather grandiose itself.
What a load of shit. All the more clear as I'm traveling in a 3rd world country where people actually have to deal with difficult working conditions. I see people in their mid 70's doing long days of physical labor on a farm for dollars a day. Ask them how barbaric the 9-5 desk job is.
As the other commenter mentioned, hyperbole like this only ever damages a cause.
I think there are probably better ways to do work and as we move towards the connected future I think many of them will increase in popularity, but that's due to an increase in options from our already very open ended lives, not some struggle against imagined barbarity.
a load of shit, indeed! This degree of hipster self-pity is intolerable. I couldn't make it more than half-way through the stupid article.
"Barbaric." I wonder if he realizes how insulting and patronizing that is. I wish he could have met my grandfather, who worked his life in a coal mine literally scratching out a living six long days a week before dying of lung cancer in the 1950s.
A man who lived in a company house, was paid in script, money that could only be used at the company store to buy good at inflated prices. A man who was shot at with cannon and rifle by the us government for daring to challenge this status quo and try to form a union (see "WV mine wars" for details).
Vacations? Unthinkable. Benefits? no. A paycheck that was just enough to stay alive until the next one came along? yes.
The idea of fulfillment from one's work was probably not even a concept to daydream about. Leisure time didn't exist. It was called "resting" and it's what you did when not working.
He would have seen the cushy desk job of the average HN reader as paradise itself, the "stress" of meetings or deadlines as literally laughable compared to the very real stresses and dangers he "enjoyed" : mine collapse, poisoning by noxious gases, explosions, fire, or cancer.
Load of shit. That's the perfect description.
Ahh yes, the always tired retort of "people in the past/in a different place have it worse, so you have no right to complain"
totally legitimate argument, im sure your grandfather fought hard for there to never be better working conditions for his grandchildren, and would hate that working conditions have gotten better and continue to improve.
have you ever complained that something tastes bad? dont forget theres starving children in africa, so you aren't allowed to complain about your food tasting bad, because someone has it worse, right?
Have you ever been thirsty and asked someone for water? that gall on you! people die everyday from dehydration, you being thirsty is just hipster self pity, you aren't going to die, so you aren't thirsty
see also:
>Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the initial argument.
Not every opposing argument is a fallacy. I observe the grandparents [1] as trying to put things in perspective, which is a very reasonable followup on a decidedly opinionated original article.
[1] Grandparents as in comment hierarchy, not as in coal miners.
i never said every opposing argument is a fallacy, but this one definitely is.
what our grandparents experienced is irrelevant to discussions on how working conditions should continue to improve.
Would you have told the men starting the UAW that they should stop because their grandparents had to work longer hours and that they have no right to complain? Thats idiotic, its fallacious, and its not even an opposing argument, its an attempt to stop a conversation.
No need for 3rd world country. Quite a few people (mostly older, but not only) in my whereabouts see stable 9-5 job as freedom and strive for it.
And yet, there could be more. So many 9-5 jobs have little or no meaning, yet we insist they are filled to provide people with "purpose" or to justify their continued existence.
Looking into the future and seeing 9-5 as "a step in the right direction, but far from the last step" is not inconceivable.
We look upon slave and child labor as barbaric, whereas not even 200 years ago it was the accepted norm. What prevents that from changing in the next 100-200 years?
Job meaningfulness is not related wether it's 9-5 or not. And some jobs, wether we like it or not, have to be done at specific predefined time. There're no jobs that have to be done by slaves or children though.
If nine to five is barbaric, what does that make jobs requiring you to wake up early and stay late? This guy seems to have a chip on his shoulder because of some bad workplace experiences and now seems to think every job sucks.
Jobs with regular, stable work hours are not simply there by corporate decree. People actually like having that predictability in their lives. It makes it a lot easier to budget your time when you have that block of time carved out where you're making money.
Now, this guy would say hey, you could work half the time if you quit your job and started your own business. Well, that doesn't match up with the experience of any of the business owners I know (they regularly work 12-16 hour days), but even it was true...now I have to run and operate my own business. I can't just show up and do good work and take home a paycheck. I have to deal with insurance, I have to deal with payroll, or I have to pay someone to deal with all of that. If the only benefit I get from that is saying, "but at least I don't have a boss," it's not even close to worth it.
Rather than going down the barbaric tone. When it comes to 9-5 jobs, I keep going back to city infrastructures.
Where I live in Toronto, all the highways and subways get clogged as everyone needs to make it to the office for 9-5. Everyone then complains about poor infrastructure, but then all cities keep building for a short burst peak traffic. Infrastructure is overbuilt for other times.
I can understand a lot of it is due to having kids (schools let out around 4pm) so everyone tries to streamline dropping kids off and picking them up from work.
I really wish everyone can try for a staggered approach to deal with congestion. I don't have a hard sync like picking up kids or anything like that yet so I avoid the normal envelopes around 9-5.
Many initiatives like Smart Cities are being rolled out but yea... I'm not a huge fan of the common 9-5 pattern.
Another complaint I have about 9-5 is I can't find time to do certain things because everyone all works the same hours. Certain services such as doctors appointments are only available while I'm working, or if I need contractor services at home, again, only available while I'm working. Luckily I work in a city centre so I can do some things in my lunch hour, but if you happened to work out of town (e.g. business park), or if the thing you need to do takes longer than an hour you're shit out of luck.
In former times it was perceived to be ok to see your doctor during the 'regular' office hours. Go figure
It isn't? I do that regularly here in Germany (although of course I coordinate my appointments to not conflict with important meetings etc.).
At first blush, I was aghast at the idea of no weekends. Then I realized I am essentially on-call 24/7, even on vacations, as I'm the primary infrastructure person at my company. Yet, because it's well designed and managed, I do tend to have that free time.
The problem becomes when you don't have that free time because of constant work issues. I can't say a future without 100% free time is such a great place.
Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:
How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
If my job, and even the entire company I work at, disappeared today, not a single soul would notice. Or they might casually notice, but their life would not be affected in any meaningful way.
The work is soul destroying, I'd love to be doing something better.
Yep. There's immense dignity in doing something that society really needs done, even when it's hard work. There's also immense degradation in working hard when you secretly know society doesn't need you, and you're just doing it so someone you think is delusional will pay you.
First, I was a big Douglas Coupland fan when I was young. Especially because I was working at Microsoft shortly after Microserfs came out, and his writing resonated with my then 24-year-old male brain.
However, I just don't think his idea will ever scale to the general populace, though. He says, "people with internet brains are capable of doing huge amounts of work, quickly and from anywhere. " Yeah, probably a few. I think his opinion might be biased because he's an artist who has commercial success (he's essentially made it as a business owner/entrepreneur, which we know not everyone is capable of).
Anecdotal evidence: I'm currently working in an office where there's no way people around here could function without the same daily routine, without micro-management, without hard deadlines, etc. Yet, the company still manages to exist and be profitable.
He does make some other good points, if you can look past the flamboyant/hyperbolic sound bites: * “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.” * More part-time jobs/partial employment
I personally disagree with premise (though a few points I must agree with), I think the real problem is the lack of satisfaction in general. Because some capitalistic societies are obessed with growth, we've created problems for ourselves that are not only pointless, but exist in part, to employ drones of people, who due to their own life circumstances, cannot say "no."
Once all jobs serve a visible, real purpose and those working said jobs can feel the satisfaction of being a part of the "cause", this problem will continue. 9-5 or not.
One example of this may be flipping burgers at McDonalds, versus stocking planes that ship food rations to war-torn nations. Funny how similar the jobs are, yet the purpose differs.
In my area McDonald's is a pretty large employer of physically disabled people. Not a single one of them has the dexterity or strength to load a plane. Coincidentally I know some people who work at my local airport and they don't have any idea what they're loading or unloading or where it's going to unless they happen to speak to the pilot.
Employment does not exist to fulfill your personal sense of self worth. You're providing a service to someone who is paying for it. In fact, most of those jobs that do fulfill your personal sense of self worth often pay less due in part to that.
Get money out of the equation and everything changes dramatically!
If only everything was free and nobody had to work for anything.
Perhaps the word "barbaric" is a bit much, but there is certainly an element of truth to what he's saying about the office being obsolete; at least in some professions.
For example, I am a software engineer, and there is literally no reason whatsoever for me to go into an office everyday. None. I am more productive when I'm remote, and working where, how, and when works best for me. I also have no emotional need for social camaraderie in the workplace, which some people do. My family meets my emotional needs, so I don't need social constructs foisted upon me by my employer. Being social for the sake of being social drains the life out of me and makes me less productive. I've worked in offices and I've worked remotely for almost 30 years, and remote work, at least for me, has proven time and again to work best.
While "barbaric" may be a hyperbolic choice of words, when describing the 9-to-5 grind, I do have to say that the reasons typically given for forcing engineers to work in a modern, open-office environments (e.g. "We need to collaborate") are shallow at best. These environments have been proven to cause more problems than they solve, so in this case, I'll have to side with Coupland, in spite of his embellishments. The collaboration excuse is especially annoying when we still use Slack to communicate, even when we are sitting two feet from each other.
He's been a successful author for over 25 years. I wonder if he really has much experience in a 9-5 career. When he was in that career, was he unhappy because it's an objectively bad experience? Or had he not found good jobs? Or was he never committed to that career because he dreamed of being a writer?
I enjoy my 9-5 career. I realize I'm lucky because I have a better experience than most, but I'm not singularly lucky or gifted to be in my position. I don't think I'm one of the few who doesn't consider it "barbaric."
I don't think it's necessarily universal to place a high value on "freeform scheduling" like he says and having structure to the day does have benefits.
> "Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing"
My work boils down to the difference between someone seeing one ad vs. another. I need money to live and this is what I'm good at. I don't pretend I'm making the world a better place but it's equally overdramatic to say the implications make the world worse. For better or worse or society is about the freedom to sell things and all the propserity and inequality that comes along with that. For all their flaws, a shift away from those fundamentals would take generations and people don't agree what they should be replaced with and there's no guarantee the replacement would be better.
This piece reeks of entitlement. If you love programming or speaking at conferences, sure you don't mind meshing it all together or follow necessary irregular schedule. But there are many people who just want to sell their labour and skills for money and go to their favorite hobbies - whatever they are - without money attached to them, be that woodworking or playing with your dog. Free scheduling should be an option, many people would like that, but calling the other option "barbaric" is tone deaf
I totally understand the people who think barbaric is too strong a term, but I'm not sure why they believe physical labor is such a terrible job. I've had physically harsh jobs before, construction, military, and they could also be 9 to 5, or sometimes they were more seasonal, it wasn't any worse. It was better in some ways, since the physicality of them made me stronger and probably had good mental effects on me. It was great to actually be out during the sunny hours of the day.
The 3rd world countries have it worse argument is a fallacy, the existence of a worse condition does not negate the negatives of another and we should be smart enough to address issues with both and improve issues with both simultaneously.
Having said that, I'm not sure the structure he describes sounds any better to me. At this point, I just wonder why work is still at the center of our lives. It seems possible to me with today's technology to organize a society in a way where we finally redistribute back the gains of automation and optimisation made in the last 200 years. I would love a society where you're free to work as little or as much as you want. Or where everyone is a part time worker. You can get two jobs if you want to work more. I don't have the answer to how it would all work, but I'd love to see a discourse about the possibility.
> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.
That's a hell of a strange line.
As far as I can see, people in tech spend way more time looking at the implications of tech work than anyone else does. (Except, perhaps, people like Coupland who are make their money from doing so.) Tech workers are responsible for much of the endless conversation on web privacy and AI risk and automation and gamification and all the rest. Which is how it should be, presumably - I assume architects spend more time looking at the implications of building design than the rest of us.
The best justification I can see is that he's just restricting a general, Stugeon's Law observation (90% of everyone don't look at implications) to one specific field.
There ought to be a name for making a true observation, but singling out one instance of it for no particular reason. It happens damned often.
I 'm sure there are plenty of people in HN who don't work 9-5 or work independently. It's an upgrade; for me its a kind of upgrade that one does not want to reverse (like moving from a small town to a city). 'Barbaric' is obviously hyperbole, but quitting the 9-5 lifestyle is a change promised by technology that hasn't yet been realized. Sectors like IT could have pioneered this shift, but for some reasons it did not happen (much like most IT workers do not work remotely, even if it's technically possible). I do think that work schedules deeply affect the structure of cities, and it would be nice to see some alternative arrangements, even as an experiment.
Highlights:
while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with it is horrible. It’s a deal with the devil. At least when they’re employed they don’t have to deal with the freefall; the nothingness of free time. (Sounds Heiddegerian - the dread that comes with freedom)
...This constant influx of news and data means we’ve come to perceive time differently. The future used to be a far-off thing, but now we experience it at the same time as the present, he contends...
Obvious: “The winners in this labour force will be the people who have an actual skill,” he says. “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.”
> Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.
This advice from Coupland is the best part of the article, because it uncovers the intended audience: telephone sanitizers. [1]
> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.
This statement actually works for about every profession.
[1] If you don't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham
Interesting read.
I was born 1980 so I straddle the web when it hit mass market adoption.
The differences are indeed marked, my father did the same job for 20 years, I can't imagine that now.
This article was a difficult read for me due to all the hand waving and "in the future so and so will happen." That said, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Coupland. Microserfs is still one of the best books I've ever read, and really hits home in so many ways.
What would be his answer when I tell him that a nine-to-five hour job would mean more free-time and vonsiderably less stress to me while being at least as productive as now, constantly sheduling things for latency instead of throughput?
Different strokes for different folks. I imagine some people enjoy the structure. Other people don't. That's why some people enjoy life in the office while others enjoy writing objectively crappy novels like "JPod."
Not that I'm one to disagree, because day jobs are fucking bullshit, but...
I worry that as advanced technology continues to unfurl evermore convenience into our lives, how spoiled will we become?
It's interesting that you choose to use the word "spoiled" here. It is a testament to how firmly entrenched the class system is.
I'm not sure we understand each other.
If there comes a moment when no single individual knows how to perform essential tasks, because automated sytems have been doing such tasks for us, and then those systems stop working, we'll notice serious problems emerging unexpectedly.
Of course it's actually 7-6 with the commute and lunch
My lunch is included in my day but I know that's an extremely rare situation. The 4-mile, 10-minute drive is pretty nice too.
But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?
> But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?
In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.
When I talked to my brother (a civil engineer who's doing his fair share of driving to remote working locations all across Germany and beyond) about the prospect of autonomous cars, he said that he wouldn't want to have one of these as a company car, for the same reason he wouldn't want to go by train: Under German law, when you're driving the car yourself, it counts as work time. When you're being driven by the car (or when you're going by train), it counts as free time. So if the location was 5 hours away, he would lose 10 paid work hours if the car was driving him instead of the other way around.
I figure anything which I wouldn't be doing on my day off should be counted as work time, including commuting and ironing shirts.