A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now. I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies.
EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it.
I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay for every day I took to make it. Given the luxury of time, I made a much better buying decision for the new-to-me vehicle.
These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.
I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the luxury of enough assets and steady income that I quickly setup autopayments on my credit card and never had to think about it again.
I had relatives and friends who couldn't setup autopayment because they were never sure if they'd have enough in their account or ability to pay their credit card and had to strategically optimize when and what they'd pay. The amount of cognative load folks endure juggling many of these artificial constructs makes it difficult for them to pursue and seize opportunity when it arises to get ahead.
Arguments could be made as to why some should or should not be in such situations but this is just one example. I often think about how difficult it is to fit certain necessary things in my schedule and then remember I don't ride the bus in the work which dramatically reduces my commute time.
There are many such aspects people deal with daily and it can be daunting. If you're very wealthy, a lot of these problems you can throw relatively marginal money at and the problem is solved while focusing on furthering yourself.
>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.
The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it.
I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or wealth (real estate, investments etc.)
I think the insistence of many people that they aren't "working class" is bad as it prevents them from seeing what is really in their best interests.
You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.
Class B is a different species. If they stop working, their money will still go up, indefinitely due to passive investments. The idea of getting to $0 is ridiculous because they get richer every day by doing nothing. Class B’s lifestyle is totally different than Class A.
Class A people like to invent all these other sub-classes to distance themselves from others in Class A: middle class. Upper middle class. Lower middle class. Middle upper middle class. It’s all pretty silly. We all have much more in common with each other than we do with people who get richer every day simply by existing.
Well put, but I'd argue it's the Class B people who invented all the sub-classes for Class A. Class A just passively accepts those divisions thinking that it is of their own ideas and doing--it's not. This is a very important distinction. It's through these divisions that Class A controls Class B. These divisions are not just of social class but also of race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Basically all the hate points of bigots are power plays by Class B to keep people in Class A down. Class A people that hate each other and create conflicts between each other are the bread and butter of control that Class B depends on to keep this charade going. Without those people stirring shit up, Class A might actually realize what's happening and call for heads of Class B to literally roll. It's happened in the past, but the same order reestablishes itself over and over throughout history.
You nailed it. There was a thread on economics and Piketty's work which summed it up well: do you live off your labor? Or your capital? The comparison perfectly matches your description of Class A and B. The only way for us A folks to get ahead is to acquire capital.
Does anyone know if there is existing terminology for Class A/B ? Investor class / working class ? Or maybe capital class / labor class.
The typically discussed classes in the US are lower, middle, upper which I always took to be one std below the mean income (lower) and one std above mean income (upper). Perhaps if we used mean days until $0 dollars in the bank if you stopped working it would be more useful.
They're generally referred to Bourgeoisie (for Class A) and Proletariat (for Class B). I can understand the hesitation in using those terms directly, as they're quite politically charged.
You mean young people and old people, working age vs retirees. For the most part, that’s how wealth works. The more years a person works, the closer they are to group b. If young people had the same wealth as older people, that would be horrific!
Most retirees are racing against the clock still - they aren't getting ever richer, and instead crunched the numbers and retired with what they hope is enough to get them to their deaths.
Wealth is a side effect of age. Most millionaires and billionaires are seniors. Despite being in the top percentile in terms of capital, most millionaires they don’t feel financially secure, regardless of their age. I think that insecurity is understandable.
In the Anglo-American world "class" has a connotation of social standing and cultural position; probably because of the quasi-feudal meaning of "class" in the British isles (something you're born into). So few people in North America consider themselves "working class" for that reason.
However in the classic socialist sense of the world, or in other parts of the world, "working class" often just means "work for someone else."
And in that definition even I, an overpaid Google employee, am "working class"
Very true. I always feel like that when people’s first recommendation for a problem is to get a lawyer. For a lot of people this is prohibitively expensive.
Oh yes. Lawyers are, unfortunately, a bare necessity in some cases. The first time I ran into that problem years ago I was lucky enough to know someone who's father was a pretty good one. He also refused to take any payments from me. That helped so much, I it is hard to fathom. Thing is, even with a white collar job, I would never have been able to afford a lawyer like that without connections. So in that regard, I assume I am not poor.
Without connections like that, and especially that one, certain periods of my life would have been a lot harder. With all the long term impacts that has.
On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me.
If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.
If you’re middle class with a shitty car, everyone thinks you’re poor. If you’re rich with a shitty car, everyone just thinks you’re painfully eccentric.
Instead your buy a beat up old Camry, which was in poor maintenance condition, and keeps breaking down, so pretty soon you have to to either replace it or repair it, and that's not cheap, so you go to the cheapest options available, and because of that, those burn out sooner too, and the cycle continues.
Regardless of the hit it would take to your social status, you CAN choose to opt out of a rich neighbourhood or a rich car, if you need a car, you can't opt out of that choice. There's nowhere to opt out to.
>Next, participants received our standard instructions to
entertain themselves with their thoughts (in this
case for 15 min). If they wanted, they learned,
they could receive an electric shock again during
the thinking period by pressing a button. We
went to some length to explain that the primary goal was to entertain themselves with
their thoughts and that the decision to receive
a shock was entirely up to them.
Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially
men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves
at least one shock during the thinking period
[range = 0 to 4 shocks, mean (M) = 1.47, SD =
1.46, not including one outlier who administered 190 shocks to himself], compared to 25%
of women (6 of 24; range = 0 to 9 shocks, M =
1.00, SD = 2.32).
I´m quite intrigued about the outlier who managed to shock himself every 4.7 seconds for 15 minutes straight. Was he trying to go for a record or just plain masochism...
Thanks for finding this, was it linked in the article and I just missed it?
Either way, I was wondering if people shocked themselves out of curiosity, but the part after what you quoted says "Note that these results only include participants who had reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again... But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid." They all already knew what it would feel like and they did it anyway.
No, it was not properly referenced in the article. I had previously seen the study.
From the supplementary material:
> All participants delivered the shock to themselves in this first part of the study. Thus, in
Part 2 of the study, when people had the opportunity to shock themselves again, everyone knew
what the shock entailed and how painful it was.
They also asked the participants to rate the experience from the sock in a 1-10 scale (negative to positive) and removed all participants who didn't find the shock as a negative experience.
The grade the remaining participants gave to the shock experience was in the lowest part of the scale, which makes it even more insane:
It's too bad studies like this have errors (obvious only in retrospect). I learned as a kid to entertain myself with thoughts and can do so easily for a long time.
But I will shock myself at least once just to see how bad the shock is... not because I would be bored.
(unless they took this into account and let everyone shock themselves before starting the experiment? That would be smart of them... didn't have time to read the study)
I am you and you are me! I have to reign in the day dreaming or I can sit on a bench happy in my mind for hours. I too would have to shock myself at least once to assuage my curiosity.
Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage:
>And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
That's why you don't go to isolated places like Maldives (unless you are utterly addicted to diving and surfing) but rather Indonesia... you can spend years travelling around discovering places, culture, people, food etc.
Met plenty of people stuck in travelling mode for years, but yeah they don't just lie around the beach (most of the time).
The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid.
It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.
Some people do not perceive this, they're either workaholics or aboulics.
Tiredness and boredom are good things evolved to prevent damaging ourselves.
If you ignore these you get burnout on one end, but no idea what is the opposite called.
> The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid [...] It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.
Nope, there's a hidden axis you're implicitly ignoring. It's possible to be active and "in flow" doing something without feeling "busy". So it's not just a 1-dimensional spectrum of whether one is idle or doing things, but also the psyche/attitude experienced when doing those things. The corresponding analogue to idleness is "leisure", where it is possible to enjoy idling or acting without coherent purpose.
It takes a particular kind of anemic perspective to ignore the experiential axis, and just consider the axis corresponding to "things done" or "output produced".
For a more detailed exposition on what goes into achieving a "flow" state, I recommend checking out Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's book titled Flow. For more on "leisure", I recommend Bertrand Russell's essay In praise of idleness.
You can accomplish a lot of task checkboxes that are irrelevant. This is exactly what the article talks about. You must ask questions on whether what you're doing has any value - ultimately for you or someone/something you value.
And while in flow state you cannot ask such questions as they're not directly related to what you're doing.
Company values are at least a few degrees removed from this ultimate value.
If you spend all the time in the flow state, you're likely are achieving nothing for your own goals, because you're not setting any. (Or worse, the goals are not thought out.)
Flow is the same as hyperfocus physically, and overdoing will ultimately harm you physically, if not psychologically or socially first.
It's also related to meditation. Like meditation it is not always beneficial, especially in excess.
If this author has some other definition of flow, be careful, there might be a tautology or "no true Scotsman" involved.
I found that a very nice observation! I've been struggling with stress lately and I feel like I'm surrounded by a culture where being busy is valued a lot, and people boast about how they stayed up very long to finish something, and it feels like that is a behavior that is reinforced.
I really like tackling things on my own time, and I feel this "tunnelling" a lot and I don't like it at all. Sometimes it can be nice, but I feel like due to stress I tunnel too much.
And I noticed that after being stressed for a while (weeks/months) it is very hard to come back and enjoy idleness. I think this is a problem in cultures with a "busy" work ethic.
There's definitely something to that. Calvinistic thinking that labor is pious seems to have been a part of American workplaces forever, especially tech. It's even a part even of the stackoverflow ethos-- god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front.
But it's all over the place. Look at the China tech sector with their popular 9-9-6 workweek. Is that an import from Western Calvinist thinking? I'm not sure, maybe?
Whatever the case, "busyness" certainly has been exploited to serve "the man" and not "god".
> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front
I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.
The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!
So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.
> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy,
Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy.
Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard.
It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly harsh standard that turns off a lot of people who need help.
BTW the dated, smug and dismissive ESR advice and premature labeling of people as "help vampires" doesn't help the argument on the SO side.
I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades.
Put yourself in the position of the people answering questions for free. It wastes their time. How long would it take to burn you if every day you had to answer the same questions by people too lazy to write with punctuation and to search for the answers to see if they already exist, who never come back to tell you if it helped them or not, who never reply to requests for clarification, who could have found the answer for themselves if they simply tried to run the code, and who are sometimes rude if you ask them a counter-question? There are so many times you can attempt to help someone asking "plz help this code doesn't run why doesn't it run plz help me" before giving up on the website.
Low quality, poorly researched questions also make SO as a whole less useful to other people. Forums full of garbage often devolve into more garbage. So there has to be a threshold -- arbitrary by definition -- and you may or may not agree with the precise one, but without one SO would be full of garbage. SO evolved into trigger-happiness because of the problem it was trying to solve: quality Q&A without the noise and garbage.
This has nothing to do with puritan work ethic or "worthiness" or gatekeeping. How to ask good questions is something every programmer (or tech-minded) needs to be good at in order to do their job. It's not too much to ask. How else would they know what code to write or what problem to solve?
If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.
In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.
Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
> If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.
If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.
To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?
> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)
> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?
I think China has a well enough set of different traditions to gather from (that perhaps have common antique roots), rather than having been influenced by US' or European's puritanism currents. :)
I think it's the "rugged individualism" ethos at play (although maybe that is a tangent of Calvinist thinking?) - the fear that if you ask questions you will come across as inferior to your colleagues and risk losing a promotion at best or a job at worst. It's quite terrible thinking and leads to isolation which compounds anxiety at work.
Not every American feels like it isn’t okay to be idle and bored. I guess you haven’t been following the real noise about moving to a four day workweek in America. Can we leave the sweeping, judgmental comments on the drawing room floor?
You might not realise it but this stuff gets exported to the rest of the world. I frequently see American lobbyists on British TV pushing a low regulation agenda with the intention to weaken workers rights.
I was working for a project with a small company in Scandinavia. For those unaware, Scandinavia as a region in Europe is very much pro socialist policies and pro work-life balance.
We got two consultants from the US of A and that was a hell of a month, constantly pushing us to overwork our employees, saying that we need to show them the carrot on the stick. Their idea was that people will work for 80 hours per week out of their own initiative because life is all about money made and time saved.
Whenever we would argue anything, they would start almost chanting Wolf of Wall Street style: "Time & money!". I've never felt more relieved to have someone leave as when they got back to the US. It took us almost half a year to get back on track after that whole shebang and the CEO still has nightmares of how much was payed for them to come there and bro up the place.
I was intending to write a short message but it turned into a little rant. What I mean to say is that yes, I believe you are correct and this American way of doing business is pushed around the world in what I think is a real bad direction for work-life balance.
If you/your CEO/folks from your company could write an article/blog post about the experience, it would be a great resource to share and point people to — to seed discussion. Please consider :-)
I don't like being busy, but I also like to be doing something active. I can only watch a couple episodes of a show before I have to create something or work with my hands or exercise. I don't think this has anything to do with a puritan culture.
BTW, no fishing I've ever done has been idle or boring. Fishing is generally a lot of work.
You're making assumptions that aren't necessarily true. For instance, I'll avoid play in order to enjoy some idleness. I've figured out why I think; because I don't want to lose track of time, then have to go to work. The same reason I can sleep fine before my day off, but not before a work day.
I don't even think I hate my job that much. I'm not really even working crazy hours; yet it still seems like there's no free time, and I don't want the little time available to fly by.
Personally, I think there is a big difference between busy and occupied and lazy and idle. I love being productive / occupied, yet I hate being busy. And that has nothing to do with stress or pressure, but rather with impact.
And yes, being busy resulted in a couple of less than perfect decisions on my behalf. The worst ones just for the sake of doing and deciding something.
I suspect 'humans' is an attempt to avoid stereotyping/sexism - but some people certainly do if not enjoy actually being busy, enjoy talking about how busy they are and how little time they have.
i.e. the enjoyment I think is in projecting a certain image of oneself; not necessarily actually embodying that image.
There can be enjoyment too, either normal or masochistic.
Alleged accomplishment tickles reward centers in the brain. In most people, reward from repetitive tasks fades quickly, in some others it does not. (Perfect employees for assembly line. Except we have robots.)
A masochist instead may thrive on the discomfort of it.
I guess you are in a good situation. My work often keeps me very busy but almost nothing of it is meaningful or challenging. It’s mainly just a repeat of the same thing.
I could not agree more.
For years I was just doing things for the sake of being busy.. crossing tasks off my todo list on a daily basis.
I felt so accomplished, however, I was not really getting a lot of useful work done!
--------------------------
What did I do?
- I started thinking about the tasks I needed to do, assessing if they were actually important to begin with.
- I often found that they were not adding value to my product (DarwinMail[1]) and so I discarded them.
- I also quickly completed any task that would take 5 minutes or less to complete.
--------------------------
What was the result?
- About a year on and I have a successful product (well, success in my head is a product which has thousands of users of which at least hundreds love the product and could not live without it).
- I feel more successful, more fulfilled and a greater sense of accomplishment.
My procrastination works as such filter. If 10 weeks later I still care about it, it is probably something important. Doesn't work that well for security-related issues (where 10 weeks might be too late...)
A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now. I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it.
I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay for every day I took to make it. Given the luxury of time, I made a much better buying decision for the new-to-me vehicle.
One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor.