welp… time to clock out…
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibioticsHave kids, a dog, a house, two cars, and a white picket fence.
In Asia it’s even worse. Standard work day in China for example is 9-9-6 which 9am to 9pm six days a week - remember that next time you see China living in 2070 propaganda. Six days a week is still de facto standard in most Asian countries.
The best part is that the actual work output is actually worse than five day 9-5 but I guess you have to keep the masses too busy for self awareness even if it costs economically. I’d remote contract with many teams in Shenzen, Tokyo and Hochiminh city and its incredibly how little actual work they get done with these crazy hours and its not due to lack of employee skill. It’s stupid.
The 996 in China is far from standard, it’s prominent mainly in the informatics/electronics sector, and it doesn’t exist in the public sector as it’s technically illegal afaik, just not prosecuted. Also, there’s increasing pushback in China against it, and it’s diminishing in scope.
You’re right and I’ve edited that my pov is from tech side after posting but for some reason edit didn’t confirm. Can’t really comment on areas as I work in software but it’s technically illegal everywhere including less developed asian countries but no one is actually enforcing this unfortunately.
Bruh, I worked in Taiwan for a while. Those hours are insane but most of the time you’re just sitting around or doing busy work. Tasks that I would do in a day would take me about a week in Taiwan because of all the meetings and dinners that got shoved in between. If you work in Asia I hope you like your colleagues because they’re basically your family and friends.
From 2020 to 2025 I worked maybe two hours a day while remote. Made millions for my company but I didn’t have to work continuously through out the day. It was a nice existence. Went through two layoffs in that time but I finally had to take a job in an actual work environment.
#meirl
It should be illegal to call it 9-5 when employers don’t pay you for your lunch break. It’s like when Subway got caught with their not that long foot longs. It’s BS. They have the nerve to expect us to be honest when they can’t even be honest about how they’re going to shill us out of work-life balance. Capitalism is just modern slavery y’all. It’s time for this charade to end.
That’s what my gig is, but that’s also cuz I’m salary and just work through the lunch hour so I can sign off early to ‘go home’.
Remote work has a lot of benefits.
monkey’s paw:
you get paid for lunch break but in return, your hourly wage diminishes by 12%, sothat your total salary stays the same.
Ok how about you’re free to eat the weak and old employees (if you take on their work load) plus during lunch breaks you get to hunt for food in surrounding offices.
Speaking as an American, we’d totally fall for it, too
I think people are confused by seeing influencers and/or rich people and thinking what they have is normal.
In the 1500s it was sun-up to sun-down, 6 days a week for the work outdoors. Once the sun set, nothing could really be done. If you were a typical peasant you couldn’t even afford to keep a candle lit. So, people went back to their one-room huts with their livestock in the same room and slept and/or waited for morning. They didn’t have to work Sundays, but they were absolutely required to attend church on Sundays, so it wasn’t a free day. There were other days off, but many of them were days where you had to do a certain prescribed activity.
In the early 1800s it was 12 hours of work, 6 days a week. Industrial era lighting technology meant that work could continue after the sun had set, so there were no winter days where you only worked 8 hours. Also, because this was the era of the factory, people had to commute to the factory and back, so if you were lucky you had a full 10 or 11 hours when you weren’t working or commuting. If you wanted to sleep for 8 hours, you’d have 2-3 hours to do your cooking, eating, cleaning, bathing, mending, socializing, etc.
Thanks to tireless and bloody protesting by labour unions, 6 days of 12 hours each was shortened to 5 days of 8 hours each. It started in Chicago. The “Haymarket Affair” was a protest that led to a riot which led to public hangings. But, eventually, as a result of that, the work day was shortened to only 8 hours. Then, in the years that followed, a 2 day weekend became standard.
It might not feel like it, but your ancestors would be jealous about how much free time you have these days. Your distant, peasant ancestors might actually have had fewer work hours. But, they only stopped working when it was too dark to do anything, and then they basically sat or slept in a tiny, drafty, stuffy, one-room hut along with their livestock until the sun came up.
If we kill and eat the rich and use their bones as decorations, it would be possible to keep a bit more of the value of our labour. But, we’re nowhere near a situation where we can all live like the rich. Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc. Life is hard, and has always been hard.
But, they only stopped working when it was too dark to do anything, and then they basically sat or slept in a tiny, drafty, stuffy, one-room hut along with their livestock until the sun came up.
This is not entirely true though; people have lived up in the north for ages, and they certainly did not just sleep up to 24h per day for several months. “Just sitting” isn’t how I’d describe it either, since those were the times for handcrafts, storytelling… etc. Expensive candles were were not the only source of light, for example around here people used specific wood chips they burned to get some light - obviously it’s nothing like modern day lighting, but it wasn’t just total darkness either.
Interestingly, the one glaring exception to this is hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They had to work less hours than modern day workers. Hunter gathered groups tended to evolve cultural practices that lead to constant population. When you’re living off the land, the land only gives what it gives. When your area is already near its population carrying capacity, there isn’t a ton to gain from putting in extra work. You go and gather what you need for the day, and that’s it. Getting extra will just mean more food that is rapidly spoiling, leaving less for tomorrow. Better to just sit in camp, sit around the fire, sing some songs, and conserve some calories.
If you own/use as much as a hunter-gather owned/used, you also wouldn’t need to work very much.
Take away the fridge, tv, computer, phone, car, hvac, stove, microwave, water, electricity, gas, 95% of the house, going out to eat, etc. You are not left with many expenses. You can live that way, it doesn’t require much working to maintain that lifestyle.
Now afford a place to pitch that tent.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2751-Two-A-Edwards-MO-65326/456747770_zpid/
$7,500 and you fully own your 3.4 acres. That shit won’t take long to pay off. Now, you actually own more than the hunter/gatherer did!
Edit: Grabbed a different one to make sure there was no HOA
Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc. Life is hard
This is only true because capitalism is limiting technology to the point where all these mundane tasks can’t be automated or improved with tech so that it can be possible for all to self-maintain. Yes, not that simple and yeah someone would need to program things and maintain things, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to believe that humanity can waste so much time and money on something as unethical as AI but somehow can’t come up with technology to let people maintain crops without having every piece of the puzzle we have now.
They can do it. Everybody talks about how crazy it is about how in such a short time span we’ve gone from flying planes to landing on the moon and it is ridiculous. It’s not that inconceivable to believe that we can come up with tech to better maintain society beyond what we have now. People want to keep the status quo because they limit their minds to what has been.
Capitalism dictates that profit means everything. We don’t need pot holes to be filled every other year just because people get a job. People shouldn’t be dependent on such a system to survive. Pot holes can be filled with a solution that will not dissipate over time but capitalism doesn’t want that. It wants to make sure there’s a demand to pay someone despite the penalty of the many.
This is only true because capitalism is limiting technology
Capitalism is trying as hard as possible to replace people with machines, but there are a lot of jobs that machines simply can’t do.
to landing on the moon
Hundreds of millions of people paid the equivalent of thousands of dollars each for a dozen men to be able to walk on the moon. “Walking on the moon” isn’t some activity that anybody can do now. It was effectively a stunt to show that it could be done
Capitalism dictates that profit means everything.
Only in the eyes of communists.
Capitalism is trying as hard as possible to replace people with machines, but there are a lot of jobs that machines simply can’t do.
This is not absolutely true. I’ve seen and worked manual jobs that could absolutely be automated by a fairly simple machine. There isn’t much reason to automate low-paying jobs away.
There are also a lot of pointless “bullshit jobs.” ~20% of people think their own jobs are pointless.
I’ve been around the tech startup scene for a while now, and they often do a lot of pointless work that everyone knows isn’t useful, just because they know that’s what’s “hot” right now with investors.
There isn’t much reason to automate low-paying jobs away.
Ok, fair enough.
There are also a lot of pointless “bullshit jobs.” ~20% of people think their own jobs are pointless.
How many of them are right? Maybe some of them. But, a lot of people don’t appreciate the whole system they’re part of.
do a lot of pointless work that everyone knows isn’t useful, just because they know that’s what’s “hot” right now with investors.
I doubt it’s truly pointless. Sure, it might not end up working, but maybe the investor actually knows more than the workers. There are a lot of successful companies that I saw in their early stages and thought “nobody’s ever going to pay money for that”, and I was completely wrong.
To your last point - do you believe that profit is not valued above all else in our current society?
I’d like to understand your view here further if you’re happy to elaborate
do you believe that profit is not valued above all else in our current society?
Of course not. Just look at a typical commercial. You’re supposed to drink coke because it’s an activity you can do with friends. You’re supposed to buy a truck because it lets you get outdoors and go fishing. You’re supposed to buy makeup so that you can look glamorous for your friends and eligible men.
If profit were the most valued thing, these commercials would be all about how drinking coke makes you more focused so you can earn more money, and how your truck allows you to take on a side hustle to make more money.
The advertisers don’t give a shit about all that stuff, you’re supposed to buy things to make the company money. If there was no money to he gained, they wouldn’t sell and advertise it. They’re just trying to convince you you need product x for activity y
The advertisers don’t care. But, the people they’re advertising things to do care. For them, profit is not valued above all these other things, thus the advertisers need to target things they do care about: friends, family, status, leisure activities, etc.
I agree with that. But the claim was that capitalism puts profit above all else, not necessarily that individual people do that.
I think it’s more likely that people saw their parents or grandparents living on a single income, so between two people there was a lot more “free” time. When one adult is managing the home, and the other is making money, both get to be more off duty after work. The grocery shopping, meal prepping, social calendar finagling, and cleaning were happening simultaneously with the money making job.
Managing a household is a whole ass job and a lot of people are expected to do it on top of their day job and that’s why we feel like we have no time. I don’t think we’re comparing ourselves to celebrities, just our own family members.
I think it’s more likely that people saw their parents or grandparents living on a single income
If their parents were white and American and this was just after WWII, that’s possible.
Just after WWII the US was basically the only advanced economy in the world that hadn’t been flattened by war. While European and Asian states had had all their factories and cities bombed, the only attack on the US was an attack on strictly military targets in a far-off place that wasn’t even a state yet. In addition, during the Great Depression FDR put into place all kinds of New Deal policies that blunted the power of the ultra rich and strengthened the power of workers. So, when WWII ended a lot of workers benefited from strong unions and weak rich people. In addition, there were now modern grocery stores, running water, electrical appliances, etc. so a housewife had a much easier time of it than her great-grandmother might have in the early 1900s.
That period wasn’t typical though. It definitely wasn’t like that in the Gilded Age, the 1920s. The 1930s had the Great Depression. The 1940s of course had WWII. Before that, in the 1800s and early 1900s it was often common for a woman to stay home while her husband worked. But, she had a pretty gruelling job. She had to get groceries (or garden (which was closer to farming than the hobby people have today)) and cook, but without any modern appliances, including a refrigerator. That also meant creating a lot of preserves or canning. She had to do laundry with a washboard and soap. Cleaning meant a broom, mop and bucket. Cleaning also meant making your own cleaning supplies from scratch. Clothes were expensive, so a lot of time was spent either sewing new clothes at home, or mending old ones. So, even though it was 1 income for 2 adults, both adults were doing a really gruelling day of work, not like the nicer version of that from the 1950s.
So, while it’s true that some women today “manage a household” on top of a 9-5 job, modern appliances and stores mean that they do a fraction of the work that their great-great-great-grandmothers did.
Oddly, though the work type has changed, there’s only about 5 hours less a week of housework than there was in 1900. Heck that’s less then 45 minutes a day difference, even with everything you mentioned.
I agree the work is far less physically demanding, but modern standards dictate about the same amount of time burden, the difference lies mainly in that men have picked up 13 more of those hours a week, and that it’s more rare for only one adult to work outside the home.
That seems extremely hard to believe to me.
Looking at the actual study, something suspicious is this, from Table 3:
1920s farmwives reported spending only 3.9 hours per week taking care of children and adults. That’s less than an hour a day. Does that really sound reasonable? A child can be ignored except for a brief, less than 1 hour period each day? My guess is that in the 1920s tthere was a lot of X+childcare. Like, making a meal while also keeping tabs on the children, maybe holding one on the hip if it was too young, or having them help out if they were old enough. Or, something similar while cleaning or mending clothing. This wouldn’t show up in extra hours of work done. But, it would make the work more challenging and less fun. It’s often fun to cook for people. It’s much less fun to cook for people while also wrangling multiple kids at the same time.
Another big difference between 1920 and 1965 is that time spent “Purchasing, management, travel, other” went way up. Purchasing, i.e. shopping, is clearly something that has to be done. But, it is also sometimes a leisure activity. If you just purely count it as housework, then mindlessly scrolling for things on amazon.com is a household chore.
The paper is really short on details. I’d like to see what the breakdown of tasks actually was. If “housework” includes things like reading a kid a bedtime story, scrolling for deals on amazon, and going to a kid’s soccer game, then sure I can imagine that “housework” hasn’t really gone down. But, I think the reality is that the true “work” part of housework really has gone down.
In Table 3, the only one that actually breaks down activity by time and compares different time periods, the latest date mentioned is 1965, 60 years ago. I think even by 1965 the amount of drudge work was down by a lot. But, I imagine that it has also gone down much, much more in 2025.
The hours taking care of children thing seems very small to me as well, but there was a lot less to raising kids back then.
Parents weren’t expected to participate in educational or self-esteem raising play specifically for their kids. Sure, playing blocks with my daughter is better than scrubbing on a washboard, But it’s not something I would pick to do without her. Parents are spending way more time with their kids than they were in the '70s, so I can’t imagine how much of what we would consider neglect today was happening in 1900. It’s still a chore. This is about time, not difficulty. I’m not arguing that things aren’t better now. I’m just arguing that we don’t have a lot more time.And I don’t know if you manage your household, but scrolling on Amazon for the thing you need sucks. I don’t like doing it, and it absolutely counts as a chore. I wish it was someone else’s job. I’m not saying it’s hard, but it is not leisure. Emptying and filling the dishwasher are both very easy tasks, but they’re not leisure. Our chores are way easier, but they still occupy a crazy amount of time considering how little time we have. Part of that is because our houses are bigger which is definitely nicer, but part of why our houses are bigger is because our communities are smaller/ non-existent.
It’s all trade-offs, but frankly I’m pretty sick of the argument that because things are better than they were in the past. We should all just be happy and satisfied with things that are crappy.
Immediate edit: And saying that shopping is a leisure activity so it’s not work… I don’t think they’re talking about going out window shopping downtown in the chore section. Pretty sure they’re just talking about household management shopping. I’m surprised that has gone up, except for when you add travel… That’s commute. I’m 0% surprised that has gone way up.
Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc.
and herein lies the paradoxy. how is that compatible with there being an unemployment crisis at the same time?
“someone” doesn’t mean “everyone”.
Because illegal immigrants were willing to work under conditions and for pay that American citizens would never put up with.
Do we actually archaeologically/anthropologically know that this is the amount of time that people spent working in those different periods?? Would love to see sources because I always think this is one of the most valuable things those fields can bring to us, but I’ve had trouble finding clear answers.
There’s a lot of evidence of what life was like for peasants back in the Medieval period. But, it’s hard to be exact because there were a lot of things that were taken for granted so nobody bothered to write them down and clarify.
Here’s an article about it:
https://www.yeoldetymenews.com/p/do-you-work-more-than-a-medieval
What’s well known, for example, is how many sundays and feast days there were. What’s less known is what actually happened on those days. For example, the Monday and Tuesday after easter were ale-drinking feasts. What was a feast though? In some cases it was a “party” where attendance was mandatory and you had to pay a fee. Yes, there was drinking, but was it a party, or was it one of those “work parties” where you had to go, had to be on your best behaviour, etc.?
Because it varied a lot century-to-century and also varied location-to-location, it’s hard to pin down what it was like unless you’re looking at a specific location at a specific time, and it’s a location and time where there’s good data. What is pretty well known is that nights were really dark. Even candles were expensive for a peasant. So, when the sun set, work more or less stopped
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
Beautiful, thank you so much! Will read momentarily.
Update: Good and pretty compelling source. May not be primary, but I appreciate the easier reading and I enjoy that they basically put confidence intervals on their answers.
But also, wow the rest of this site is hilarious. Bookmarked!
Solid review of the source, now I need to make a note to check it out later…
Yeah, that particular article is a serious more historical one and then most of the others on the site are satire written in a cheesy old English style and medieval setting and it’s killing me
Yay! A chance for me to link to my favorite blog: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivc-rent-and-extraction/ (may require reading part IV.a and IV.b first).
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is right now doing a series on how peasants lived. Arable land is limited, people really don’t want to watch their family members starve, and the entire economic system is maybe kind of reliant on squeezing peasants to do the things necessary for society to function, so there’s strong incentives of all kinds to work a lot
Back in the 50s they thought people in the year 2000 would only work 20 hours a week and the biggest problem would be too much free time.
If we don’t make permanent retirement for all of humanity a goal we won’t get there. But the unifying factor for every political party is MOAR JOBZ. Hell, even the ancoms think people should work.
And we basically did that with agriculture already. In industrialized nations less than 10% when just a couple hundred years ago it was over 90%.
Back in the 50s they thought people in the year 2000 would only work 20 hours a week and the biggest problem would be too much free time.
Back in the 50s they had strong unions and great New Deal laws that helped workers out. But, they didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t understand why things were great. They didn’t realize that by the 70s politicians would already be rolling back all those protections, and that people wouldn’t object. In addition, the people in the 50s just assumed that black people would continue to be an underclass who could be exploited. So, a white person could do less while a black person picked up the slack.
In the 1500s
(I assume amerikkka)
AND with no supplemental information offered… Off to the races!
love me some internet.
*sources plz don’t apply
And they wonder why no one wants to have children anymore. Between not having enough money and not having enough free time, how the fuck do they expect all that? The rich really are a parasite and capitalism is a cancer.
My version:
24 hours in a day
12 hour shift
1 hour commute each way, so 2 hours
1 hour cooking/eating/cleaning
1 hour showering, getting dressed, getting ready for the next day.
Uh oh, bedtime if I want to have a chance at 8 hours of sleep.
1 hour walking the dog and playing with her. 7 hours of sleep possible.
Fuck it, I’ll get groceries next week I guess.
Trouble sleeping due to the anxiety of not getting enough sleep.
Cry.
Sleep 5 hours.um uh buy less avocado toast
Yeah and I’ll skip the lattes too. That’ll reclaim an hour every day.
Have you tried not eating and drinking yourself to sleep yet?
I save that for when I have 24 hours off to flip from day shift to night shift or vice versa. Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that the 12 hour shifts frequently rotate. Fuck me, right?
Rotating shifts are lovely. I used to work in a factory for 3 years that did weekly day/night/afternoon shifts. Living in perpetual jet lag did fucking wonders to my circadian rhythm and blood pressure. The pay was amazing, but not BP over 200 and falling asleep at the wheel amazing.
How many days do you work a week?
It varies. Usually 3-4 unless somebody takes PTO, but a few times per year there’s like a month of 6-7.
WFH has been a blessing.
You easily eliminate almost 2h from there, no commute, and some workdays no showerp/getting ready to go out. Even when I shower I try my damnest to do it between meetings in company time.
I also do zero overtime, you’d be surprised that there are actually decent consultancy companies in that regard.
As soon as I got a taste of working from home back in 2020, I knew I was never going back to the office. I bought a nice chair and built a good computer, and now I just hang out every day while working when I feel like it. I’ve come up with enough shortcuts and workarounds that I can do my job over twice as fast as my coworkers, though I’ll never tell my boss that. I do have OT sometimes, but I get paid well for it, and still rarely have to put in a full 8 hours of actual work in a day, even when getting an extra several hours of time and a half. People look down on hourly pay, but it’s way better than salary for times like those.
You two have hit the jackpot apparently.
I got lucky for sure. A lot of my friends in the office tried to keep working from home after covid and got let go. I just happened to time it perfectly where I asked a little later, after the higher ups got worried they were letting too much of the younger talent go by being so rigid with the in-office mandate.
I thought for sure they’d let me go when they found a replacement willing to be in the office, but it’s been years and none of the new hires in my department have picked it up nearly well enough to take over my responsibilities. I think it’s settled down enough by now that I’m pretty safe with my work from home exception.
Lol are you me?
This is why I demand work from home.
I hate commuting.
Sometimes you can sit and cut vegetables and peel potatoes in a meeting… Which drastically cuts down meal prep time, I find.
Just don’t be like the guy at my job loading your dishwasher with your mic unmuted.
When you’re crying about the 10th Teams Meeting that week you can blame the onions.
I guess anon is too tired to do maths correctly. That sums to 21 hours, so only 3 left instead of 4.
Thanks for making it worse.
1h unpaid overtime?? Explain? So much wrong here, and 1h is just 1h, but why would you ever work unpaid??
Working through the lunch hour, as someone else said, but I want to add that this is why you leave the freakin building for that hour.
Lose your job otherwise
not OP
I’ve had numerous jobs that had ‘unwritten rules’, such as being in, dressed, and ready to clock in 15 minutes before the shift starts. Being 1 minute late 3 times in a month was grounds for dismissal. It’s the old way that everything wanted to work.
If the job market is bad and managers are tyrants, you end up being soft-forced to put in more time.
If you don’t do it, you prob won’t get fired, but you prob also won’t get raises in hopes for attrition.
“Work 1 hour extra or get fired” goes a very very long way to people that work minimum wage and can barely read, let alone fight a court case, my man…
I think they are referring to a lunch break they are forced to work.
9-5 is 9h, so they probably work the whole time and don’t get OT for the 9th hour.
9-5 is 8hrs, you might be thinking 8-5 with unpaid lunch
Yeah that haha
Real and straight. This is all of us.
We should rise up, and unionize.
Ok but I don’t want to have to eat any rich people. Frankly that sounds disgusting.
deleted by creator
Okay you can feed them to your pet, but cook them thoroughly first, you
don’t knowsuspect where they’ve been.Not Elon Musk though, I know where he’s been.
I would feed him to the crows instead, but I suspect they’d rather leave him to the maggots.
I wouldn’t want my local crows to OD on ketamine
Oh he’s definitely spoilt rotten and inedible
I don’t really even care how gross it is at this point, I want my bite.
I dont have the time for that, I keep scrolling trough the news and attending work meetings.
I have strictly limited overtime with high bonuses and mandatory rest days, afternoon/night shift bonuses, 20 days minimum fully paid vacation, fully paid maternity leave, fully paid sick leave, healthcare paid through taxes, all written into law. Feels nice to live in a place where workers have rights. Sometimes I don’t even know what to do with all this legally mandated freedom. Anyway, how’s that deregulation going, America?
If you’re unsure what to do with your copious freetime, I recommend some political activism to make sure that your rights don’t backslide. Fascism is on the rise practically everywhere in the west.
The post still applies to you in its entirety except for the 1h unpaid overtime. And yes, socialist ideas are good, that’s the entire point of the post.
The traffic and living situations in socialist countries are also not as bad as in USA due to better public transport and denser housing near work, so remove an extra hour of commuting as well.
Socialist countries? You mean like China? Or are you talking about European-style socialdemocracy? Plenty of suburban neighborhoods with detached housing in Germany or Norway too
Yeah, Europe ones. China isn’t socialist.
The country with a communist party and 60% of state ownership of the stock market is less socialist than the Nordic countries currently electing fascists into government like Finland and increasing poverty rates by 2% of their total population in 3 years?
OP shouldn’t be doing 1h of unpaid overtime every day. Just simply don’t do it. Get a new job if necessary.
Many people don’t have that luxury.
Shitty
“And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death”
-Pink Floyd
This exact line brought a chill down my spine back in high school that got me really depressed about my life.
That whole album deserves the recognition it gets.
And if you want even more existential dread and less metaphysical understanding, The Division Bell does it.
