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> We need work.
Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before.
The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
I don't think that was the author's message at all.
Rather, I think that this post is about balance, and about being emotionally present. He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care. The only way to avoid the struggle is to cease caring, and that means you push something out of your mind that you really should be paying attention to because it's uncomfortable.
I've got plenty of stories about a dad who went the other way - full time househusband, gave up his career entirely soon after my sister and I were born - but they're a bit too personal to share on HN. It's not all roses and sunshine on that side either, though.
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true.
Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend two or three weeks idling most of the time, but after that I need something to direct my energy and concentration toward. I need a goal that stretches my abilities, or I find myself constantly battling a depressive spiral.
It's more than a social fact. It's a consequence of living in a physical reality with physical wants and needs that require action to be satisfied. The best we can do is move the work around, and have someone else do it. (We can harness physical forces to take care of most of the work in the force-times-distance sense, but we're still a long way from moving the rest.) And the ultimate problem with moving it around so that we don't have to do any of it will be that it is likely to result in some outside entity having outsized power over our lives.
I think you're also doing a trick here.
While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work.
Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if we believe we need it". The logic is just plain faulty.
Well, "work" is a broad term. It can mean a paycheck, the gulag, or that todo you've been putting off because you want to finish the show. Lots more as well.
Some are meanings are constructs, but some are limitations of complete communication from a single English world.
Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
Something I believe, but can't really prove is that this is completely wrong and there's very little about the need for "work" that's socially determined. We are biological creatures that evolved under very specific circumstances. And "work" in the most basic sense is a big part of that. We need to be struggling to feed ourselves (or simulating it) -- every day. Most of us wither and die when that need is removed.
It’s not a social fact, it’s a fact of thermodynamics.
Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work.
At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
I disagree that it's a social construct.
I'm not saying that we all need to work for hyper-capitalistic machines. Or even anything remotely resembling a "business". But humans need to do semi-regular things that approximate work. Whether it's something like running a farm, coding programs, or passing lessons on to the next generation—we all need something semi-recurring, with some perception of value.
I do agree that the sense of duty towards work that is stereo-typically cultivated in Silicon Valley is a social construct and not at all a universal truth. THAT we can both agree is definitely a social construct.
Fwiw, I felt exactly the same.
I think some specificity is needed.
To me when you write “we need work” is a social fact, I read “we need jobs/full employment.”
Work to me is a term that applies to any system doing a task; input->(processing)->output.
So like you’re saying, it’s “work” in a “biological sense” to learn wine.
Inherently we need to “work” but our social idea of work is arbitrary, a lot is busy work.
Police violence, don’t let government have weapons of mass destruction to police global violence, wind down superfluous industrialism, deflate chads whose dads own dealerships and be humans.
The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow.
Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future.
However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old.
It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.
This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy.
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
I'm not sure how "Dad sold his soul to work, regretted it forever, but couldn't change his ways" leads to the conclusion that "work/life balance should be difficult."
It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.
I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs:
1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.
2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.
3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.
If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.
Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.
His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline.
This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister.
You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.
I'm not sure that it _should_ be hard, but I am sure that it always will be hard. This is just the nature of life, your attention is zero-sum. More time here means less time there.
Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money.
So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.
Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it.
I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.
So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.
The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.
I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.
PS:
Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.
The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
Work/life balance should never be difficult.
Significant research has gone into evaluation actual productivity. Sure people tend to go into the office for 40 hours but the amount of time where they actually work is more like 15 hours or less.
If we drop to say 30 hour weeks. How's that work/life balance going? Easy peasy.
He says "Work" and uses it as a synonym for "Career". I'm not sure about anyone else (though having read enough posts on this site, I know I speak for many), there are many kinds of work. I get log off from my job, these days, and play with my son and while he's being put to bed (no mean feat for my wife these days... I'd help if he'd allow it), I crack open the personal Linux box and start in on Rust code with the Bevy engine, for no reason other than self fulfillment.
It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice.
I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in.
I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.
Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.
It sounds like the author's father never recovered from extreme trauma, which is a fate many face. I'm not sure that says anything about a job/life balance.
“He had a deadline.”
He also had two young children to provide for on his own. That seems to be omitted from this story.
"Work" and "jobs" are two very different things.
We need action towards results.
We do not need 16 hour workdays.
That you need work is kind of tautological: work is some kind of struggle that you have to go through in order to achieve some end. When work becomes either a non-struggle or optional is also when it stops being work.
But it’s quite the claim to say that work is a psychological need.
Think what work is for most people. Work for most people consists of providing surplus value to the owners of whatever organization that they work for. That is what work is in economic terms.
Where is your Maslow now?
But people like this author—although perhaps not him in particular—have to give some lip service to show fealty to the concept of Loving Work in case some potential employer or whatever other person-with-networking-potential stumbles upon his blog. (We have careers to maintain…)
I really don't think work is on Maslow's hierarchy.
Work can sometimes provide you with Esteem, Belonging and Self-actualization, but often it's a poor and unreliable mechanism to fill those.
Working on interesting things with other people you like and feeling accomplished and useful and respected in that way is great, but you can do that without it being a Job.
If I had an infinite stream of money, I'd still be working on interesting things when I need too, and it be easy enough to find those.
In my opinion the work as we've defined it today is accidental, a necessity to provide the lower things on the hierarchy like food and shelter, and in some cases can also be fulfilling and interesting, but rarely in a sustainable way and often it's not at all.
The sum total of your life at any period of time should be fulfilling and each part of your life should be rewarding.
If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.
> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose.
Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
There is nothing much to the article; a personal anecdote and a far-fetched inference which btw, is not quite correct. I am surprised that this generated so much discussion.
> We need work.
Yes, but the place you get a paycheck from doesn't have to be this kind of work, the work we need. I need a paycheck. I need work. They can come from different places. Give me my paycheck and let me spend time with family and on my true work, if not, in this market, I'll find another job that pays more.
I work for a living, I don't live for work.
Giving too much importance to work is stupid (IMHO) and its a highway to feeling your life was entire shit by the end of it whenever that is... I think this pandemic serves as the best example to how disposable you are to a company... Just one more replacable cog in the machine...
this is a pretty bizarre article and im not even sure what to take away from it
guy who works all the time loses some of his family, feels bad, continues to neglect the remaining family, and the son chastises him for not climbing the corporate ladder high enough. in conclusion work is a Very Important Thing
I found this article to be lacking. It felt like introduction to the content... that abruptly endedn
If you're a busy person, it depends on what you're doing. If you love what you do, there's never a busy time in your life.
Archived: https://archive.ph/LLr4Q
This reminds me of one of the founders of blizzard posting on twitter a while ago "If you don't code in your free time, you are not a programmer."
This dude, who graduated from the USC during a huge economic boom, landed a dream job at a small video game company that was about to blow up, then never had a different job since gets to decide who is a programmer or not?
You were born during an economic boom, graduated from a prestigious university with the perfect degree at EXACTLY the right time. You started out on 3rd base, why would anyone take career advice from you. If you were to re-enter the workforce today you would be down here with the rest of us, instead of lording over us with your fancy title. Have some humility.
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Nothing against Kent Beck, I rather like him and he is not being a jerk in this post, unlike the blizzard dude. But it is kind-of the same situation. A lot of us did not get in on the ground floor of the software engineering gold rush and got to become rich and (semi? kinda?)famous with our own Wikipedia article before the industry got crowded.
I'll speak for myself: I am extremely career oriented. I want to do good work and I have done well for myself. But I don't have a wikipedia article. I don't have the fancy degree to get my foot in the door. I don't have the 50 year long career that make people jump to attention when my resume slides across the desk. I don't have the mental stability to burn out my starry dynamo every night trying to make my boss more money.
Nobody cares about keeping me happy. I don't get the interesting work at my company. I take what I can get and I am a commodity level developer like 99% of everyone else on this website. I think I do high quality work but it ends there for me.
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Another aside: My parents were both workaholics. They weren't really around that much growing up, and I was always forced into band/sports/daycare/etc. because it was basically free baby-sitting and they didn't want to have to leave work to pick me up. They have even acknowledged this to me. As my mom once said: "Building your business was more fun than raising your kids."
I'm not complaining, they are nice people and did their best. Honestly, this is pretty normal and I don't think it is that big of a deal.
What IS a big deal is the lack of hobbies and interest my parents have outside of work. My dad is retiring, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He plays a lot of video poker. It is frustrating, I want him to thrive and not hang out at bars all day, but he hasn't developed any relationships and hobbies outside of his work. ( Living in a tiny town doesn't help either. )
People are different. Some of us do need work, some probably don't.
This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
Thank you. That gives a chance to think from another perspective about all that grinding.
Improve your expenditures and work less.
The first 10-15 years I worked my ass off. The last 10 I've taken it easy so I'm behind on all the new tech. The problem is now I want to work hard again but my skills are out of date. Despite the "unbelievably Strong" job market I'm finding it hard to get roles.
I don't understand what this guy wants, his dad had to bring money to the table, was probably depressed for loosing a wife and a daughter which is more depressing to the father than to the child. Give him a bit of slack, the fact that he was still functioning at work is good enough, loosing a kid put a a hole in a father heart, to expect him to be normal is just clueless
This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members.
Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.
If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.
When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.
It is not worth it but people do it again an again.
People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.
Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.