I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/natural requirements, when the research isn't there for it at all.
The reality is, some people can work for 100 hours while others can only work for 20 hours per week without without losing productivity.
This is why I'm sick of this stupid trope that nobody should be working 80 hour weeks. Guess what, I want to, that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that? When I was in the military I would work 12 hour days every day and my co-workers would complain because I was "making them look bad" that they only worked 8-10. What? Go home if you want.
The kind of person you are should push you into those types of roles - not the other way around. A 20 hour a week capable person isn't going to last very long in a 100 hour a week job, and they shouldn't be going out for it.
I think the major contention though is that you can't realistically succeed and live comfortably anymore as just a 40 hour a week person, because all of those jobs are gone. So inevitably 20 hour a week people, get put into 60 hour a week jobs and then say the whole system is screwed up (maybe it is, I dunno).
I believe those were accounted for in those times with the notion of a stay-at-home spouse (in reality, read: wife) who did most if not all of that non-job work; food purchase/prep, laundry, chores, children, etc.
Because households basically use all extra income to bid up the cost of real estate in neighborhoods with "better" schools. So if every household has both parents working, then no household is the better off for it. And single parent households are well and truly fucked.
I was thinking the same. I don't have children, either, but observing my friends and siblings who do would make me estimate this at 40+ hours/week. (Estimate applies to children below age 6-8. Of course, it's progressively less the older and more independent the child grows.)
It's an exponential back-off kind of a thing. Our 6 month old probably requires 30 hours/week by himself (and that's already much reduced from what it was). Our 3 year old probably requires 10 hours/week. And our 4 year old maybe requires 3 hours per week.
The bigger issue is that this time is spread out pretty evenly throughout the day, so in practical terms it takes up every single hour that the kids are awake. What changes is that, as they get older, you have an increased ability to do other things in the in-between moments.
I easily put 30 hours a week in getting my 3 yr old dressed, to daycare, entertained while my wife makes dinner, and on weekends. My wife puts in similar time.
I guess we just live a different lifestyle. My wife is a full-time mom, so no daycare. The three year old dresses himself at this point, plus he and the four year old entertain each other pretty well.
I think there's also an element of once you have multiple children you just don't have any extra time. As a result, all the inessential time expenditures get cut. For instance, neither my wife nor I spend any time whatsoever entertaining our children. We don't have the time and they can entertain themselves.
Right, it was a completely different world when the 40 hour work week was proposed and people were pretty interchangeable in the industrializing shift.
The issue is that a normalized office environment will demand or imply that all workers work the same number of hours. The suggestion that you can consistently work 80 hours a week might be viable for you, but what about those who only get 20 hours before their productivity craters? What should you, or that person, do in the normalized 40-hour environment?
And what if the 20 hour worker produces more than you in 80 hours? For many environments, pay is by hour because that's the easiest thing to measure. Or it's per annum (salary) and it's supposed to track some loose or arbitrary or indirect metric.
If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with before we efficiently extract the optimal and earnest amount of labor from all workers and compensate them appropriately with respect to their output and not their hours.
If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with...."
Yes agreed.
The point is that people should be given roles and responsibilities commensurate with their personality type and then given the flexibility to execute their job as they see fit.
No research on sleep requirements ? are you serious ?
Have you been sleep deprived ? There's a clear limit under which you're useless. For an extreme instance, I lost sleep for 5 days and went borderline insane.
Maybe 6h of sleep is adequate but saying 8 is arbitrary bulls$t is... exactly that.
Couldn't tell you for certain. Probably some combination of genetics and intense training, with previous periods of long sustained critical work.
Often I find I compare whatever my current situation I'm in, with previous tough situations I've dealt with, and know that if I made it through those, then my current situation is tractable.
On multiple occasions in a previous life I've worked multiple 24-36 straight hours doing intense cognitive and physically intensive work for multiple crises in Korea, Iraq and other wartime places. So that's a good benchmark to compare to.
Right, everything else is trivial in comparison. As a result, working an extra few hours on some Python is just a great thing to be able to get paid for.
The secret according to my business professor who was an electrical engineer, a sniper in the military, and started a multimillion dollar PE firm, and sleeps <6 hours every night: eat more.
And yes, I've succeeded just fine on less than 40 hour weeks throughout my career. The obsession with stupidly long hours doesn't extend much into Europe, or Australia.
I mean seriously, by the time you add in a half hour for lunch and a half hour each way for travel, 80 hours translates to over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, working.
40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan:
“Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”
I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/natural requirements, when the research isn't there for it at all.
The reality is, some people can work for 100 hours while others can only work for 20 hours per week without without losing productivity.
This is why I'm sick of this stupid trope that nobody should be working 80 hour weeks. Guess what, I want to, that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that? When I was in the military I would work 12 hour days every day and my co-workers would complain because I was "making them look bad" that they only worked 8-10. What? Go home if you want.
The kind of person you are should push you into those types of roles - not the other way around. A 20 hour a week capable person isn't going to last very long in a 100 hour a week job, and they shouldn't be going out for it.
I think the major contention though is that you can't realistically succeed and live comfortably anymore as just a 40 hour a week person, because all of those jobs are gone. So inevitably 20 hour a week people, get put into 60 hour a week jobs and then say the whole system is screwed up (maybe it is, I dunno).