causation or no causation. we need to rethink the whole idea of work anyway. at some point something went seriously wrong.<p>how can people accept that it's right that we get taught in a certain mental pattern for almost 20 years and then we are to work for 40 years in that pattern so that we can spend the last 15 years of our life in peace anyway?<p>i spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get great at things - you know, human nature.<p>but the times i spent in traditional work structures i actually got lazy and stupid, because they encourage you to create things that are just good enough at a slow pace, because if you actually perform too well you become a liability.
Methinks some causation and a large degree of correlation. There's quite a bit of spread until 2050 hours or so.<p>Most workaholics I know neglect their health, they stop exercising, and they are generally miserable.<p>I used to be all three. These days, I prioritize the first two points, but I'm still occasionally miserable when the work is tedious. If the work is engrossing, it's hard to pull me away from it because it feels more like I'm exploring than working. I've gone to great lengths to make sure my work is interesting. My longevity will hopefully provide a useful data point.
This is a typical article that everyone here will feast on. Another of a long list of "the answer to your problems" to make people who are in a rut feel better about themselves.<p>For the last time "work" and the amount of work doesn't mean the same thing to everyone to begin with.<p>It depends on what you do, how much you like doing it, why you need to do it and a host of other pressures and things that you deal with every day.<p>I work everyday and enjoy what I do. Other people can't wait to get out at 5 and take the train home. (When I was in high school it was that way for me because of the type of jobs that I had when I wasn't doing my own thing which I typically did (side businesses)).<p>I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get off the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better than sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people like what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing.<p>That said this idea that you need to find something that you enjoy to earn a living is not true either. Because sometimes you can't it's not that easy. I had to do many jobs that I didn't like to get to the point of doing a job that I do like and enjoy to do.<p>Yesterday I had to review a legal contract and truly despised doing so. So I'm glad I'm not an attorney because if I was the stress of that job would certainly make it hard for me to "work all the time". But if I have to I do that work and just make sure that I reward myself with doing things that I need to do that I enjoy (like writing a shell script..)<p>Everyone is different.
For the last 4 months, my daily goal has been 'no client work before lunch' [1]. I'm happier, healthier, and more focused on the important things than I have been my entire professional life.<p>1. <a href="https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/no-client-work-before-lunch/" rel="nofollow">https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/no-client-work-before-lu...</a>
I'm more of the mindset of who would want to work 40 hours a week? I work on projects that I find interesting and I still only do about 20-30 hours a week of work. I've done the whole work yourself to death thing, 75 hour work weeks and work until dawn every night for a month. F#%k that!
If you want to impress an employer as someone who will work until they die on the job, your answer to the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" should be "dead."
A blanket 'work less hours' policy across professions might actually be bad because doctors, scientists, researchers, etc work longer hours to advance medical knowledge which benefits everyone.<p>This is pure speculation but I don't believe anyone who is at the frontier of human knowledge will ever expand it by working less hours than usual.
I'm not sure how to interpret this chart:<p>For an average annual hours of 2000, how can we know if that person works 40 hours a week during 50 weeks or 66 hours during 30 weeks ?<p>Also what jobs are represented here ? For instance for firemen or soliders it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature mortality will happen.
Correlation studies are fine, but I do worry about national GDP as a confounding factor.<p>Maybe poorer countries have lower life expectancies, (or whatever PYLL measures is higher), and work longer hours.<p>I would like to see this graph broken down by quantiles of national GDP.
I know this isn't on-topic, but am I the only person who tried to read this who didn't already have an account with the economist? Apparently, I have "reached my article limit".
hopefully the robots will work for us soon...
this path might be easier than changing a system where competition and success are a lot based on spending more time working.
R-squared of 0.2? Not a stats major, but that seems like a pretty low correlation to try to draw conclusions from, even though it may be statistically significant.
Correlation is not causation.<p>Far more likely an explanation is an inverse correlation between work hours and wealth, intelligence, and education, as those are shown correlated to health and life expectancy with better and more plausible mechanisms for causation than those waved around for work hours.
I love when these multi-million dollar studies come out and the only thing that hits the news is a headline that could've been inferred by a 10 year old.