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Kinda sorta.
It is more that the things we are busy doing are not fulfilling. Half of everything we do is because we are forced to do it to survive.
Contrary to popular belief, people actually like to do things and to keep busy/be productive... when we have control over what those things are
Not being busy will make you braindead and depressed too = shorter lifespan
It's a balance. Not being busy is good sometimes; it's called "resting" and it's important for mental health.
But yes, to what I believe you're trying to get across, being forced to be stagnant for extended periods of time (such as solitary confinement) can have deleterious effects on one's mental and even physical health.
The point is also more about having agency over whether or not you have to be doing something and how you get to do it.
Yes I was merely adding to your earlier comment
Your statement does a poor job in its addition and neglects certain important nuances by being overly generalized in its phrasing.
"Not being busy" doesn't make you braindead and depressed. It is an important distinction between simply "not being busy" and "being forced into stagnation to the point it becomes hazardous to your health"
Not a native speaker and living in different culture, commenting online is always a risky game. I wish people would understand the correct undertone.
Undertones are entirely social concepts and depend on the culture of a region, and usually involve nonverbal communication in things like tons and body language to discern differences. Adding the language barrier just complicates things even more.
Most people unfortunately don't consciously consider this stuff and just assume everyone is like them.
So, as you said, commenting online is a risky game.
30 years in the forest, surrounded by family and friends, a life spent close to nature, around a fire, below skies that have not yet be tainted with light pollution. A naturally human schedule, based on natural cycles. Or a long life spent under a hazy sun and enough toys to distract you from how alone you are, surrounded by strangers and neighbors who have no reason to learn your name. I wonder which is longer, and which is more full.
I don't think you understand what busy means, you are clearly busy spending time with your family and doing things to make them happy, helping friends, making fire.
That's a productive life where you add value.
A life of chemicals, to extend your productivity and to extract what it can from you. A life looking for distractions, when the meaning was there. In the woods. In the plains. In the mountains, the valleys, in a natural garden of eden. We traded it all and all we got was a clock to make us all slaves.
I'm not a primitivist, but you're also not wrong. For my part, I wish we could just make a better trade. We don't need all the toys — just the ones that directly impact our flourishing.
I agree. That's why I said 'fuck the system' 13 years ago and haven't spent a single second being a slave since then. Every day I wake up and don't have to pay a house scalper is another victory against crapitalism.
If you don't mind sharing - how are you getting by? Social Security? Food Stamps? Section 8? Inheritance?
Homeless?
Super Rich?
I have a routine day job and a part time night job which I do from home on contract basis. I had vacation from my day job last week, because I have a sweet union job and get loads of vacation so some of it is just hanging out at home, but it's AMAZING how job 2 expands to fill all that time, as well as every errand thing I have no time for, like haircuts. And my dork assed loser ex I still have to live with is like "well you can get these things done while you're off". I'm never off. Never ever.
Ugh that sucks. Is it not an option to drop that additional responsibility? Just say you can't because of "prior obligations" (taking care of yourself)?
I find empathetic people are often the worst at letting things break so they can have one.
Not that I fully know your situation, so pardon my perscriptivising.
No, unfortunately I need the money, and my ex is a bad situation that I have to grey rock through.
Is it really that crazy to think you might have more time to do things when on vacation from your day job?
I do "productive vacations" mostly too, but sometimes you need a real break. I'm not even talking about going anywhere, but giving yourself time to just laze about and read and make meals and just do basic tidying, or whatever.
I don't even have a paying job right now, but I can't wait until I do, so I can take a week off to actually relax.
You might not need that, but I do.
It is actually. The amount I work is insane.
You honestly sound bitter
Why shouldn't I be? I've worked at least 60 hours a week for 20 years, while he sits on his ass and watches hours of TV.
I like being busy, but I like having agency over how I am busy. I don’t want to be “busy” because I have a bunch of arbitrary and meaningless paperwork to turn in that my boss won’t even read, but I like being “busy” in that I’m happy to spend my time doing things that have an immediate impact.
Give me a 12 hour day cleaning up a homeless shelter over paperwork.
So yeah... I noticed you haven't filed your TPS reports this week.
When we got to UML diagrams I dropped out of programming and CS. I’d rather eat fucking glass.
My bullshit poison paper work was lesson plans. Like, what other profession expects you to tell them what you are going to do a week in advance? I planned my lessons, but I didn’t do it in a way that matched their paperwork. Like, bruh, can you trust that the stack of books on my desk with notes on them indicates something?
Like, I don’t know what vocabulary or math skills I’ll be teaching this week - because sometimes I’d find out they didn’t know how to use a calculator or the same dickweeds that wanted me to have my entire future planned out decided to have a random fire drill.
I like teaching without a plan and I’m damn good at it. Making me spend my Sunday evening (you know, time I’m NOT AT WORK) filling out some dumbass form made for english and social studies teachers which doesn’t realize that science spends months on the same standards…. When I know my shit. Put 20-25 teenagers in a room with me for an hour and they will know the quadratic formula or how to balance a chemical equation. Just fucking let me do that instead of staff meetings and discipline (ie, spending 1-2 hours after school calling every parent of a kid that stole my shit/refused to put their cell phone up/called me a fucking [will be removed if written out]) - just let me TEACH.
My wife is a middle school teacher and I 100% feel your pain through her.
Lesson plans are like of bullshit paperwork, invented because a minority don't do shit without being tightly monitored and a rigid structure to follow.
Good teachers can just wing a class based on whatever needs covering from the curriculum on that day, bad teachers don't care whats on the curriculum that day, terrible teachers don't care and couldn't even teach it without following a detailed plan.
Its because of those two groups that lesson plans exist.
In an ideal world you would just performance manage those two groups and sack them, but because teaching is underpaid there are a shortage of teachers (plus most people suck at putting people properly through performance management), so its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
Kinda a positive feedback loop there. Teaching is a hard job which is going to require lots of work beyond your contract time and pays shit compared to other jobs which require the same level of education and training. Adding the additional work and micromanagement drives people away. Especially when that micromanagement is pointless and ineffective.
They’d pay these consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell us to do things, when those consultants had no understanding of the fact that you cannot teach a physics class like an English class. (Maybe use that money to hire more staff? There’s a huge difference in the work when the class average is 25 and not 32.)
And yeah - the district I worked in was primarily staffed by emergency certified teachers. I taught my colleagues subatomic structure and wrote their assessments, because they often had degrees in things like physical education. I get, if you’re hiring people off the street because you’re desperate you probably do need to watch them more, but at the same time if the vice principal is taking me aside my first day of teaching and saying “you actually have a degree in this, so you are going to have to step up and take one for the team” - idk, if I’m going to have to work Sunday nights, let it at least be in a way that acknowledges that I’m a professional and have my own system.
You not going to break the loop till you pay dramatically more to teachers, poor pay usually attracts under motivated people in smaller numbers, so you cant be picky. These people eventually get promoted, an you end up with poor quality managers running the school who take advantage of good teachers.
Its so self defeating as high quality teaching as you do results in better engaged students with better results that lead to life long improvement to the entire economy. Instead we have ladder pulling from the rich who want to kneecap state funded schools while enriching their own private schools to create a barrier for the majority to compete.
Long live the 4-day work week.
Which has been proven to improve both productivity and profits. Same as home office. But petty people still prefer to take away freedom from people they consider beneath them, I guess.