But the 40 hours work week is already a progressive measure to reduce the weekly amount of work?
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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If anything, it's the consistent nature of 40 hours for almost the entire year that's the problem. We need actual vacations and periods of rest and time off for other responsibilities.
Our company forced us to take 8 hours off every week for the past couple of months. It has been fantastic 😊. Why not make it permanent? C'mon!
Which 8 hours?
This is why working from home needs to be more normalized. The corporations have made the market impossible to bear unless you have more than one income. Without the ability to work from home (ideally flex hours), then basically your house goes to shit. You don't have any free time if it doesn't.
Your "choice" after putting in a full day of work for enough money to buy a portion of your groceries, is to come home and do everything that your stay at home partner (now, working a full time job), would have otherwise done (basically speed running burnout, any%), or actually relax and accept that your house will always be somewhat messy.
Friendly reminder you work more now than your ancestors did before all the innovations we have now, and you get a much smaller slice of the pie for it.
One thing I like about WFH is that I can do the chores and stuff during the day. Take a break every hour or two is healthy, and using that time to do laundry or dishes or a quick errand means I have a lot more time in the evening and on weekends
We're seeing the race to the bottom that is inevitable under capitalism, unless there's some form of outside intervention.
When it was the norm for a single person in a household to work, wages had to be sufficient to support a household with a single source of income. Men almost always earned significantly more than women; it was assumed that a working woman was either supplementing income, or not taking care of a household, and it was assumed that a working man needed to care for a household. As women started to enter the workforce in greater numbers in the 50s and 60s, you see household incomes start inching higher; as incomes increase, prices increase to meet the available income. Rising prices leads to more women entering the workforce, because a single income is no longer sufficient to meet the requirements for a household. By the time you get to the late 80s, it's nearly impossible to have a family on a single income. Now a two income household can barely afford to even have an apartment, much less have a family.
Now you have people working a day job, and working gig jobs for secondary income, to 'get ahead'. Eventually that will be the new normal, just what is necessary to keep up with prices.
Without putting capitalism on a very short leash, this is only going to get worse.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, legislators granted special powers to the president, and now he's proposing extending the work day to 12 hours.
As true ancap would do
You're right, of course, but 🤮
So true. People seem to have convinced themselves that 35/40 hour weeks was some kind of ideal or agreed amount of hours we all found to be the best balance of all things.
Nope, it used to be 60, until people fought back and made them reduce the hours they're forced to work for other people's profit.
The problem is, we stopped fighting back.
It was a measure enacted during wartimes to increase productivity, or at least that's what they said, because it was never rolled back to pre-war even after the US was no longer engaged.
Always beware what they try to slip through under the guise of patriotism and "unity."
In Capitalism, wages are tied to subsistance plus replacement. This problem can only really be solved via Socialism.
40 hour week is a loss for both sides anyway. 32 hour week has superior results.
I'll add to this: it was also from an age where necessities were fairly readily available at basic income levels (in most cities) and through a lifetime you could get ahead and upgrade your house along the way while supporting a family on a single person's income.
Now you can have two people making a decent income and still have issues affording rent/mortgage. Necessities have gone up significantly while stuff like TVs have become cheaper but also shorter-lived.
Capitalism in action, wages will rise to meet bare necessities plus replacement, and fall to that level as well, regardless of productivity levels.
Are TVs and things really shorter lived? I remember my parents having theirs forever, but I was like 8 years old. Everything felt like forever. That 21" TV that lasted most of my childhood was probably only about six or seven years old when they swapped it out for a bigger one.
Meanwhile as an adult my TV still feels new because I remember paying for it, but it is already 7 years old. And I'm not thinking of replacing it yet.
For computers I had a Spectrum +3 which felt like I had it for a lifetime, but looking at release dates for that and what I replaced it with, I must have used it for 5 years tops, and the same for the Amiga 1200 I replaced it with. Modern consoles have about a 7 year lifespan. They're cheaper too, when you take inflation into account.
Housing is fucked. Although I do think too many people have this weird idea that they need to live in big cities or popular areas. You can live in a smaller place. They have electricity, internet and food. You'll survive.
I'm in Canada. Even smaller cities are absolutely fucked for house prices or rent right now
I had to laugh when somebody in my office found a house for £25,000 in the middle of my nearby city.
"It's a nice one too!" he said, pointing at the picture.
I looked over his shoulder. "Mate, that's the price for the parking space in front of it."
The property sites are a minefield though. The parking paces are obvious enough to people with eyes, but the amount of cheaper properties and then you see it's for part ownership...
Having seen a lot of failed tv/monitors I'd say they fail easier since we went lcd. The polarizing films get vinegar syndrome, and the LED lens start popping off from aging adhesive at around 10 years.
Beyond that LEDs start failing because of excessive heat depending on the backlight settings in the same timeframe and when one or two have problems it usually cascades into full failure - or trips a check in the TVs software to turn off the backlight making the TV unusable anyway.
Newer TVs usually have even more complexity and will likely fail quicker IMO.
I'll agree that a modern TV is unlikely to be economically repairable if it breaks. For the price of calling somebody out to look at it, you could have got a used (or even new) one that's still better than what you had.
Where the good old days you had a local TV repair man, who could fix the few things that went wrong with them. And chances are most TVs then had the exact same faults. It wasn't just a couple of circuit boards they no longer make that cost nearly the same as the whole TV.
My TVs and monitors have always been fairly reliable. Only really had one fail before I wanted to upgrade it anyway, and that was a cheap Samsung monitor that was pushing 15 years old. A £40 used one from CEX was just as good. I don't know if I've just been lucky, but I tend to stay away from the cheapo supermarket brands. If you're buying the Deal of The Week from Aldi, where they get you a 65" TV for under £400 then you might have less luck.
15 years isn't really that long. Older tvs could last decades. My grandparents are still using a TV they bought at least 30 years ago. My other set of grandparents have some tvs still functioning that are even older than that.
My dad bought a small electric fan in the 70s. It still works (he gave it to me.)
I bought a taller fan in the 00s. The motor burned twice in 5 years and then I couldn't find where to repair it anymore.
It comes from a very particular age.
It was after WWII when the US was one of the few countries that hadn't had its infrastructure destroyed by the war. It was also the late 1940s. In the 1930s the New Deal had shifted a lot of power from the rich capital owners to workers, but because of the waning years of the depression and then WWII, nobody had really seen the fruits of that work. Suddenly in the late 40s, the war ended, the US economy was in a huge boom because it was the only place in the world that could still make things, and workers had all kinds of hard-won protections.
This was never going to be sustainable. Eventually the rest of the world was going to rebuild, which was going to result in more competition, and a relative weakening of the US economy. But, the post-war years also saw union power getting weaker and weaker. A significant part of that was that organized labour smelled a lot like communism, which was the scary enemy from the end of WWII to the 90s. So... no communism, no organized labour, nobody to push back on the rich as they consolidated power.
Also, inflation isn't really the issue, it's that workers don't have the power to demand that their wages go up as well. And, of course, with so many workers supporting an anti-union, pro-business party like the GOP, worker power is going to stay near zero.
I'm working on downsizing a lot. I have so much bullshit. And people just keep getting me more. Like pls stop. I can't handle it lol
I really needed this. I live alone and work full time and have chronic illnesses. I struggle to keep up with everything and it drives me absolutely crazy. Idk how people can keep their homes so clean and still have time for themselves.
hey, married people without chronic illnesses can barely manage as two people and sometimes with outside help. idk where you get the idea people have time for themselves. pretty much no one i know does.
you have a lot to sort through and you shouldn't be hindering yourself by being hard on yourself or comparing yourself to some imagined perfection outside.
small chunks, one thing at a time. if you don't have time for something don't worry about it. work on your peace of mind and wellbeing first. getting rid of some dust bunnies won't do much good if it costs you your mental health.
Thank you for the encouraging words. It means a lot. My very messy home is a source of distress in regards to my mental health, unfortunately. I managed to get a couple tasks done yesterday and feel a little better about it. I still have so much to do. It also doesn't help that my pets love to tear things out as soon as I put them away. Little shits are so sneaky.
these are mostly tips for procrastinating but could apply:
prioritize according to urgency: do you have something to wear for tomorrow? do you have clean plates/cups to eat and drink? if one task needs attention first, that should be the only thing you care about. don't think about both at the same time.
and for that one task: if you can fragment it into small chunks and worry about only one chunk at a time that could help. you don't need to do the whole laundry, you just need a couple white undergarments washed today.
focusing on a small chunk could help minimize the size of the task in your mind and encourage you to get into it a bit more easily. usually starting is the hardest part so when you do a couple of clothing items, it feels insignificant, maybe almost silly not to finish it. i mean you're there, the laundry is there. "might as well" is a pretty strong motivation; how you might trick yourself to get to that part is the challenge.
some people use timers instead. like the five minute rule: commit to only do a task for five minutes. time it if it helps. again this should help minimize the task to just a five minute thing but once you're doing something for five minutes it will often feel trivial not to finish it while you're at it.
another one is a two minute rule: you don't even commit to doing the task itself. just commit to "get ready" for two minutes. that minimizes the task even more. getting the laundry basket ready, taking the hoover out of wherever you keep it and plugging it in, the simplest of things... once you're there you might feel comfortable starting at that point.
final thing, not about procrastinating but this might apply to your chronic illness:
once i tried learning to play the guitar, and had these audio lessons to get started. they put my mind at ease because here's how they opened:
Lesson One — If it hurts, stop.
sometimes it's easy to blame ourselves for feeling tired or even hurting through a task... and feel pressure to push through, only to risk feeling worse or injury
That's really good advice. Thank you!
That sounds exhausting - I’m sorry, I hope you’ll somehow be able to have an easier time at some point.
Thank you. I'm getting therapy right now and one of my goals is to be able to manage things better. Hoping my therapist can help me out.
I know people who have living conditions and habits far, FAR worse than mine, so I just think of them when I'm spiraling and feel a little better.
Reasonable expectations and also downsizing. It took me a long time to realize your stuff ends up owning you, especially stuff you don’t need.
It’s extra surfaces to clean, takes up space in your living area, and usually stops contributing to your mental well being.
Stuff like original artwork, that works for me. I like going to starving artist sales and can usually find something to put on the wall.
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