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I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.
To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.
One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.
Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.
A few of them, sure? 5.6% of workers averaged 60 hours or more last year, according to BLS. People who worked under 15 hours a week were nearly as common.
You might be in a bit of a bubble. There's a lot of variation between industries (full time mining, quarrying, and gas workers average 48.3 hours, so you know there's a lot of 60 hour stretches; my mother quit her veterinary career after a decade or so because the local "60+ hours or don't bother" jobs available were too much with a kid), and variation between companies and subsectors within an industry (I'm told the AAA game developer work ethos is something like "you can sleep when you retire"?). Perhaps you're in one of the worst of those?
And yeah, I empathize with this. People were shocked when "The Millionaire Next Door" talked about how many people with 7-figure net worth were driving 20 year old beat-up cars, but that's a goal I started aiming for! I still remember my mom trying to explain to toddler-me that Happy Meals were too expensive right now (soon after she quit her job, my dad lost his...), and enjoying fewer luxuries now seems like a more than worthwhile price to pay for never having to do that with my own kids later. But again, is this the median American, or are we in cultural bubbles? People have spent more on restaurants than on groceries for most of the past decade. Even when my parents found stable new careers it was a treat to visit a buffet every couple weeks.
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This all reads as "cultural victory of the nerds, as delivered by an evil genie" to me. I read for fun, don't like relaxing on the beach or partying, and travel for the same feeling of immersive escapism that I would have gotten out of a good book or game while shutting out as much as possible of the "real world", and have been earnestly telling everyone I want to go into academia so that my work is my hobby is my work and "work-life balance" is just for the poor suckers who sold out 8 hours of their every day doing something they hate since long before this HN grindset hustle culture took root. Now, suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who apparently feel compelled to pretend to be me, because it's the cool thing - and they hate every moment of it, and respond to any displays of the preceding genuine sentiment roughly in the same way as one would to a teacher's pet or the guy who honestly believes in Our Corporate Mission and excoriates the cynical coworkers who just want to collect a paycheck. At best, I get reactions that parse as "wow, you're trying harder to pretend than I ever could, I should learn from you".
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