You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape. Make the experiment with a clean slate: a group of children raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot. Did I just describe rich kids? Anyway.
And what’s “a lot of free time” anyway?
This is so good I feel the need of framing it!
You just described Lord Of The Flies.
Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
Especially when real life instances of groups of young children being stranded without adult help exist and play out in ways directly opposite of the novel’s central thesis.
For example, Star Trek is Roddenberry's idea of a utopia. A benevolent dictator with his happy ship of comrades all rowing together. (But hey, I enjoyed watching it!)
STTNG amps that up even further. It got so heavy-handed with it I lost interest in it.
What is the fundamental human nature in your opinion?
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Then I got a job I liked, and while some of the hobbies were still quite active for the first two months or so they've all come to rest now. Still trying to figure out how to get a better work-life balance again, because I quite liked those hobbies
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
*confused in European, again*
Hey, if only there was an entire continent of hundreds of millions of people who typically have 5 weeks of paid vacation per year or more so that we could check this and see what happens?
I don't think there's a lot of things that one could do in 5 weeks, but where 4 weeks would be too short.
This is also taking from that same 5 week leave bucket people have available per annum, if they're taking 4 weeks then they have 5 days to last the remainder of the year. Not that crazy, but I have literally never even met a single person who does this let alone knowing tons.
* no source to back them up, and equalize everyone without considering some will be productive
* equating all non-money making or enterpreneur activities as non-productive and equal to doomscrolling
* ignoring other limitations like living space size, funds availability, opportunity, license or regulation
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
Some people will grow up in households where their parents understand basic law, finance, and business bureaucracy. They may already be part of a network with similar individuals in their cohort.
There's also the informal culture - knowing when you can push and maybe exploit vs knowing when to fold and play by the rules.
Other people come to it completely cold. They don't know the basics, don't understand the requirements, have no experience of the culture, don't even know what the words mean.
This is another reason why UBI isn't enough. If you want people to be more entrepreneurial you need a practical culture that supports that. Investing in them financially is a good first step, but it's not a complete solution.
Or just go door to door offering maid service or yard service or cleanup service or handyman service or tutoring service or ...
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
Lots of jobs (both physically and mentally) require slacking off half the shift. I've seen quite a few that on paper require 8 hours of top tier athletic performance. It might be possible to train a person to accomplish that. The work schedule looks nothing like a training program.
To grow, mental and physical challenges have to push people to their limit for X hours over Y days where X and Y depend a lot on what it is one does and their point of exhaustion. If you are not exhausted you aren't growing. When you are exhausted you should be resting. Rest should be exactly the right duration.
If people are never challenged physically, mentally (and perhaps socially) they will decline and eventually the lack of physical fitness will eat away their mental performance just like a lack of mental challenge will ruin physical performance.
There is no discussion about the duration or frequency of shifts.
If you look at it strictly from a greed and exploitation perspective it is a dumb idea to pay someone for 8 hours if it isn't possible to do more than 5 hours of work. It is dumb to have people work 5 days if they are used up after 3. It is dumb to have 2 days of weekend if the employee is not recharged. The collective goal was to exploit them until retirement. If they cant even be allowed to grow stronger it is a truly dumb schedule.
I had a job once that involved a weekly truck full of 75 kg bags of flour. About 10 employees were unable to do a single bag, about 10 could do 1-5. Then there was one guy who did the other 150 bags. Not a coincidence it was the same guy who put them in the mixer. Say 10 000 kg. The world record most weight lifted in a day is half a million kg or say 6500 bags.
They calculated top memory sports people are on average 5000 times better at remembering things than untrained people. They weren't born like that nor did it just happen suddenly.
Lots of people want to start their own business but they are terrified by the amount of work and level of uncertainty. It doesn't seem like we want people to start their own business. We need them to but it looks more like we've made it intentionally complicated. Complicated enough that you probably shouldn't invest in them.
There is also the angle of people able to support you. If everyone has 4 day weekends you really should ask them to help you. If it is only 2 days you'd best not bother.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
The issue of work isn’t the time it consumes, but _the energy_. Scrolling social media costs virtually no energy, hence it being a way to spend time after work when you’re already tired.
- Caretaking
- Community and organization
- Art ventures
- Political involvement
All of which are meaningful parts of as functioning society, but almost invisible to the capitalistic eye. Some of these (caretaking for example) are obstacles to one industry being maximally profitable, so sometimes they're structurally pushed out by the simple act of prioritizing company interest over decades.
You'll notice they were also kind of stereotypically married women's activities when women used to be homemakers in majority, and that went away when women of working age joined the workforce, i.e. lost control over how they distributed their working day.
Otherwise people would indeed do the exact same stuff they would do in their free time. In certain perspectives, that is maximising productivity in essence.
If anything I wasted less time because I did not finish the day needing to recover from a demanding job.
Wrong.
> I know many people with a lot of free time...
Not a valid argument for, or against anything.
You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
That's the foundation of Marxist theory.
In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.
Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.
Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.
Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.
A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.
After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years
> Saudi Arabia
I have some news for you.