http://toaiw.blogspot.com/2011/02/re-is-technology-really-making.html

That would explain what I think of this in detail ^^

Thx for the inspiration

Anyhow thoughts are well explained. keep fullfilling your thought.
nice article.
i am also devloper (in initial stage)and i also wonder about such things.i can imagine how you are feeling when youhave written this.

I’m having fun with my blogs and websites, but I’m beginning to lose focus.

It’s kind of like, computers were supposed to eliminate paper. Instead, we accumulate more paper as we seem to have to print out everything.

Who wouldn’t love to get out of work 3 or 4 hours earlier to be able to take your kids to the zoo, or teach them to throw a ball.

Or just to read a book. Even 35 to 40 hours makes quite the difference, regardless of whether it seems small or not. If nothing else, you could use it to do your daily grocery shopping and have the time you’d currently spend shopping for groceries available for other things. For the record, the normal Dutch work week is between 36 and 38 hours for an average person.

…We used to go to work on a farm, or tanning leather, or in the depths of a coal mine.

Many people still do. And thank god for them… But I would say that working 40+ hours, in an air conditioned room at even the best job still takes its toll on a person. It shows up in the lack of time to exercise, depression, high blood pressure and addictions. And that’s saying nothing about the indirect affects it has on children.

Humans need to “work”.

Absolutely, no question about it; I agree. It benefits the individual and the community. You must have workers. But forty hours? No, absolutely not. Even the best job and for the record I love my job is not better than spending time with my kids. Who wouldn’t love to get out of work 3 or 4 hours earlier to be able to take your kids to the zoo, or teach them to throw a ball. Even the native American’s didn’t work as much as we do and our food is in the refrigerator.

It would be a quite the conversation on why and how it came to be that we work forty hours, something to do over beers no doubt. You certainly wouldn’t want to just look at the last hundred years or even the last thousand years. You would want to look at the entire span of man. I’m sure that in the end it would come down to money and power. It usually does…

We’ve been ingrained with thousands of years of a work week, be it 35 hours or more. The feudal system, slavery, and so on and so forth prevailed for many centuries without people staging a revolution. As long as a sufficient amount of people is happy enough (panem et circenses) won’t the voice for change fall on a deaf ear anyway? Right now the only party that wants such a thing also wants to quit the EU, so I’m not exactly jumping at the opportunity to vote for them.

Under the capitalistic system you simply can’t afford to work much less than your competition, or you’re anti-competitive. Given the choice between two equally appealing candidates, the one willing to work 40 hours and the other 35, which candidate would an employer choose? If you’ve got your own business you might be able to afford a little more leeway, but you will have to be available to your customers 7 days a week.

And just because we live in a golden age doesn’t mean we can’t make it platinum.

We largely define ourselves by the work we do. What is one of the first things you ask a person you just met: “What do you do?”. Little kids follow dad out and pretend to help mow the lawn – we even ask children “what do you want to do when you grow up?” There is pride and dignity in work.

As for the specifics of a 40 hour week – we’ve been working this way for a very long time. If everybody hates it, why hasn’t it changed? Generally speaking when large groups of people want something, they realize their shared mission and try to get it. Where’s the effort to change this? I hear complaints (but complaining doesn’t count…), but no real effort to change.

Perhaps (and I’m going to get this quote wrong, but something like:) “people who live in a golden age tend to complain about how yellow everything looks”

ok.. I think I’m up to 4 cents now – sorry.

Work is work, Eric. You don’t show up late, you don’t make excuses, and you don’t not work. If it wasn’t “work,” they wouldn’t call it work. They’d call it “super-wonderful, crazy-fun time!” Or Skippedydoo!”

And what job would not require specialization? Sure, theoretically I could decide to be, say, a welder for a few weeks, but how would that work out in practice? It would require sufficient planning beforehand, and afterward you’d have to stay a welder until you find something else again. Otherwise, you’d be jobless. Additionally, if you had a job where you were more or less free to pick your own times to start and stop working (like, if your wife/child/friend suddenly has time available) switching jobs to something that might seem fun for a while might put you in a position where you’d have to abide some kind of 9-6 life. Not to mention how your constant job-switching would look to employers… Maybe you’re just lucky, maybe you’re right and most people are quite happy with the way things are, but I whole-heartedly disagree.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png

Everybody knows the score – to think otherwise is a little hubristic, no?

But more to the point of the post – I have a different take on this [Mark (Golgotha) knows I like to be contrary anyway...].

(First, since you opened with ipods and blue-ray, I’ll assume we’re talking first-world here. Given that…)

You’re suggesting two things:
1. We are doing more work despite these technological enhancements
2. We don’t want to be working more (we’d like to be working less)

To the first point (We are doing more work than we used to):
For starters this might be a bit of a statistics-tweaker. My quick census search told a slightly different story for the US.

But more importantly: Quality of Life. Has technology changed the hours we work? No. But has it change the way we work, and what we do for work? Certainly. And have those changes translated into an improved quality of life? Absolutely. We used to go to work on a farm, or tanning leather, or in the depths of a coal mine. Today people like you and me spend 40+ hours a week sitting in climate controlled buildings splitting our time between writing code and reading the 140 character ramblings of perfect strangers. Which is harder “work”? We’ve certainly each made our choices…

To the second point (We don’t want to be working more):
This is implicit in your argument, and I’m not sure it’s true. Humans need to “work”. The fact that hours worked per week is remarkably steady, and is largely consistent across continents might demonstrate that we *need* to work 40+ hours a week (yes the French have a 35 hour work week – but are we going to quibble over a 5 hour difference in a 168 hour week?). So I’m not sure we really want to work less. We might want to do different work – but that’s a separate point (and something we have a lot of control over, even if we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise). Time-Of-Work is a rather arbitrary measure of success or happiness. I appreciate that I’m probably one of the lucky ones – but I like my work. If the week-length magically expanded by 50%, I’d keep about the same ratio of work to not-work. To me, technology has no influence on this equation.

Technology is less about reducing work than it is about changing what we’re working on. When I have a tedious task that I decide to automate with technology, I don’t do it in the hope of going home 10 minutes earlier. I do it in the hope of getting to spend that 10 minutes working on something more valuable. That’s what technology has allowed – and in spades.

My 2 cents anyway…

IMO — most people are working so hard for intangible goals. Rather than having a concrete focus, they instead spend all their efforts “Keeping up with the Jones’”

And so they’re never happy, since they base the quality of their worth on how they measure against others. I heard it yesterday — don’t judge your insides based on other people’s outsides

@Duncan – “My kids have just finished their 6 weeks school holiday and I spent nearly everyday with them…” That’s great, exactly what life should be like. Instead of 9 hours at work and 2 with the kids…

I live in the UK where I am self employed. I don’t have a big business, but I earn enough to pay the bills each month.

I don’t have a shiny car (I have an 18 year old Volvo), I don’t wear designer clothes, I don’t have a big house.

My kids have just finished their 6 weeks school holiday and I spent nearly everyday with them. Drove me mad some days, but I still regarded myself as being lucky to be able to spend loads of time with them.

What’s really important to me is that I don’t go out and work for ‘the man’ anymore.

I’ve managed to sneak out of the rat race, but kind of feel guilty for doing so. Not everybody can – people are too tied into big financial responsibilities. Perhaps its time those big fat cat bankers should be feeling guilty.