Our lives are a mix of work and play (= “liesure”). We tend to play more in the evenings, on weekends, holidays, and vacations, and at the start and end of our lives. Why this pattern of work vs. play?
Cf. professional sports where star players retire completely rather than switching down to lower leagues where they would be still good enough to play and make some money.
In my opinion, anyone who works one day longer than they have to is in some way mentally ill. I had an easy job (35 years) i enjoyed, and retired at 57 years of age. I probably would have went a year or 2 earlier but stayed on to keep youngest grown child on health ins while she went to college. many claim to be fulfilled by work. old rock stars, politicians, businessmen, actors, doctors maybe. I know or at least hope they are fulfilled but i firmly believe that most of them do indeed have psyche issues. I literally just thought of this example. " MOST PEOPLE WHO PROFESS TO LOVE WORKING WHEN THEY DONT HAVE TO, ARE EXACTLY LIKE THE PERSON THAT SAYS THEY ENJOY SMOKING, IT JUST ISNT TRUE, SMOKERS WHO SAY THEY LIKE SMOKING ACTUALLY MEAN THEY DONT ENJOY THE FEELING AND WITHDRAWL FROM NOT SMOKING" Put that in your pipe and smoke it! There simply are too many ways to pass time. For me, simply being in the forest, preferably by running water, in addition to putting out effort to stay fit by excersizing and eating well brings peace. im not going to move into the woods, but i happen to enjoy simple living. if you are "imprisoned by the thought of what to do", well, thats your problem...good luck with that. Other loves of mine? my grown kids, my granddaughter, internet, motorcycle riding. i love that i seemingly have escaped the rat race. who knows what lies ahead. but the next time i worry about spelling, grammar, overly politically correctiveness will be when i fill out my medicare forms in 8 years (hopefully...unless the big rats take it away).
> Once as a young man working at Lockheed, I decided to switch from working 40 to 30 hours per week, to spend more time on my independent research. My rate of advancement in the company didn’t just slow by 25%, it stopped completely — I was seen as not serious about my job.
Potentially relevant is this new randomized study on telecommuting for call center workers in China: http://www.econ.brown.edu/e...
> Employees in the treatment group who wished to come back to work in the office full-time were allowed to come back at the beginning of September. To understand the characteristics of the workers who choose to come back to the office, we run probit regressions using whether a worker returns to the office as the outcome. The sample for returning to the office includes the 103 treatment works still at CTrip at the end of the experiment. Out of the 103 treatment workers, 22 opt to come back to work in the office full-time. As shown in column (3) of Table 7 Panel B, we find that employees who have better pre-experiment performance and worse post-experiment performance are more likely to return to the office. They are likely a group of employees who did not benefit as much from the Work-from-Home Program. We also find that married employees or those living with parents are less likely to return to the office. In-depth interviews with the employees as well as home visits suggest that these employees tend to benefit more from the Program as they enjoy spending more time with their family and have received support from their family as well.
My experience is completely the opposite. There is some minimum # of hours you need to stay "in form", but after that productivity increases sublinearly. My first 20 hours/week are probably 2x as productive as the next 10, and so on.
Good article, it is a bit of a paradox, but I guess it highlights the importance of doing something you have a degree of passion about (if you can help it). I'm a fan of the line "follow your passion", you need to have a an element of inflexibility in your approach though (and of course your passion needs to be something that you can somehow make money with)
> On a side topic: if we convert people into scanned uploads, how will we be able to tell that the scanned uploads are actually working and not playing since we cannot tell even today who is working and who is playing?
An upload can be monitored even more closely than a regular human: *every* aspect of its existence is computerized and loggable. Forget keylogging or web browsing records - you can log every sense! Depending on how deep our understanding of neuroscience is, you may or may not be able to go down to recording what percentage of an uploads thoughts are 'work-related' (perhaps pattern-matching on keywords or just general machine learning techniques).
On the other hand, why would you bother hiring an upload in the first place? Just contract for specific results, like the way lawyering is moving - not pay per hour, but pay per contract or action.
> This is consistent with almost everything interesting in business being superlinear.
So diseconomies of scale do not exist? Funny, I think even Robin has posted on how companies tend to be too large (suggesting empire-building psychology, IIRC)...
I took my retirement in my 20s. Self-financed through seasonal work, I traveled the world, pursued interests, read books, met fascinating people, had many relationships. I wanted to do it while I was young enough to enjoy it.
I then started my career in my 30s . Now, at 44. I'm responsible, run a business, have kids, and work all the time. It was definitely difficult getting a late start, but the hardest part for me has been longing for the joy in leisure that I knew in my 20s.
Most people go right from school to work, never knowing the freedom or joy of real leisure.
Knowing how to spend free time is a skill that must be developed, and most people have never done it.
Why do people wait until the end of their life to retire?
Sadly, because they want to -- they don't know what they are missing.
My subjective experience is that productivity scales sub-linearly with hours worked, beyond some reasonable minimum. The data I have seen on error rates in hospitals confirms this, showing that beyond 40 hours per week, error rates increase exponentially. I used to put in solid 65 hour weeks during grad school with only a handful of days off per year, and I am certain that any attempt to put in more hours would have been useless unless it was for the most mundane work such as grading papers. You can force yourself to do grunt work for up to a hundred hours a week, though you will become rapidly less efficient beyond 60 hours or so. When I hear of people in certain professions bragging about insanely long workweeks, I can only imagine that they are getting paid obscene sums for spending hours tweaking powerpoints for the big boss, and not doing real innovative or creative work after only having slept 4-5 hours a night and having no free time in the last two weeks.
On the low end, though, you are right. Someone working twenty hours a week will get more than twice done than someone working ten hours, because inevitably a few hours a week get tied up in junk that simply doesn't scale.
I too, at 28, after a decade of working hard, investing wisely, and living modestly, have decided to stop working and live a life of leisure rather than one of increasing my net worth ever higher. It's not for everyone, but it works great for me.
And I'm not the only one. Start searching for people who have "retired" in their 30's and you'll see lots of people have chosen to do what most people think is impossible. Anyone with the intelligence and drive to have a successful 50 year career would also be capable of having a 10 year career followed by 40 years of living off of their investments if they just made it their goal.
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief"
People have other desires then play. A lot of us seem to want families. Either because we just like them, or because they are a form of social insurance for our old age. Full time work provides two bulwarks against the disasters that threaten our families: a steady income and health insurance. We tolerate some loss of time with our beloved families in hope of reducing (they're bulwarks, not magic shields) the risk that our spouses will be left destitute, and our children sent to state foster care.
By the time we've reached the traditional age of retirement our families will be launched and if we're lucky self-sufficient. Then we are will to tolerate a few more risks.
"But why, for example, doesn’t the idea of spreading a decade of play from age 65-75 across the four decades from age 25 to 65 appeal more? Why not want a week off every month, or two years off out of every eight?"
In many careers, it takes a fair amount of effort and sometimes expense just to break even. Not only is productivity more than linear with hours worked, as Michael Wengler points out, but it actually is negative for some initial run. Work beneath a certain intensity just doesn't pay the individual's cost of maintaining the education, connections, skills, and other capacities to do the work. Since employers often pick up some of that cost, they are quite interested in the intensity of the employee's work interest.
This, I think, goes part way to explaining why people retire. That U-shaped curve is a golden chain. Taking off a year or two risks breaking it. There's few careers where it's all that certain you can pick back up. At the same time, most people don't want to be forever tied to the intensity of effort that gets them on the right side of the curve. So, they plan on sticking to it long enough to gain the financial freedom to do other things. Those "other things" may look quite a bit like work. Sometimes, they are work. But a kind of work that doesn't carry that pattern.
Cf. professional sports where star players retire completely rather than switching down to lower leagues where they would be still good enough to play and make some money.
In my opinion, anyone who works one day longer than they have to is in some way mentally ill. I had an easy job (35 years) i enjoyed, and retired at 57 years of age. I probably would have went a year or 2 earlier but stayed on to keep youngest grown child on health ins while she went to college. many claim to be fulfilled by work. old rock stars, politicians, businessmen, actors, doctors maybe. I know or at least hope they are fulfilled but i firmly believe that most of them do indeed have psyche issues. I literally just thought of this example. " MOST PEOPLE WHO PROFESS TO LOVE WORKING WHEN THEY DONT HAVE TO, ARE EXACTLY LIKE THE PERSON THAT SAYS THEY ENJOY SMOKING, IT JUST ISNT TRUE, SMOKERS WHO SAY THEY LIKE SMOKING ACTUALLY MEAN THEY DONT ENJOY THE FEELING AND WITHDRAWL FROM NOT SMOKING" Put that in your pipe and smoke it! There simply are too many ways to pass time. For me, simply being in the forest, preferably by running water, in addition to putting out effort to stay fit by excersizing and eating well brings peace. im not going to move into the woods, but i happen to enjoy simple living. if you are "imprisoned by the thought of what to do", well, thats your problem...good luck with that. Other loves of mine? my grown kids, my granddaughter, internet, motorcycle riding. i love that i seemingly have escaped the rat race. who knows what lies ahead. but the next time i worry about spelling, grammar, overly politically correctiveness will be when i fill out my medicare forms in 8 years (hopefully...unless the big rats take it away).
> Once as a young man working at Lockheed, I decided to switch from working 40 to 30 hours per week, to spend more time on my independent research. My rate of advancement in the company didn’t just slow by 25%, it stopped completely — I was seen as not serious about my job.
Potentially relevant is this new randomized study on telecommuting for call center workers in China: http://www.econ.brown.edu/e...
> Employees in the treatment group who wished to come back to work in the office full-time were allowed to come back at the beginning of September. To understand the characteristics of the workers who choose to come back to the office, we run probit regressions using whether a worker returns to the office as the outcome. The sample for returning to the office includes the 103 treatment works still at CTrip at the end of the experiment. Out of the 103 treatment workers, 22 opt to come back to work in the office full-time. As shown in column (3) of Table 7 Panel B, we find that employees who have better pre-experiment performance and worse post-experiment performance are more likely to return to the office. They are likely a group of employees who did not benefit as much from the Work-from-Home Program. We also find that married employees or those living with parents are less likely to return to the office. In-depth interviews with the employees as well as home visits suggest that these employees tend to benefit more from the Program as they enjoy spending more time with their family and have received support from their family as well.
My experience is completely the opposite. There is some minimum # of hours you need to stay "in form", but after that productivity increases sublinearly. My first 20 hours/week are probably 2x as productive as the next 10, and so on.
That's a real firehose of data you're talking about, so who's going to drink from it? Exponentially more uploads?
Go tell the LGTB people that! I'm sure they would love to hear that.
Good article, it is a bit of a paradox, but I guess it highlights the importance of doing something you have a degree of passion about (if you can help it). I'm a fan of the line "follow your passion", you need to have a an element of inflexibility in your approach though (and of course your passion needs to be something that you can somehow make money with)
> On a side topic: if we convert people into scanned uploads, how will we be able to tell that the scanned uploads are actually working and not playing since we cannot tell even today who is working and who is playing?
An upload can be monitored even more closely than a regular human: *every* aspect of its existence is computerized and loggable. Forget keylogging or web browsing records - you can log every sense! Depending on how deep our understanding of neuroscience is, you may or may not be able to go down to recording what percentage of an uploads thoughts are 'work-related' (perhaps pattern-matching on keywords or just general machine learning techniques).
On the other hand, why would you bother hiring an upload in the first place? Just contract for specific results, like the way lawyering is moving - not pay per hour, but pay per contract or action.
> This is consistent with almost everything interesting in business being superlinear.
So diseconomies of scale do not exist? Funny, I think even Robin has posted on how companies tend to be too large (suggesting empire-building psychology, IIRC)...
I took my retirement in my 20s. Self-financed through seasonal work, I traveled the world, pursued interests, read books, met fascinating people, had many relationships. I wanted to do it while I was young enough to enjoy it.
I then started my career in my 30s . Now, at 44. I'm responsible, run a business, have kids, and work all the time. It was definitely difficult getting a late start, but the hardest part for me has been longing for the joy in leisure that I knew in my 20s.
Most people go right from school to work, never knowing the freedom or joy of real leisure.
Knowing how to spend free time is a skill that must be developed, and most people have never done it.
Why do people wait until the end of their life to retire?
Sadly, because they want to -- they don't know what they are missing.
But I think this same choice is made when the cost falls mainly on themselves.
My subjective experience is that productivity scales sub-linearly with hours worked, beyond some reasonable minimum. The data I have seen on error rates in hospitals confirms this, showing that beyond 40 hours per week, error rates increase exponentially. I used to put in solid 65 hour weeks during grad school with only a handful of days off per year, and I am certain that any attempt to put in more hours would have been useless unless it was for the most mundane work such as grading papers. You can force yourself to do grunt work for up to a hundred hours a week, though you will become rapidly less efficient beyond 60 hours or so. When I hear of people in certain professions bragging about insanely long workweeks, I can only imagine that they are getting paid obscene sums for spending hours tweaking powerpoints for the big boss, and not doing real innovative or creative work after only having slept 4-5 hours a night and having no free time in the last two weeks.
On the low end, though, you are right. Someone working twenty hours a week will get more than twice done than someone working ten hours, because inevitably a few hours a week get tied up in junk that simply doesn't scale.
I too, at 28, after a decade of working hard, investing wisely, and living modestly, have decided to stop working and live a life of leisure rather than one of increasing my net worth ever higher. It's not for everyone, but it works great for me.
And I'm not the only one. Start searching for people who have "retired" in their 30's and you'll see lots of people have chosen to do what most people think is impossible. Anyone with the intelligence and drive to have a successful 50 year career would also be capable of having a 10 year career followed by 40 years of living off of their investments if they just made it their goal.
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief"
People have other desires then play. A lot of us seem to want families. Either because we just like them, or because they are a form of social insurance for our old age. Full time work provides two bulwarks against the disasters that threaten our families: a steady income and health insurance. We tolerate some loss of time with our beloved families in hope of reducing (they're bulwarks, not magic shields) the risk that our spouses will be left destitute, and our children sent to state foster care.
By the time we've reached the traditional age of retirement our families will be launched and if we're lucky self-sufficient. Then we are will to tolerate a few more risks.
"But why, for example, doesn’t the idea of spreading a decade of play from age 65-75 across the four decades from age 25 to 65 appeal more? Why not want a week off every month, or two years off out of every eight?"
But that would be .... French!
In many careers, it takes a fair amount of effort and sometimes expense just to break even. Not only is productivity more than linear with hours worked, as Michael Wengler points out, but it actually is negative for some initial run. Work beneath a certain intensity just doesn't pay the individual's cost of maintaining the education, connections, skills, and other capacities to do the work. Since employers often pick up some of that cost, they are quite interested in the intensity of the employee's work interest.
This, I think, goes part way to explaining why people retire. That U-shaped curve is a golden chain. Taking off a year or two risks breaking it. There's few careers where it's all that certain you can pick back up. At the same time, most people don't want to be forever tied to the intensity of effort that gets them on the right side of the curve. So, they plan on sticking to it long enough to gain the financial freedom to do other things. Those "other things" may look quite a bit like work. Sometimes, they are work. But a kind of work that doesn't carry that pattern.