Is modern life 'worth it'?

[MrsTroutfire]

Obviously, not an entirely 'serious' question as I doubt many people would want to live in the conditions our predecessors did 200 years ago with limited healthcare etc, and it's not likely that society will change anytime soon anyhow.

However, I drive a lot for my job and have a lot of time to endlessly ruminate over the universe. One thing that I always return to is the fact that as a society we work the majority of hours in a day, the majority of days in a week, the majority of weeks in a year, and the majority of years in our lives.

Then, in our mid/late 60s, with our youth decades behind us, we then finally get the freedom to spend our days as we wish, finances and health allowing. If you're male, the likelihood is that you'll probably have worked for over 40 years without a single month away from your work environment, as most people only get a few weeks leave each year and paternity leave still isn't really very common.

I'm pretty sure this was never planned and just evolved that way, but when you look around your place of work and think "this is the majority of my life" it's not a great thought!

Of course life was much tougher in previous centuries, but people were mainly trying to survive. Nowadays it seems like the main purpose of work is churning profit. Even with financial difficulties abound I don't know many people who literally have to worry about survival.

So I sometimes wonder what we actually spend our entire lives working for. No doubt, the machine would stop turning if a huge proportion of the population ceased to make and spend money, but in some ways it seems the system runs us nowadays rather than the reverse, in the sense that money was originally created as an alternative to barter, but is now the principle determinant of quality of life (health issues aside). For example, food may be plentiful, even going to waste, but that's no longer the issue as you'll still starve without the money to buy it (whilst I still appreciate that there has to be some alternative to bartering/swapping of physical goods and a currency is necessary).

It seems like we create new unnecessary technologies, and in turn a market which needs workers to populate it, and this keeps future generations in employment, but at the cost of moving ever further away from subsistence.

Of course people don't want to give up their OLED TV's, iPhones, game consoles, foreign holidays etc, and I don't either tbh. But then a part of me reflects that most people just seem happy to 'play the game' and are so involved in the various aspects of their lives that they don't consider that the biggest sacrifice most of us make is spending the vast majority of our life doing something that we don't really want to and which isn't ultimately necessary for survival in the truest sense.

I'm defo waffling now, but I'd love to be able to contrast our society against a parallel one where our focus has been on prioritising the bare essentials such as food and healthcare etc and people spend a much bigger percentage of their lives actually living them rather than sitting at a desk. Of course they wouldn't have all the gadgets and toys we have but they wouldn't know any different - hell, perhaps in a hundred years time when teleportation has become a thing, people will wonder how we stayed sane only leaving our country 1-2 times a year rather than daily!

@motherloaded I did not say living with less is a race to the bottom. That is how you interpreted it. We do not need as much materiality in our lives to have positive and fulfilling lives. In fact if we want any life at all we are going to have to live with much less material things. It will not be a choice and that is why those who hone the skills to live with less and be truly happy stand to gain most. Odd that isn't it?

Great thread. Place marking to read properly!

@Chickencrossing

I do envy people who find jobs they can enjoy, afford a little bit more than bare minimum bills and have social purpose. What are these jobs?!

Psychology 😁 it's a slog but brings me joy everyday!

Definitely agree with most of what you say, but sadly I'm not expecting a change in my lifetime or even in my DD's lifetime.

Unfortunately Western society is run by capitalist neo-liberals and there are too many ordinary people willing to dedicate themselves to earning money or status.

But if we didn't have modern life the day would not be spent relaxing and enjoying it, it would be working on the shelter, hunting, finding water, teaching children etc etc,

MyOctopusFeature

that has been the message from any dominant class over centuries to convince the poor to be content where they are!

I don't buy it, or at least, I don't want to be in the poorer but content class...

I am not overly materialistic as long as I have enough basics, but I want to keep my freedom, to move, to travel, to live basically.

I certainly think the system we have is broken (i.e. we could have more people in employment all with part-time hours, rather than fewer people working full time), and 4/3 days workweeks are definitely doable.

However you make a huge assumption about 'living' - i.e. if people weren't so busy working they'd have more time to live. But surely living is about doing things you enjoy, including enjoying all those expensive gadgets and foreign holidays. It's also about experiencing life, and believe it or not things like dance lessons and music cost money because the creatives who make these deserve to be paid.

I'm not a very materialistic person and can happily live ('daily life) on a shoestring, including things like clothes. However if my entire life consisted of cooking, farming what have you and talking to the same people in the town square every day I'd go completely nuts.

Oh OP, I've thought this for years and I am so with you. Life is such a slog. I've actually been feeling extremely depressed about this the last few days, because life seems so pointless!

I have a plan to go down to 4 days a week in just a few years, and then 3 days a few years later. Or maybe go straight to 3 days in just a few years.

I'm saving like mad (as much as I can whilst doing my house up), then I'm going to buy a house with a garden, get rabbits and a dog, and only work a few days a week. The rest of the time I will spend with my parents, doing hobbies, or in the garden.

This is only possible because I have no children, though!

You’re absolutely right OP. It’s something I ruminate over quite often. We work all our lives to pay off a house, or just for basic living expenses. We’re lucky if we get a week each year to holiday.
It hurts me. Life is about survival now for so so many. That’s not living. I find it really hard to digest.

DH thanked me for cooking the other day, and I said, Oh it didn't take that long. Imagine if I'd had to grow the grain, grow the vegetables, mill some flour, milk cows and churn butter. Just think how much work would go into every meal. Most of us have swapped that back-breaking labour for some kind of paid labour that we exchange for food and other things. I know which I'd rather do!

Working part time provides a good work/life balance, and it would be good if it becomes the norm eventually.

We have a lot more free time than previous generations did, but I think that many people are mentally overloaded by social media, 24 hours news coverage and the abundance of tech gadgets that go with modern life. Many people are glued to their smart phones 24/7, and can't manage to walk along the street without gazing at their screens. When I go for a walk, I never carry a phone with me. I immerse myself in the walk and look around me, it's a kind of mindfulness which recharges me. I think the expectation of everyone being contactable 24/7 is madness - for me, that is for people like doctors who are on call, but most other people don't need to be available 24/7. It is worrying that people have sleep walked into accepting this new norm.

@toocoldforsno

I don't think your premise is very sound, at least not as any kind of universal notion. I can tell you that my DH is late 40s and certainly has had more than a few weeks at a time off work, inlcuding multiple parental leaves of several months, as well as long holidays and a sabbatical. I can tell you that neither he nor I work to generate profit for anyone, and our work is essential to people. I can also tell you that a lot of people are struggling to put food on the table and pay for basics, and your pontificating about how we all just care about buying ipads and cars is actually quite offensive.

Perhaps you work long hours at a desk in a job you dislike as you're mad for money and material things, but please don't assume we all are the same.

Well, good for you I guess but seeing that nearly 90% of voters have indicated I'm not BU, it looks like you're largely alone in finding it offensive. In response to your comment that it's 'not a sound premise' I would direct you to the opening line of my first post where I state that it's obviously not an entirely serious question due to the hypothetical nature. Maybe also a bit tonedeaf to boast about your 'long holidays' whilst lecturing me about how people are struggling to put food on the table lol. I can't think of many (any) men who've had multiple long maternity leaves in addition to sabbaticals, so your husband certainly sounds rather more privileged than most.

I certainly don't have a desk job. If you look at my posting history (on my main account I started the thread with) you'll see that I posted at length only yesterday about how I escaped the rat race a few years back and love my job. I'm not one to boast about how 'essential' my job is, but it ultimately is. A large part of it revolves around managing sustainability and recycling processes and next year I hope to reduce the amount of cardboard going to landfill by approx 250k tons.

I'm also involved in helping three councils manage the huge increase in domestic waste created by all the people currently WFH. We're also building a renewable energy plant which will run on waste which would otherwise have gone to landfill and will provide power to the local community - we have another plant soon to follow. I've mentioned all these on here in the last few days.

So no I'm not an embittered office worker who only cares about material things, but the fact remains that somebody must be buying all these iPhones and Apple watches. 🤷‍♀️ If you worked in my industry I guarantee you'd be shocked by the amount of resources we waste and the amount that go landfill (including over 40% of recyclables as customers are so bad at segregating them and cross contaminate the loads beyond saving). So much plastic tat which gets buried and then replaced with more new plastic crap - do we really need all this stuff?

In spite of everything, most people wouldn't work if they won the lottery and I'm sure you know this. This is partly what the thread is about. A lot of people work out of 'necessity', but their work is ultimately unnecessary. I thought that would be an interesting thing to deconstruct in a hypothetical manner and most posters seeminglty aren't offended. You can make as many petty comments as you like but as a society we spend countless hours, time, and resources manufacturing useless crap that ends up in the ground and then we so it all again. That's a fact not an opinion.

I completely agree with you OP. The human race is well evolved and very intelligent, and had a clean sheet to create whatever society it wanted - and this is what it came up with? A world full of stress. We are slaves to money. We are the only species who has to pay to live on the planet. It’s bonkers. I look at my cats and I envy them their stress-free lives. We’re supposed to be more advanced than them FFS! I reckon people were a lot happier in caveperson times.

I disagree. I've always thought that it's a waste of a life to spend all that time doing a job that you don't like. I enjoy my work, think it is useful and purposeful (brings benefits to others) and I choose companies that Iwantto work for.

I don't dislike my job at all. It provides societal value and is never boring, which is more than I can say about my decade in a corporate job. However, unlike others I don't think I've 100% swallowed the pill that working for the majority of hours in your life is necessary or preferable to pursuing the things you really enjoy - for me it would be things like reading philosophy and music production, which aren't viable careers for 99% of people but really enrich my mind in a way that no job ever likely will.

So many posts I want to reply to and not enough fingers. 😂

It's a hard discussion to have, partly because it's so multifaceted and also because it's necessarily so hypothetical. A lot of posters are mentioning days of old, but I was more thinking of a parallel world, which of course makes it even more speculative and elusive.

For example, despite our amazing advances in technology, the quality of much of the processed food we eat as a society is terrible. Again, I'd imagine that it often comes down to profit - GM crops and unhealthy animals pumped full of chemicals etc, and untraceable sources in some cases. And of course a large proportion of the world is starving whilst the other is living in what our ancestors would likely see as a technological wonderland.

Just for the sake of argument/speculation, I wonder what society would look like if we had instead focused on sustainable and adequate food supplies and renewable fuel sources etc. I'd imagine that with even half the revenues and hours currently invested in entertainment (football, gambling, video games etc) we could most likely have robust food and medical provision with most people not working 40 hours a week.

It gets increasingly hard to try and outline it as the devil is in the details. But picture the following as a hypothetical scenario. Modern society evolved differently in a parallel universe and is much more subsistence/necessity focused. We have decent healthcare/food/policing etc in place but most people only work half the day or alternatively half the week as we have the workload spread over a much greater number of people, who would be working in 'unnecessary' industries in our current society.

Having prioritised the necessities as a society, we are then free to focus on the more luxury elements of life, but from the advantageous position of having everything we need to survive and a decent chunk of our lives to spend as we see fit. We could actually choose whether we want to sacrifice more time to facilitate overseas holidays, luxury gadgets, etc.

It's obviously a somewhat ridiculous and fanciful thought as it's so far removed from reality and we were likely already well on our way to our current situation before we realised it (hindsight being a wonderful thing, etc). But I think picturing hypothetical alternatives often allows one to contrast and really see more clearly our current reality and reflect on what we'd really choose if we had the ability to.

As is, we have little choice but to continue as we are, as the machine is already in motion. We have many unnecessary parts to our society, but they need to keep running as the collapse of industries leads to the collapse of the economy and in turn a downfall in our tangible living standards. I often think this about cars. We don't need them as a society for the most part and we are causing catastrophic and unsustainable damage to the planet, which I'm not convinced electric cars will ultimately resolve. However, that cat is out the bag and won't go back in again.

Most of us can't imagine being without a car (myself included) but I often speculate that the day may well come when teleportation is possible and people teleport to Tokyo for meetings and can't imagine only leaving the country a few times a year - likely s.bit of an exaggeration but you get the point. Much as I jest, it's apparently not outside the bounds of science according to many scientists and we just aren't advanced enough yet to do it - we successfully teleported photons decades ago and just need to learn how to teleport more complex matter like atoms and molecules (technically, I believe it isn't so much teleporting in the usual sense as reconstructing in a different location, but it's not unfeasible IMO that we'll achieve it in the next few centuries providing humans are still around).

@thepeopleversuswork

You are absolutely right that people are not more busy now than they used to be. I was just commenting that the need to have every moment scheduled and feeling a sense of importance because of it seems to me to contribute to modern problems of anxiety and depression. I see this in how people raise their kids and in how they conduct their social lives.

When I was young the average working week was 40 hours, if you worked longer you had to be paid overtime so unless it was necessary your employer didn't really want you to do it. Now some people work a ridiculous amount of hours. Few people worked at the weekends, now shopping seems to be a national pastime and shops need to be open every day to compete. People don't have the free time for sport and leisure they used to - sure they have free time, but often at a different time to others so they can't participate in the sports, hobbies etc. with others. As other posters have said, we have so much more technology now and yet everyone is working harder. We also got more pay increases when I was young. When I think about the world when I started my working life, and the world now that I am nearer the end there is no contest - modern life sucks!

When I was young many moons ago people worked where they lived because they didn't have cars (a rural area so yes, some public transport but pretty limited)- this made it easier to join clubs, sports teams etc Commuting means a waste of time travelling but also not knowing the people you live near.
If we do cut back on car use and people work from home that should become the norm again.

Given people love to witter on about the evils of everything I don't know why more people don't talk about commuting. It's expensive, it's time consuming, bad for the environment and can be exhausting. It can mean you don't have the time to emotionally invest in the place you actually live. It can turn areas into dormitories where most people just eat and sleep.

@Quincie

When I was young many moons ago people worked where they lived because they didn't have cars (a rural area so yes, some public transport but pretty limited)- this made it easier to join clubs, sports teams etc Commuting means a waste of time travelling but also not knowing the people you live near. If we do cut back on car use and people work from home that should become the norm again.

But that's a double-edged sword isn't it...

I'm all in favour of helping people reduce their commute and cut back car use. But I can't think of anything worse than having to work where I grew up as a child. It would be so limiting for people who were ambitious.

I can't help feeling that with a lot of this rhetoric about how toxic modern life is, what's being ignored is that the risk of slowing down and working less is much greater for women.

Prioritising your children, the environment, your mental health etc: these are all great things to focus on. No one is going to disagree with this, its motherhood and apple pie.

But the unspoken narrative is that in the overwhelming majority of cases this means less money and less career progression.

I'm ambitious. I need to be because I'm on my own and I need to support my child. I really don't want to limit my income or my child's inheritance for some notional idea that I may have a few extra hours off work and better quality of life. It's just not worth it for me.

I've said all this before but fulfilling this elusive work/life balance in large part rests on your having someone else to fall back on to take the load off, financially or in terms of the childcare load. Fine, if that's a risk you're prepared to take. Personally I would rather work my arse off and keep all of that than share any of it with a bloke. That's a far greater priority for me than an easier commute or more time to spend in my garden.

I'd love to be able to contrast our society against a parallel one where our focus has been on prioritising the bare essentials such as food and healthcare etc and people spend a much bigger percentage of their lives actually living them rather than sitting at a desk.

All I can think of is the communist failure. Where Everyone has a job & most people skive & do the bare minimum at work because there's no advantage in excelling at your job. No status to be gained.

Naive to expect different outcome.

I'd love to be able to contrast our society against a parallel one where our focus has been on prioritising the bare essentials such as food and healthcare etc and people spend a much bigger percentage of their lives actually living them rather than sitting at a desk.

In a society which prioritised "bare essentials such as food and healthcare" people wouldn't have time for "living". Because the standard of living would be so there wouldn't be time for anything other than eking out an existence "Sitting at a desk" would be something people dreamed about. The society you are describing sounds a bit like some of the rhetoric used about Pol Pot's Cambodia.

I do think some people need a bit of an economic reality check.

Some companies have trialled a 4 day week whilst paying their employees for 5. I think this will happen within 20 years. I swear the Labour Party support it.

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/four-day-work-week-gains-popularity-around-the-world

I don't feel like this in relation to work, but I work part time, love my job, feel like it contributes to society and I'm well paid. I recognise how lucky I am to have that combination.

I do feel slightly like this in relation to my children, however... I love them dearly and wouldn't change them for the world but I feel a bit like my life is given over to servicing and facilitating them and their lives. By the time I'm finished that so much of my youth will be gone! They are little just now so perhaps it just that way at the moment.

If anyone is able to work part time I do think that gives a wonderful balance to life. I've been trying to persuade my DH for years but he struggles with it. He thinks he won't look committed enough, won't be promoted, that we won't cope with the pay cut.