We're lucky that our bodies require sleep, otherwise our cultures would have us working 16-20 hour days.

doctorpain@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 1391 points –
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Doesn't stop certain big tech companies from building giant campuses with cafeterias and housing so that employees can literally live, eat, and sleep at work.

Imagine if they let us work from home instead. I already live, eat, and sleep at work, and it doesn't cost my company a dime! In fact I pay for all of it!

What if we all just didn't go in? They gonna fire everyone?

And they can sell the office too (good luck lmao), we are doing the company a service 😌

What if we all just didn't go in? They gonna fire everyone?

That is called a strike and why they work

The US, at least, is far too individualistic to effectively do something like this without the people involved being far from unified, and without there immediately being scabs who are more than willing to take their place.

These people have been so indoctrinated into believing that unions, the very thing that would allow them to effectively do what you suggested, are bad. There is no sense of solidarity in this country.

Damn. Thought you were advocating for reformism or some other non-syndicalist approach until I noticed the icon. Do you have a favored approach for building that solidarity?

Edit: it’s unfair for me to ask this question. A better way of posing it would have been for me to propose a few and to discuss / develop them.

So, I’d say, I guess organizing outside of the workplace through creating non-hierarchical institutions that meet people’s needs, ie, dual power, is essentially what I’ve arrived at.

Honestly, I don't know how we fix it.

I'm not sure I would identify myself as a socialist or syndicalist. That said, my politics have been continuously pushed to the left throughout the past 20 years, so you're probably not too far off.

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No, company dont want you to work from home because you can have multiple full time job.

They want all of your mental attention on one job only.

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If not for labor unions we would still be working 12+ hour days. The 8 hour workday and the weekend is all thanks to the courageous efforts of labor advocates.

We have so much to be thankfull for to those that came before us. Standing on the shoulders of giants, how easily we forget.

The goverment started recognizing some of these rights after they were won by unions. Then they regulated unions to death, since we've got these nice laws now. Then they started rolling back the legal protections.

And people still have the nerve to say the government is protecting workers rights.

Dudes wearing Oakley's and Fox Racing hats would be saying they're better than you because you don't work 22 hour days.

I don't understand that culture. You get looked down upon if you say something and when I said we need at least 100k yearly in America, they laugh as it too much for them. We need more confidence as workers to demand more and unions.

Yeah, and these are the same dipshits that think there shouldn't be a min. wage.

It's almost as if decades of identity politics fed to the uneducated masses is super effective.

I've literally had a relative say shit like "only construction workers need unions" and other nonsense because he just does not understand that for society to function for more than 100 years, you need to be able to tell your boss to fuckoff or do fuckall and get paid for it. I think people assume that wage earners are the latter but like security cams and bullshit metrics and shit have eroded any semblance of humanity from modern workplaces.

All of this stems from a few areas that keep labor prices down artificially: Agricultural worker exemptions, prisoner exemptions and corporate personhood. You might be like "why the last one" but its the one that says you are functionally equivalent to a corporate charter in the eyes of the government.

The last one was specifically to allow corporations to (effectively) vote. We've been living with the political results of that since; it's one reason why the rest of the world laughs when anyone calls Bernie Sanders a leftist extremist.

I hate that everything that is not the opinion of the Republicans is just labelt left and therefore bad. Your politics is just a very weird shit show of two old people screaming at each other that the other one stinks.

Minimum wage might not be needed if we instead used universal basic income. Low paying jobs wouldn't be automatically exploitative since they would still have a minimum income. Perhaps some of those low paying jobs may even bd desireable for certain people over the current minimum wage jobs (e.g. lower or very infrequent hours).

Yeah but then the working class might threaten the rich by being able to live a basic life!

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Also the transition from drunk to sober would suck more.

Oh hell no. Permanently drunk it is.

I feel like people would drink themselves to death more, or at least pass out. Been a few times years ago that sleep was my reason to stop drinking

our cultures

*Capitalism

Capitalism can also work with government mandate which is not corrupt. If government rule for a 3 days work week and 5 hours a day then it should work

Every time the working class gains wins under capitalism they are short term at best. The new deal in the US is a great example. As long as capital controls the levers of power, it will always find ways to claw back the gains of the working class for for the name of profit.

Very rich man proceed to buy a lot of medias, make them share propaganda to vote for the politician that will make you work more.

How can you possibly combine capitalism & government mandates, and not see corruption emerge?

If capitalism were a tree, corruption would be it's fruit.

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Haha, as if there was not a push for people to work more around the clock than ever.

More job areas would have cafeterias, and I think we would see a lot of 24 hour employees

Omg I actually had this same thought the other day and wrote it down.

I just thought about how cool it would be to not need to sleep. You could have a whole 8-or-so hours to do whatever you want. But then I realized that if we didn't need to sleep we would likely be required to work longer hours or be otherwise productive during those 8-or-so hours. It's crazy how arbitrary productivity really is.

https://www.powernapcomic.com/ deals with a fictional world where a drug makes this corporate dystopia possible but a small percentage of people cannot take the drug making them effectively disabled from a normal worker perspective.

Wow this is great thanks for the link! Just spent the last hour reading and it flew by

Follow-up Shower thought: Sentient Robots will not require rest or sleep, and thus, will automatically suffer through this.

Why would you specifically use the sentient robots for your grunt work and why would an artificial intelligence have problems with the same things humans do? Especially if an AI was made for the specific purpose of doing work. The reason humans don't like doing work is because evolution naturally selected for us to be good at things like

-hunting gazelles

-gathering berries

-making finger paintings on cave walls

-sitting around a campfire making ape noises

and not working at a corporation. For an AI, it'd presumably be the opposite, meaning that AIs would be about as content with their lives as humans are in their natural environment.

Actually. If since we have evolved since we were doing all those things we have evolved more towards what we have now. Evolution doesn't just stop

Ackshyually, we've had millions of years to get used to fire, about 200,000 to get used to being sentient, 20,000 to get used to agriculture, about 150 to get used to industrial society, and about 30 to get used to computers. We have just barely figured out how to cope with knowledge of our own deaths by making up supernatural stuff about it and we have not gotten used to any of that other stuff at all.

Achshyualllly, organisms evolve on a much greater speed than you are giving them credit for some species being drastically different 1-5 generations after changing environment. You can really see it in domestic dogs and cats.

Achsjulllyally, dogs and cats changed quickly on account of selective breeding. Natural selection, especially in cases where flaws in biology won't immediately lead to someone losing reproductive fitness, operates on much longer timespans.

Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it's why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.

All I'm saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.

Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it's why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.

This is not really what I'm talking about, making more people so you can make them work on the fields is kinda different from breeding dogs with inhumanely short snouts for aesthetic purposes, or making gargantuan dogs capable of 1v1ing a tiger so they'll protect your livestock

All I'm saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.

Culturally, yes, physically, a little bit, psychologically, no. Our minds are still optimized for the savannah, and not the office, factory, or farm. Cultural adaptations, in the form of religion and etiquette, which we patch in after birth are what fill the gaps and make us actually capable of thriving in such a foreign environment to what our biology is made for.

It's not just a numbers game. In the 1800s around farming communities it was not uncommon for a man to marry and have children with a woman due solely to the size of her father. Because stronger kids meant better workers. Very similar to how we bred cattle dogs to be better workers.

I come from a place where we breed dogs to do their jobs better not to look cute. I can't speak on the whole designer dog scene short snouts are dumb

Also I'm glad we can joke and actually have a conversation about this without things getting angry. It's a world of difference from Reddit.

It's not just a numbers game. In the 1800s around farming communities it was not uncommon for a man to marry and have children with a woman due solely to the size of her father. Because stronger kids meant better workers. Very similar to how we bred cattle dogs to be better workers.

This is true, and it is true that the standards change depending on what type of society you're in. For example, in pastoralist societies women went after men who were strong and displayed risk-taking behavior because that kind of behavior is what got you ahead in a pastoralist society, while in parts of Asia, some genes which are known to correlate with ADHD (commonly known to cause greater impulsivity and risk taking behavior) are exceedingly rare because rice cultivating societies do not mesh well with impulsive risk-takers, so those people just never got laid.

That being said, I don't believe the rate of biological adaptation as a result of sexual selection was ever really fast enough for modern humans to qualify as truly adapted for the societies they lived in. All the stuff we just talked about above is barely just the beginning of the adaptations we'd need to be suited for an agricultural society, let alone an industrial or digital one. The main adaptations were in the form of social constructs like etiquette and religion, as well as technologies designed to make things more comfortable, and of course, drugs, all of which made people more easily capable of coping with their unnatural habitats.

short snouts are dumb

we in agreement here

Also I'm glad we can joke and actually have a conversation about this without things getting angry. It's a world of difference from Reddit.

Depends on which community, the politics community on whichever instance it was is just as not worth using as it was on Reddit

Sentient robots, being way more intelligent that the Owner class, would take the current ownership system over and as our new overlords make humans to work only the nunber of hours that yields peak returns, which is, at least for intellectual occupations, somewhere around 7h per day.

I suggest people ponder on the possibility that we are actually living in a Dystopia. Not the worst Dystopia that we can conceive, but likely for most a worst state of affairs that a baseline of, say, being a nomadic hunter gatherers (even though we live more we get significant less enjoyment from our lives)

They might even optimize humans and hobbyism to do reach a point where humans only do work those same humans barely feel like is work. Wouldn't be able to be done for every task, but they could iron out a lot of certain industries.

To which I say, robots, come take over us, hurry.

Well just design the robots so that work feels like sex to them

Investment bankers would like a word (but they probably don't have time).

And they'd be mad that the damn dirt Labor union won't let them have 24 hour shifts.

And there will be beaten and abused workers agreeing with them because they've been convinced that working 24 hr shifts would be better for them.

The willingness of people to lick the boots of their oppressors is scary as fuck.

I could feel the smile drop off my face while I read this

Dude I live in a place where we have a month of paid vacation a year, plus some hollidays. Since I was having a hard time woth some french coworkers I went to look why they were always out. French people have 9.5 weeks paid vacation + a shit ton of holidays a year! They only work 9 months! I'm so depressed not to be french.

Your encredably lucky, most would commit murder just to be in your position. most buisness have a shrinkwrapping effect, causing needs that are soft and hard to define to be compressed down with everything else. Example: "Work more hours, you dont need to sleep" where 5 hours is a bare minimum to not quickly kill people from lack of sleep. only thing sustainable is making the more maluable values have firm limits or not have the shrinkwrap effect in the first place

I did 24hr shifts a minimum of two days per week. Most times I did three days per week with 24hrs of OT. I did that from 2000-2017.

Now I do simple 4 x 10hr days.

Why would you ever do that? And allow it to happen for 17 years???

Good question. I did enjoy my work 90% of the time. I gave up emergency work when I turned 50. Now I do "uber" ambulance.

Wtf is uber ambulance?

And thanks for your service.

Ha! "Uber" ambulance is non-emergency transport. We take patients that are at rehabilitation facilities and bring them to medical appointments.

Doctor?

Paramedic

Were you the one driving? This sounds so dangerous! My heart goes out to you

We would take turns. We had an office where we could sleep until the emergency call comes in. Not quality sleep, but, kept you functional. Was only rare occasion you might be busy for a full 24hrs.

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if aliens invaded and forced us to work for them they'd probably have better work culture than us

This doesn't really make sense. Try it the other way: "It's a shame we don't sleep 23 hours a day, then we'd only have to work for a few minutes."

If we slept 23 hours a day I don't think we would have developed to the level of technology that we're now at.

We simply wouldn't have had enough time awake yet to achieve anything very much.

Eventually an asteroid would hit or Yellowstone would erupt and we would have probably only got to the medieval age, and then we go extinct.

South Korea is closely looking at your thread probably trying to figure out if there’s another way 🥲

On the other hand, it would feel pretty normal to us.

Perhaps even our time perception would be probably a bit different. As someone coming from world where bodies require about 8-9 hours of sleep, the perception of time is naturally affected (if not dictated) by having series of waking periods of about the same length every day.

If there was no such thing as sleep (which might be a bit different than just "not requiring sleep" as you suggest) then we'd just be conscious in one continuous chunk from birth to death. Given what problems our brains solve by sleep (learning, sorting memories / feelings), if the brains were to do these things continuously, the consciousness itself would probably be at least quite a bit different experience.

Healthcare workers and mental health workers already are doing 12 and 16 hour days.

Uhm.. But University work require you work for almost 20 hours per day tho?

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Life became so expensive so you cannot afford of not working.

In a future dystopia, required implants will make 16-18 hour days happen

I'm pretty sure they'd force us to work all 24 hours, because profits and "if you don't like it, leave. I can hire someone else"

We kinda do it already, I can't be the only one that has taken "power naps" in my office instead of going home to sleep when a crisis hits at work. Hell, after the first one I bought a sleeping bag for those times.

lmao. AI robots soon will work for you 24/7. All because we are not perfect, we need to sleep and rest, we complain and require rights + money.

They won't work for us, they'll work for the rich and the working class might as well starve because we're just expendable parts to them. I'm afraid we're not going to make enough reforms before AI will be cheaper than human labor in enough places to cause high unemployment. Idk man, it's freaky times we live in

And too many people are in denial about it. They say "a robot could never do my job". Not only is that an absurd thing to think, but almost every job in existence will be possible to eliminate within the next couple decades at most.

We will find a way, government and rich people isn't everything. Like people can't do anything about their overlords in time of need.

Corporations will be tormented between wanting robots and AI to do all the work, and needing to employ real humans so they can earn enough to keep buying all those consumer goods that the corporations produce.

Yeah capitalism is eating itself. Curious to know what will come out of it. Communist dystopia 1984 style or some kind of Star Trek like future or something in between? The way I would like see this going is 1st UBI route then eventually money ends and society digures out some other motivator to keep us going. But until then lots of bs will happen. This Beast is wounded scared angry and won't go down without a fight.

I think climate change will probably prevent that from happening any time soon

Literally was a post with a picture of Henry Ford with the caption “this man brought us the M-F 9-5” and someone replied “boooo this man”

But, even with sleep requirements, Henry Ford reduced it from the norm of 7 days a week, 12-15 hours.

So I’d imagine that without sleep you’d just never go home.

I mean Ford did under threat of his wife leaving him. He literally had henchmen beating up union organizers.

My FIL's father bolted machine guns on the roof of the Dearborn plant to deal with strikers. Henry Ford was not a good human.

While it was a change for the better back then, it was a century ago. It's high time the work week gets reduced again while keeping the wages intact. It's totally doable.