Work, creativity and modern life...

I got this link from a friend in Denver. Often I start my response to her posts with Robyn, You Ignorant Slut! :<) Notice the smiley icon at the end showing this was a joke. My comment to Mrs. Schulte's would not have an emoticon. It's typical leftist crap on how Americans work too much today, It even mentioned how shopping on a smart phone while on the toilet is a bit of extreme multitasking. In case she missed something, for generations people would use the time for their constitutional to read the morning paper, a magazine or a book.

Again it's mostly not worth the cost of you time, but I found this interesting:

How our frenetic, too-busy lives have become status symbols

...Even as neuroscience is beginning to show that at our most idle, our brains are most open to inspiration and creativity — and history proves that great works of art, philosophy and invention were created during leisure time — we resist taking time off. Psychologists treat burned-out clients who can't shake the notion that the busier you are, the faster you work, and the more you multitask, the more you are considered competent, smart, successful. It's the Protestant work ethic in overdrive.

In the Middle Ages, this kind of frenzy — called acedia, the opposite of sloth — was one of Catholicism's seven deadly sins. But today, busyness is seen as so valuable that people are actually happier when they're busy, says Christopher Hsee, a psychologist and professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. "If people remain idle, they are miserable," he wrote in Psychological Science in 2010. "If idle people become busy, they will be happier."

That part about being creative while at leisure stuck me as odd. Some of the most creative mines I've seen in my life are not 30 hour a week workers. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Trump, Sam Walton, Jeff Bezos are people known for going full blast. How about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. To call them “creative” in their fields of endeavor does now even begin. Jobs revolutionized multiple high tech industries, Bezos changed the way people show for instance, on the toiler!

Conversely I've patrolled areas of Houston were the largest effort day in and out is waiting for an EFT card update or listing your job as "unemployed improvisational rap artist”. I don’t see much creativity there. It's full of sloth, gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, greed, lust and other destructive behaviors….those terms kinda sound familiar. If not having to work leads to "inspiration and creativity" why isn't there much in Houston's Third Ward? Just asking.

Life in the early 21st century wasn't supposed to be so hectic. In a 1930 essay, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek by 2030, when we'd all have time to enjoy "the hour and the day virtuously and well." During the 1950s, the post-World War II boom in productivity, along with rising incomes and standards of living, led economists and politicians to predict that by 1990, Americans would work 22 hours a week, six months a year, and retire before age 40.

While accepting the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioned a world where "leisure . . . will be abundant, so that all can develop the life of the spirit, of reflection, of religion, of the arts, of the full realization of the good things of the world."

At the time, the idea that leisure would soon be meant for all, rather than just a wealthy elite, was quite radical. A 1959 article in the Harvard Business Review warned that "boredom, which used to bother only aristocrats, had become a common curse." In the early 1960s, when TV broadcaster Eric Sevareid was asked what he considered the gravest crisis facing Americans, he said: "the rise of leisure."

Leisure for all was exactly what the U.S. labor movement had been pursuing for more than a century. As late as 1923, the steel industry required 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Finally, it seemed, workers were about to savor shorter, saner work hours. So, what happened?

First: Life got more expensive, and wages failed to keep up. College tuition alone jumped 1,120 percent from 1978 to 2012. Child Care Aware of America reports that child care is more expensive than public college in dozens of states. The Kaiser Family Foundation says that health-care premiums increased 97 percent between 2002 and 2012. At the same time, wages have fallen to record lows as a share of America's gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages made up 50 percent of GDP; in 2012, they were 43.5 percent. And, as a recent obnoxious Cadillac commercial boasts, we work hard to buy more things: The Commerce Department reports that consumers spent $1.2 trillion in 2011 on unnecessary stuff, 11.2 percent of all consumer spending, way up from 4 percent in 1959.

Yes college tuition costs have exploded in large part because since the 1950s we've pushed generations into a single track of college only. Maybe if we directed them to decent paying jobs that don’t require four plus years of college (e.g. construction, plumbing, mechanics, computer services, welding etc) they can start out in their working years quicker without 100K and more of debt. What’s old is new now. We can have someone sitting in college on Feminist Studies, graduating with worthless degrees to jobs that don’t exist. Or we can have them working on a fracking rig starting off at over 30 an hour, making money and a great life.

Of all these costs listed one that doesn't come up, the increasing burden of taxes and regulations. Try and start a business today and it’s almost impossible. With the regime of B Hussein Obama adding the “tax” of providing health care to start ups and anyone working more than 30 hours a week will only discourage hiring. Or how about tobacco taxes which are very regressive, i.e. they fall more on lower income people. Maybe if we were not pay more and more for government we would have more time to spend with our families or buy a new Cadillac.

Also, just wondering is how the hell does the Commence Department define "unnecessary stuff"? The Harley-Davidson Road King in my garage may be unnecessary to you, but it's very necessary to me. That Chevy Volt I'm subsidizing with my tax dollars seems like a waste to me, but if you want one be my guest. The difference is HD didn’t get anything from Uncle Sugar to make it and I’m paying gas taxes to pay for the roads!

Second: Jobs have become less mechanical and work more creative. New York University sociologist Dalton Conley argues that today's knowledge-economy professions in art, technology, engineering and academics are similar to the pursuits of the mind that the ancient Greek philosophers envisioned as leisure. So, we work a lot because we enjoy it.

That's true in part, but the rise in working hours for the creative class in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by an increase in job insecurity for those same workers, according to the General Social Survey. And the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which protects employees from working too many hours, applies only to hourly, not salaried, workers. In the crudest sense, U.S. law allows employers to work professionals harder without paying them overtime or hiring more people to share the load.

Perhaps we have no choice, then, as a matter of survival, to give greater value to the work that we are compelled to do all the time....

Gee, B Hussein Obama just issued another one of his famous Executive Orders on overtime and this propaganda comes from the Washington Post. If I was paranoid I would see a link from the Obama Regime and a major branch of its propaganda tree. Then again even paranoids have enemies.

I write this as I’m finishing my second day of work at my extra job, security at a telephone place. That’s after working all night. Reading this I get the impression the author has too much time on her hands. So Mrs. Schulte if we ever meet I’ll simply have one thing to say, Kiss my ass you ignorant slut!