Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2017/mar/30/douglas-coupland-the-nine-to-five-is-barbaric?CMP=fb_gu

by freddyc • 9 years ago

58 82 9 years ago

bmmayer1• 9 years ago

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work.

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?

It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.

Sure, work is changing, and many people are lucky to be able to detach from such schedules with exciting and unknown results for the future workplace. But those of us fortunate enough to have had access to 9-to-5 jobs would be tone deaf to act like it's such a traumatic experience, when so many people in the world would be so grateful to have such an opportunity.

jgrahamc• 9 years ago

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?

I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

kevincennis• 9 years ago

"Forced" doesn't seem like exactly the right word.

JoeAltmaier• 9 years ago

And every weekend. And evenings and mornings. And the kids are at school anyway.

This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.

jerf2• 9 years ago

"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"."

As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this time period their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough. Not to mention many of these hunting trips often spanned multiple days from what I gather. I suppose militaries had a lot of cohesion, as long as you don't mind defining "loved ones" as "my squadmates". Family farms still generally would end up with the family cut in half between the women and men, assuming the men even stayed together. Etc.

I can't off the top of my head think of a time period where there wasn't a large portion of the population separated from at least half their family for long periods of time.

The current situation isn't perfect, but let's be precise about what we're comparing it to, and when exactly it supposedly existed and was widespread.

gdulli3• 9 years ago

Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die.

And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.

So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.

Declanomous3• 9 years ago

I think his ego gets in the way of his argument. I was thinking about how melodramatic he sounded about all of this, and then I got to the picture of him standing cruciform under a spotlight, and all I could do was roll my eyes.

Fricken• 9 years ago

I doubt he chose the photo. While a great writer, Coupland is a bit shy & awkward as a speaker.

fsloth3• 9 years ago

Chained to a desk from 9-5 is inhuman if the work is not intrinsically motivating. From quality of life perspective I'm not sure if it's much better than generic hunter gathering.

The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept.

The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better.

Sadly, it's the status quo. Yes, calling it barbaric is hyperbolic - but the end is not to find out the specific philosophic understanding of the condition but to create propaganda and motivation to find something better.

krapp2• 9 years ago

Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line.

To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done.

Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains.

UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.

yawz2• 9 years ago

the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.

We should have never left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. :)

jackhack3• 9 years ago

Because nothing beats dying at the ripe old age 30 with a toothless mouth, body failing of undernourishment and disease (especially parasites), common death in childbirth, the slightest infection becoming a death sentence, and so on.

purplethinking• 9 years ago

Early agriculture was indeed the worst. But look further back, to a time before agriculture. Hunter gatherers spent significanly less time actually hunting and gathering that we do working today. And while off work we have a hard time mentally letting go of it, hunter gatherers instead had pure free time. I'm not saying life was perfect back then, but in terms of work we can clearly strive further. Agriculture has been fairly brief time in the history of our species, so perhaps we shouldn't be using it as a base line.

ellius• 9 years ago

I think he made the mistake of ignoring half the connotation of the word. "Barbaric" really implies a combination of two underlying ideas. He's right insofar as the 9-5 is backwards and unsympathetic to human beings, which I think is his point. He's wrong in that it isn't physically brutal. The problem is he picked a word with a complex connotation when he needed a simpler one.

hectorr• 9 years ago

That's true, but language is constantly evolving. I actually think we need a cultural shift in how we perceive work. The high intrinsic and extrinsic value we place on it served a lot of communities really well for millennia, but things really are changing these days with robotics and narrow AI. Language is one of the main tools we have to work with.

lj3• 9 years ago

Really, barbaric?

Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say,

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag...

edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0].

[0] http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...

gdulli3• 9 years ago

> Really, barbaric?
Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is.

It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem.

But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make.

awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic

Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.

return02• 9 years ago

It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival,

It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era

noir_lord• 9 years ago

Interesting read.

I was born 1980 so I straddle the web when it hit mass market adoption.

The differences are indeed marked, my father did the same job for 20 years, I can't imagine that now.

mstade• 9 years ago

This article was a difficult read for me due to all the hand waving and "in the future so and so will happen." That said, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Coupland. Microserfs is still one of the best books I've ever read, and really hits home in so many ways.

anm89• 9 years ago

What a load of shit. All the more clear as I'm traveling in a 3rd world country where people actually have to deal with difficult working conditions. I see people in their mid 70's doing long days of physical labor on a farm for dollars a day. Ask them how barbaric the 9-5 desk job is.

As the other commenter mentioned, hyperbole like this only ever damages a cause.

I think there are probably better ways to do work and as we move towards the connected future I think many of them will increase in popularity, but that's due to an increase in options from our already very open ended lives, not some struggle against imagined barbarity.

mantas3• 9 years ago

No need for 3rd world country. Quite a few people (mostly older, but not only) in my whereabouts see stable 9-5 job as freedom and strive for it.

falcolas• 9 years ago

And yet, there could be more. So many 9-5 jobs have little or no meaning, yet we insist they are filled to provide people with "purpose" or to justify their continued existence.

Looking into the future and seeing 9-5 as "a step in the right direction, but far from the last step" is not inconceivable.

We look upon slave and child labor as barbaric, whereas not even 200 years ago it was the accepted norm. What prevents that from changing in the next 100-200 years?

jackhack3• 9 years ago

a load of shit, indeed! This degree of hipster self-pity is intolerable. I couldn't make it more than half-way through the stupid article.

"Barbaric." I wonder if he realizes how insulting and patronizing that is. I wish he could have met my grandfather, who worked his life in a coal mine literally scratching out a living six long days a week before dying of lung cancer in the 1950s.

A man who lived in a company house, was paid in script, money that could only be used at the company store to buy good at inflated prices. A man who was shot at with cannon and rifle by the us government for daring to challenge this status quo and try to form a union (see "WV mine wars" for details).

Vacations? Unthinkable. Benefits? no. A paycheck that was just enough to stay alive until the next one came along? yes.

The idea of fulfillment from one's work was probably not even a concept to daydream about. Leisure time didn't exist. It was called "resting" and it's what you did when not working.

He would have seen the cushy desk job of the average HN reader as paradise itself, the "stress" of meetings or deadlines as literally laughable compared to the very real stresses and dangers he "enjoyed" : mine collapse, poisoning by noxious gases, explosions, fire, or cancer.

Load of shit. That's the perfect description.

unprepare2• 9 years ago

Ahh yes, the always tired retort of "people in the past/in a different place have it worse, so you have no right to complain"

totally legitimate argument, im sure your grandfather fought hard for there to never be better working conditions for his grandchildren, and would hate that working conditions have gotten better and continue to improve.

have you ever complained that something tastes bad? dont forget theres starving children in africa, so you aren't allowed to complain about your food tasting bad, because someone has it worse, right?

Have you ever been thirsty and asked someone for water? that gall on you! people die everyday from dehydration, you being thirsty is just hipster self pity, you aren't going to die, so you aren't thirsty

see also:

Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the initial argument.

nasalgoat• 9 years ago

At first blush, I was aghast at the idea of no weekends. Then I realized I am essentially on-call 24/7, even on vacations, as I'm the primary infrastructure person at my company. Yet, because it's well designed and managed, I do tend to have that free time.

The problem becomes when you don't have that free time because of constant work issues. I can't say a future without 100% free time is such a great place.

pavement2• 9 years ago

Not that I'm one to disagree, because day jobs are fucking bullshit, but...

I worry that as advanced technology continues to unfurl evermore convenience into our lives, how spoiled will we become?

sidlls• 9 years ago

It's interesting that you choose to use the word "spoiled" here. It is a testament to how firmly entrenched the class system is.

pavement2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure we understand each other.

If there comes a moment when no single individual knows how to perform essential tasks, because automated sytems have been doing such tasks for us, and then those systems stop working, we'll notice serious problems emerging unexpectedly.

d357r0y3r• 9 years ago

If nine to five is barbaric, what does that make jobs requiring you to wake up early and stay late? This guy seems to have a chip on his shoulder because of some bad workplace experiences and now seems to think every job sucks.

Jobs with regular, stable work hours are not simply there by corporate decree. People actually like having that predictability in their lives. It makes it a lot easier to budget your time when you have that block of time carved out where you're making money.

Now, this guy would say hey, you could work half the time if you quit your job and started your own business. Well, that doesn't match up with the experience of any of the business owners I know (they regularly work 12-16 hour days), but even it was true...now I have to run and operate my own business. I can't just show up and do good work and take home a paycheck. I have to deal with insurance, I have to deal with payroll, or I have to pay someone to deal with all of that. If the only benefit I get from that is saying, "but at least I don't have a boss," it's not even close to worth it.

mynegation• 9 years ago

This piece reeks of entitlement. If you love programming or speaking at conferences, sure you don't mind meshing it all together or follow necessary irregular schedule. But there are many people who just want to sell their labour and skills for money and go to their favorite hobbies - whatever they are - without money attached to them, be that woodworking or playing with your dog. Free scheduling should be an option, many people would like that, but calling the other option "barbaric" is tone deaf

xherberta• 9 years ago

Highlights:

while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with it is horrible. It’s a deal with the devil. At least when they’re employed they don’t have to deal with the freefall; the nothingness of free time. (Sounds Heiddegerian - the dread that comes with freedom)

...This constant influx of news and data means we’ve come to perceive time differently. The future used to be a far-off thing, but now we experience it at the same time as the present, he contends...

Obvious: “The winners in this labour force will be the people who have an actual skill,” he says. “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.”

filereaper• 9 years ago

Rather than going down the barbaric tone. When it comes to 9-5 jobs, I keep going back to city infrastructures.

Where I live in Toronto, all the highways and subways get clogged as everyone needs to make it to the office for 9-5. Everyone then complains about poor infrastructure, but then all cities keep building for a short burst peak traffic. Infrastructure is overbuilt for other times.

I can understand a lot of it is due to having kids (schools let out around 4pm) so everyone tries to streamline dropping kids off and picking them up from work.

I really wish everyone can try for a staggered approach to deal with congestion. I don't have a hard sync like picking up kids or anything like that yet so I avoid the normal envelopes around 9-5.

Many initiatives like Smart Cities are being rolled out but yea... I'm not a huge fan of the common 9-5 pattern.

test12352• 9 years ago

Another complaint I have about 9-5 is I can't find time to do certain things because everyone all works the same hours. Certain services such as doctors appointments are only available while I'm working, or if I need contractor services at home, again, only available while I'm working. Luckily I work in a city centre so I can do some things in my lunch hour, but if you happened to work out of town (e.g. business park), or if the thing you need to do takes longer than an hour you're shit out of luck.

jhoechtl3• 9 years ago

In former times it was perceived to be ok to see your doctor during the 'regular' office hours. Go figure

chasing• 9 years ago

Different strokes for different folks. I imagine some people enjoy the structure. Other people don't. That's why some people enjoy life in the office while others enjoy writing objectively crappy novels like "JPod."

gdulli3• 9 years ago

He's been a successful author for over 25 years. I wonder if he really has much experience in a 9-5 career. When he was in that career, was he unhappy because it's an objectively bad experience? Or had he not found good jobs? Or was he never committed to that career because he dreamed of being a writer?

I enjoy my 9-5 career. I realize I'm lucky because I have a better experience than most, but I'm not singularly lucky or gifted to be in my position. I don't think I'm one of the few who doesn't consider it "barbaric."

I don't think it's necessarily universal to place a high value on "freeform scheduling" like he says and having structure to the day does have benefits.

"Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing"

My work boils down to the difference between someone seeing one ad vs. another. I need money to live and this is what I'm good at. I don't pretend I'm making the world a better place but it's equally overdramatic to say the implications make the world worse. For better or worse or society is about the freedom to sell things and all the propserity and inequality that comes along with that. For all their flaws, a shift away from those fundamentals would take generations and people don't agree what they should be replaced with and there's no guarantee the replacement would be better.

taude• 9 years ago

First, I was a big Douglas Coupland fan when I was young. Especially because I was working at Microsoft shortly after Microserfs came out, and his writing resonated with my then 24-year-old male brain.

However, I just don't think his idea will ever scale to the general populace, though. He says, "people with internet brains are capable of doing huge amounts of work, quickly and from anywhere. " Yeah, probably a few. I think his opinion might be biased because he's an artist who has commercial success (he's essentially made it as a business owner/entrepreneur, which we know not everyone is capable of).

Anecdotal evidence: I'm currently working in an office where there's no way people around here could function without the same daily routine, without micro-management, without hard deadlines, etc. Yet, the company still manages to exist and be profitable.

He does make some other good points, if you can look past the flamboyant/hyperbolic sound bites: * “Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.” * More part-time jobs/partial employment

didibus• 9 years ago

I totally understand the people who think barbaric is too strong a term, but I'm not sure why they believe physical labor is such a terrible job. I've had physically harsh jobs before, construction, military, and they could also be 9 to 5, or sometimes they were more seasonal, it wasn't any worse. It was better in some ways, since the physicality of them made me stronger and probably had good mental effects on me. It was great to actually be out during the sunny hours of the day.

The 3rd world countries have it worse argument is a fallacy, the existence of a worse condition does not negate the negatives of another and we should be smart enough to address issues with both and improve issues with both simultaneously.

Having said that, I'm not sure the structure he describes sounds any better to me. At this point, I just wonder why work is still at the center of our lives. It seems possible to me with today's technology to organize a society in a way where we finally redistribute back the gains of automation and optimisation made in the last 200 years. I would love a society where you're free to work as little or as much as you want. Or where everyone is a part time worker. You can get two jobs if you want to work more. I don't have the answer to how it would all work, but I'd love to see a discourse about the possibility.

Avshalom• 9 years ago

Of course it's actually 7-6 with the commute and lunch

test12352• 9 years ago

I figure anything which I wouldn't be doing on my day off should be counted as work time, including commuting and ironing shirts.

pc865• 9 years ago

My lunch is included in my day but I know that's an extremely rare situation. The 4-mile, 10-minute drive is pretty nice too.

But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.

_m8fo• 9 years ago

I personally disagree with premise (though a few points I must agree with), I think the real problem is the lack of satisfaction in general. Because some capitalistic societies are obessed with growth, we've created problems for ourselves that are not only pointless, but exist in part, to employ drones of people, who due to their own life circumstances, cannot say "no."

Once all jobs serve a visible, real purpose and those working said jobs can feel the satisfaction of being a part of the "cause", this problem will continue. 9-5 or not.

One example of this may be flipping burgers at McDonalds, versus stocking planes that ship food rations to war-torn nations. Funny how similar the jobs are, yet the purpose differs.

pc865• 9 years ago

In my area McDonald's is a pretty large employer of physically disabled people. Not a single one of them has the dexterity or strength to load a plane. Coincidentally I know some people who work at my local airport and they don't have any idea what they're loading or unloading or where it's going to unless they happen to speak to the pilot.

Employment does not exist to fulfill your personal sense of self worth. You're providing a service to someone who is paying for it. In fact, most of those jobs that do fulfill your personal sense of self worth often pay less due in part to that.

jhoechtl3• 9 years ago

Get money out of the equation and everything changes dramatically!

jhoechtl3• 9 years ago

What would be his answer when I tell him that a nine-to-five hour job would mean more free-time and vonsiderably less stress to me while being at least as productive as now, constantly sheduling things for latency instead of throughput?

eli_gottlieb2• 9 years ago

Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:

How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

RUG3Y• 9 years ago

If my job, and even the entire company I work at, disappeared today, not a single soul would notice. Or they might casually notice, but their life would not be affected in any meaningful way.

The work is soul destroying, I'd love to be doing something better.

eli_gottlieb2• 9 years ago

Yep. There's immense dignity in doing something that society really needs done, even when it's hard work. There's also immense degradation in working hard when you secretly know society doesn't need you, and you're just doing it so someone you think is delusional will pay you.

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.

That's a hell of a strange line.

As far as I can see, people in tech spend way more time looking at the implications of tech work than anyone else does. (Except, perhaps, people like Coupland who are make their money from doing so.) Tech workers are responsible for much of the endless conversation on web privacy and AI risk and automation and gamification and all the rest. Which is how it should be, presumably - I assume architects spend more time looking at the implications of building design than the rest of us.

The best justification I can see is that he's just restricting a general, Stugeon's Law observation (90% of everyone don't look at implications) to one specific field.

There ought to be a name for making a true observation, but singling out one instance of it for no particular reason. It happens damned often.

innocentoldguy• 9 years ago

Perhaps the word "barbaric" is a bit much, but there is certainly an element of truth to what he's saying about the office being obsolete; at least in some professions.

For example, I am a software engineer, and there is literally no reason whatsoever for me to go into an office everyday. None. I am more productive when I'm remote, and working where, how, and when works best for me. I also have no emotional need for social camaraderie in the workplace, which some people do. My family meets my emotional needs, so I don't need social constructs foisted upon me by my employer. Being social for the sake of being social drains the life out of me and makes me less productive. I've worked in offices and I've worked remotely for almost 30 years, and remote work, at least for me, has proven time and again to work best.

While "barbaric" may be a hyperbolic choice of words, when describing the 9-to-5 grind, I do have to say that the reasons typically given for forcing engineers to work in a modern, open-office environments (e.g. "We need to collaborate") are shallow at best. These environments have been proven to cause more problems than they solve, so in this case, I'll have to side with Coupland, in spite of his embellishments. The collaboration excuse is especially annoying when we still use Slack to communicate, even when we are sitting two feet from each other.

return02• 9 years ago

I 'm sure there are plenty of people in HN who don't work 9-5 or work independently. It's an upgrade; for me its a kind of upgrade that one does not want to reverse (like moving from a small town to a city). 'Barbaric' is obviously hyperbole, but quitting the 9-5 lifestyle is a change promised by technology that hasn't yet been realized. Sectors like IT could have pioneered this shift, but for some reasons it did not happen (much like most IT workers do not work remotely, even if it's technically possible). I do think that work schedules deeply affect the structure of cities, and it would be nice to see some alternative arrangements, even as an experiment.

majewsky4• 9 years ago

Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.

This advice from Coupland is the best part of the article, because it uncovers the intended audience: telephone sanitizers. [1]

Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.

This statement actually works for about every profession.

[1] If you don't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham

Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

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