Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've seen so far are giving it a negative spin I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.
This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'.
I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
> She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home.
This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.
Isn't this the dream of automation, though? That all those shitty jobs are replaced by robots, and the humans are left with only the interesting, creative, ones?
Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting.
The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.
> I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.
> I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.
That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers:
> Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore.
But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).
> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants
What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired.
Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members.
The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately how structured development programs, in the US workplace versus university, are not as popular as they should be. Pipelines like this are less common for young people in the post-4HWW world, where people strive for independence versus collective success. The latter to be had via hard work and building.
>She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's.
You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down?
While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.
> our quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.
But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative.
If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue.
This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work.
You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.
> our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.
This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs.
I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.
>I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later
That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?
You have a 40+ hour workweek, until you put in enough intelligently focused 80 hour work weeks coupled with some dumb luck, to possibly arrive at anything resembling a 4 hour workweek.
I'm really tired of seeing online 'equality' warriors think entrepreneurship is easy and should be used to pay for all of society's financial hardships; entrepreneurship is a significant toll that can cause financial ruin and mental instability just to have a chance at arriving at any sort of time liberation.
When you create something you place your own time, finances, energy at risk - in many cases you get a low ROI in return. But like all educations, one can get better and improve over time.
One must vision the system, design the system, find ways to finance the system, execute the system, manage the system, and optimize the processes. Then possibly, you might be able to receive benefits from that system - but it is in no way guaranteed.
So don't pity the founder, but don't denigrate them either; actions taken on own volition mean founders must enjoy or live with the outcomes.
I think a lot of people's main problem with entrepreneurship is that it's by and large a rich kid's game. I know a few "serial entrepreneurs" - every time they failed, their parents or the social network they grew over the years at their private school were there to pick up the pieces and back them for the next attempt. Until they made it and didn't need help any more and could pay for their own flat and live off their projects. It's a problem in a lot of professions too, like law or even acting https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/14/workin...
Most people have zero shots, or at best one, in them until they have to get back to paying their bills - and get stuck in the rat race forever. No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks to build his or hers business. However hard that is to pull off, people won't respect it because it's just privilege asserting itself most of the time.
> When you create something you place your own time, finances, energy at risk - in many cases you get a low ROI in return.
The laborer class doesn't risk time; they simply have it consumed. They also risk their own finances and energy, with the "ROI" being often to do things like decide between food and $5 in gas for the drive to work tomorrow.
The problem I have with entrepreneurship evangelists is that they elide important context from the discussion: the role a secure financial life growing up and into adulthood provides.
Nobody would say the act of building a business is not hard work, requiring sacrifice and long hours. That isn't at all what "equality warriors" object to. The objection is to the notion that that kind of hard work is even possible for everybody.
Almost everyone will not have the opportunity to commit to the hard work of an entrepreneur.
Part of the point of the article is that Tim was born in East Hampton, NY and went to Princeton - he never truly faced the possibility of complete financial ruin when building what he's built. That gave him the freedom to do what he did - without that privilege would he have been able to do thing?
I don't know...but for him to NOW turn it into a cult of personality and sell a fake story about "working hard" is at a minimum disingenuous
Ok fine, then only require established businesses, like Amazon, Google, Home Depot, Wallmart, non-union construction (which might be the worse jobs in America), etc. to treat employees with better working conditions.
The struggling start-ups are left out of the experiment. I do understand the risks of new entrepreneurs. I'm perfectly fine with giving them a lot of leeway.
We could use profit off 1040's to determine which companies need to improve working conditions?
I think most of us are looking at the monopolistic big boys.
And sure, there will be companies crying poor mouth forever, but most won't be savvy enough to fool the IRS. Amazon will always be the exception.
Entrepreneurship is not easy. Not by a long shot. If a founder-CEO is putting in crazy hours to get the company off the ground then they should be compensated.
The denigration happens when this labor doesn't just generate more money than other laborers, but way more money through a means that is entirely decoupled from labor. Gates has seen his wealth increase through Microsoft ownership more after he left the company than during his time actually working there.
Right, but I think more people have a problem with the passive investors, who have a surplus of capital and then reap the lion's shares of rewards from the businesses they invest in. They are not taking on anything like the risk of the entrepreneur.
It's recently that these articles coming out. This one talks about exploiting others for their own benefit that leads to such a life. Otherwise there were too many as articles about working hard and hustle.
As a followup - I've seen illegal immigrants in the U.S. create million dollar legal businesses without connections, unable to speak English, in fear of constant de-portation, and tons of hard work. [as singular examples]
So I'm pretty sure anyone can create a business - that also EMPLOYS the people who need to pay their bills yet do not want to take the huge risks in founding a business.
The author has crab in a bucket mindset. One person having enough success to have the lifestyle they want does not mean somebody they employ is being victimized by them. This might resonate with some, but for me it is a big turn-off. It smacks of jealousy and a rejection of all personal responsibility in charting a path to where you want to go in life.
Tim's book isn't without flaws (and is now significantly dated in many of the details), but one of the core messages is to recognize we all have a choice to do something other than work 50 years at a job we hate and then retire/die. Tons of people go through life without considering any alternatives to the path they are on, or developing the self-knowledge about what they actually want, which is a big reason so many people end up so unhappy.
He also emphasizes creating repeatable systems that you can then automate with software or hand off to other people. This helps you scale your business and income, but more importantly it preserves your time for other things you value more. The blog author thinks this is somehow a bad thing, but if nobody ever realized the efficiencies of exchanging money for services then most of us would be naked and starving; a huge chain of such exchanges is needed to produce the modern miracles of cheap clothing and food that are the foundation of modern living.
Tim didn't actually retire to the beach for a hedonic 4-hour lifestyle with servants refilling the wine glass and fanning him with palm fronds; the guy works harder than most people with a new huge book every couple of years, lots of active investing, and running a major podcast almost every week. The difference between him and other people is that he's not wasting time on stuff that other people could do for him.
I'm not a "bro", but I guess I'll stand here and defend Tim's book because it gave me a lot to think about.
> Tons of people go through life without considering any alternatives to the path they are on, or developing the self-knowledge about what they actually want, which is a big reason so many people end up so unhappy.
This feels like an expression of the "just world" fallacy[1]. It's entirely possible that many of the people stuck in 50hr/week jobs did all of the things you list but didn't get the lucky breaks Tim did and so are still working 50hrs a week.
Consider an alternative reality where everybody read 4HWW, took that advice to heart and proceeded to apply it to their life. Would everyone be working 4hrs/week or would you still need some people to work those 40hr/wk jobs that keep the world running?
Saying they need some "personal responsibility" and not acknowledging that the odds are stacked against part-time minimum wage workers is disingenuous.
If you look at the who the poor are - it's virtually all part-time minimum wage workers. It's disproportionately women of color with children. A lot of these kids were born when these women were very young, if not girls. Most of these people were born into poverty AND live in areas with terrible public education AND the sixteen states where minimum wage is the lowest federal minimum...
Further, the majority of small businesses are not hiring 1 or 2 Ivy League educated MBAs they pay $250k per year. They're disproportionately hiring disenfranchised workers from the above ground.
Granted, these small businesses generally aren't the 4-hour work week Tim was talking about.
Jessica's dream book of collectivistic Utopia, that she was expecting under the "4-hour work" metaphor... I doubt it would sell very well and for good reason.
Her appeals to woke tropes make no sense, especially considering she goes by the title of "influencer"* - there's no colonialism in creating jobs, much less so in places with next to no digital economy. It's based on an abstract disregard to the fact that merely removing job opportunities will hardly leave anyone better off. There's also no colonialism in spending dollars where they get you further. It's just zero-sum guilt and envy porn.
Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams.
It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world.
I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice.
Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go.
That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack.
There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article.
It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
Wow. I was expecting a critique on how a 4-hour week causes harm to your colleagues through your laziness. Instead, the article only tangentially mentions this, with no supporting evidence or arguments. And 90% of the article consists of absolutely nothing more than ad-hominem attacks on Tim.
> The 4-Hour Work Week enshrines entitlement, providing an instruction manual for wannabe digital nomads: If earning a million dollars is too hard, you can just jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism)
How on earth do you get angry at someone for suggesting living in a low COL location? Developing countries around the world are extremely eager to attract tourists/nomads who can inject money into their economy. And yet, the author would prefer that we shun developing countries entirely. Because colonialism.
> See, a global economy can’t support millions upon millions of people jetting around the world and running businesses online. There will always be a sub-class of people working constantly behind the scenes, in sweatshops and kitchens, in order to sustain this dream lifestyle for a tiny few. The inequality is baked in. That’s where the private, selfish audience of one becomes so dangerous. We read books like The 4-Hour Work Week as if they were made just for us, because that’s how they’re written. Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. We’re rendered invisible. That’s what should anger us. It’s not that Tim Ferris found a new way to live and then wrote about it. It’s that now millions of “enlightened” bros all worship him and aspire to be like him, as if this is what our planet needs — more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet.
Offering people advise on how they can better their lives, is now an evil thing to do? Not everyone in the world can work in a white-collar job, and therefore, it is evil to help people pursue it?
The author of this article genuinely scares me. There is no discussion of content here, no discussion about the consequences of certain actions, no consistent logical argument put forward. It is simply endless ad-hominem attacks, based almost entirely on Tim's demographics and career success. The fact that this is trending on multiple social media, instead of dying in a tabloid rag, makes me far more worried about the future of our society.
It's all nice and well to rail about Tim Ferriss... until you realize that all of us (in the developed world) are profiting from people in less developed countries, or even people in our own country, working (much) more than 40 hours per week for less than we would get for 4 hours. If all these people would have acceptable work conditions, we would have to pay way more for clothing, food, electronics... you name it.
This was part of my issue with Four Hour Work Week, it externalized costs and seems like a net negative karma wise.
I’m a fan of Tim Ferris, bought books, listened to him for years, his material has really helped me.
But 4HWW seemed somehow off for me as it seems to fake it enough that customers stick around and even love the product, but if everyone did it, we would just have superficial stuff and not real.
So I don’t judge people but it’s not for me. And I’m sort of envious of people who can do it without worrying about it all the time like I feel I would.
I’ve never encountered a 4HWW product, other than Ferriss himself, that I liked. It just annoyed me with their anti patterns that work for some customers but not me.
Atheletic Greens is a good example in my mind, although not sure if they actually use 4HWW. I like the idea of a “healthy supplement” but it costs 3x the random green powder at Whole Foods, but it well marketed and forces subscriptions and auto renews. So it takes a hippy idea and weaponizes it for slackers like me. So I’d rather just guy the green stuff from the co-op, but now I’m always hearing athletic greens marketing and wondering if I chose wrong. The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are.
So it’s not a bad thing, people really like it. But it seems like the automation has so much potential to help customers more but instead scoops it up for the owner.
"The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are."
Yeah, there's a lot of irony to marketing, especially in this space. 'Authentic' products don't need marketing, leaders in a space will seek them out and stock them of their own accord. The purpose of dark patterns is to essentially circumvent this positive feedback loop authentic use produces, forcing passive consumption of a subpar product.
I’m no Tim Ferriss fanboy, but her “exploitation” critique is wrong.
Paying people overseas for what would be a low salary in one’s home country isn’t exploitation. Say you’re paying someone abroad $3 an hour while minimum wage in your country is about $8. Median wage in this abroad country is $1.50 an hour. Your employee could expect to make that if she weren’t working for you. Are you exploiting her? I suppose, based on the non-loaded dictionary definition of exploit as “ make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).”
But so what? You’re making her better off than she would otherwise be. She’s free to leave or argue for a higher wage. If you left - or were banned from hiring overseas workers - you’d be making her worse off.
Let's be real here. You wouldn't pay someone abroad $3/hr if:
* there were actual tariffs imposed when you imported the results of her labor, reflecting the very different costs of living in two nations
* the nation where she works had the same environmental and labor regulations as where you live.
* there were barriers to you directly or indirectly investing capital in the nation where she lives, and/or significant taxes on the profit you make from doing so.
* the nation where she lives had a strong union/pro-labor culture that gave workers the power to collectively negotiate with employers.
* the nation where she lives had a legal system that would reliably hold employers and investors responsible for their decisions.
Now, you might still choose to pay for overseas labor even if all these things were true, but you likely wouldn't be paying $3/hr anymore. As it stands, "cheap overseas labor" is about much more than that.
You could argue that what's exploited is the fact that there is a country with a minimum wage of $8, and another with a median of $1.50 in your example. So if you're Tim Ferriss raised in the first country it works, but in the second it doesn't (if you don't find an even cheaper country).
The luck/unequality is in that what's not much money for you, is a lot of money for some-one else.
What a depressing, pessimistic view. Eventually, yes, we can get to the point where most people work fewer hours. But, writing that vision off because "inequality is baked in" without providing context or thoughtful or innovative solutions seems like a waste of an article, especially one that hits the HN front page.
Someone below mentioned self-promotion, and I can see why it seems like it is. Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer?
It is the ineffectiveness of the solutions that upsets me more than anything else.
These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".
The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.
"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
I stopped reading at “more fragile white Princeton….” The author was making decent points, and I’ve seen plenty of non-whites going all-in on the various Feriss-style minimal work/maximal outsourcing cults that exist. There was no need for that dig. It’s quite literally irrelevant to the article.
> If you really want to work four hours a week, you have to outsource the rest of your labor to other people, who wind up working way longer and way harder. You have to be okay with exploiting people, and you can’t really think about it.
I don't love Tim Ferris and the criticism of the book is pretty spot on, but come on, you are not "exploiting" people if you pay them to handle your support calls, be your virtual secretary or whatever.
Sometimes I feel like someone else is paying for my 40-60 hour work week. A bunch of people far poorer than myself are working 80-120 hours to mine rare Earths, assemble electronics, stitch clothes, dig coal, and so on, so that I can live in relative-to-them luxury. Not only do I work only 40-60 hours a week but it's indoors, in air conditioning, doing work that is largely interesting and not very dangerous. I even have time to punctuate it by posting shit like this.
The four hour work week is bullshit but it's just the snake oil we all consume distilled to greater purity. I'm sipping wine while Ferriss is selling 150 proof fire water.
You enter the global upper middle class already primed for a shot at being part of the global rich by simply being born in the developed world.
I'm in research, I think it'd be physically impossible to be a successful researcher with only 4 hours a week. There is simply a lot to do, from reading, studying, and thinking, to grants, planning, gathering data, analyzing, to publishing, conferences, teaching, and disseminating knowledge.
If all these curious and hardworking researchers followed Tim's lifestyle, innovation would collapse and diseases and problems would gain the upper hand. I doubt Tim would want his doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, or dentist to stop making new advances, and just do 4 hours of work a week.
Is anyone actually advocating everybody have a 4-hour work week? Of course not. Tim Ferriss doesn't even specifically advocate a work week of 4 hours. The point is to delegate to the maximum so you can spend as much of your time doing what you choose - which can include working. Unfortunately there are always going to be jobs that need done and some of them suck. We should pay these people well and we should appreciate the work that they do.
Unless we completely change our economic systems some people are going to have easier lives than others. A medium article bitching about that isn't going to change it. There are people with much easier lives than the author - but the author also has a much more privileged life than most.
Reducing the worlds inequalities and problems to "millions of “enlightened” bros" and "fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet" is ridiculous.
A lot of great points here. I'm in the position of having a 4-hour workweek, as I run an online business that generates a pretty good income with very little work due to everything being automated. I don't employ anyone else or outsource anything for the most part (except occasionally farming off entire projects to other people if I don't want them).
A lot of the argument seems to be that you are using other employees working 40-80 hour weeks for the things you enjoy in your daily life. But I think the main point of Tim's book is that most processes can be automated or at least optimised. Consider the examples of "Someone’s gotta run" in the article: it's certainly possible for coffee shops, trash collection, food production and Amazon delivery to be mostly automated. Amazon has already automated most parts of their operation except for the flights and drivers delivering the parcels, but even that could be automated one day.
[+] [-] null_object|4 years ago|reply
This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'.
I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|4 years ago|reply
This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|4 years ago|reply
Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting.
The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.
[+] [-] baryphonic|4 years ago|reply
I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.
[+] [-] bnralt|4 years ago|reply
That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers:
> Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore.
But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).
[+] [-] pjc50|4 years ago|reply
What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired.
Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members.
The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.
[+] [-] adamsiem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mordisquitos|4 years ago|reply
You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down?
While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
Someone chooses to provide a service.
> people who are used in low-wage countries
Where wages would be lower without manufacturing like shoe making.
> well-paid career in banking
Here's hoping software eats that part of the world earlier.
[+] [-] disruptthelaw|4 years ago|reply
But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative. If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue. This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work.
You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jxidjhdhdhdhfhf|4 years ago|reply
This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs.
I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.
[+] [-] erezsh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?
[+] [-] czbond|4 years ago|reply
I'm really tired of seeing online 'equality' warriors think entrepreneurship is easy and should be used to pay for all of society's financial hardships; entrepreneurship is a significant toll that can cause financial ruin and mental instability just to have a chance at arriving at any sort of time liberation.
When you create something you place your own time, finances, energy at risk - in many cases you get a low ROI in return. But like all educations, one can get better and improve over time.
One must vision the system, design the system, find ways to finance the system, execute the system, manage the system, and optimize the processes. Then possibly, you might be able to receive benefits from that system - but it is in no way guaranteed.
So don't pity the founder, but don't denigrate them either; actions taken on own volition mean founders must enjoy or live with the outcomes.
[+] [-] bantunes|4 years ago|reply
Most people have zero shots, or at best one, in them until they have to get back to paying their bills - and get stuck in the rat race forever. No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks to build his or hers business. However hard that is to pull off, people won't respect it because it's just privilege asserting itself most of the time.
[+] [-] sidlls|4 years ago|reply
The laborer class doesn't risk time; they simply have it consumed. They also risk their own finances and energy, with the "ROI" being often to do things like decide between food and $5 in gas for the drive to work tomorrow.
The problem I have with entrepreneurship evangelists is that they elide important context from the discussion: the role a secure financial life growing up and into adulthood provides.
Nobody would say the act of building a business is not hard work, requiring sacrifice and long hours. That isn't at all what "equality warriors" object to. The objection is to the notion that that kind of hard work is even possible for everybody.
Almost everyone will not have the opportunity to commit to the hard work of an entrepreneur.
[+] [-] boleary-gl|4 years ago|reply
I don't know...but for him to NOW turn it into a cult of personality and sell a fake story about "working hard" is at a minimum disingenuous
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
The struggling start-ups are left out of the experiment. I do understand the risks of new entrepreneurs. I'm perfectly fine with giving them a lot of leeway.
We could use profit off 1040's to determine which companies need to improve working conditions?
I think most of us are looking at the monopolistic big boys.
And sure, there will be companies crying poor mouth forever, but most won't be savvy enough to fool the IRS. Amazon will always be the exception.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|4 years ago|reply
The denigration happens when this labor doesn't just generate more money than other laborers, but way more money through a means that is entirely decoupled from labor. Gates has seen his wealth increase through Microsoft ownership more after he left the company than during his time actually working there.
[+] [-] jimbokun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birksherty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] czbond|4 years ago|reply
So I'm pretty sure anyone can create a business - that also EMPLOYS the people who need to pay their bills yet do not want to take the huge risks in founding a business.
[+] [-] jurassic|4 years ago|reply
Tim's book isn't without flaws (and is now significantly dated in many of the details), but one of the core messages is to recognize we all have a choice to do something other than work 50 years at a job we hate and then retire/die. Tons of people go through life without considering any alternatives to the path they are on, or developing the self-knowledge about what they actually want, which is a big reason so many people end up so unhappy.
He also emphasizes creating repeatable systems that you can then automate with software or hand off to other people. This helps you scale your business and income, but more importantly it preserves your time for other things you value more. The blog author thinks this is somehow a bad thing, but if nobody ever realized the efficiencies of exchanging money for services then most of us would be naked and starving; a huge chain of such exchanges is needed to produce the modern miracles of cheap clothing and food that are the foundation of modern living.
Tim didn't actually retire to the beach for a hedonic 4-hour lifestyle with servants refilling the wine glass and fanning him with palm fronds; the guy works harder than most people with a new huge book every couple of years, lots of active investing, and running a major podcast almost every week. The difference between him and other people is that he's not wasting time on stuff that other people could do for him.
I'm not a "bro", but I guess I'll stand here and defend Tim's book because it gave me a lot to think about.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|4 years ago|reply
This feels like an expression of the "just world" fallacy[1]. It's entirely possible that many of the people stuck in 50hr/week jobs did all of the things you list but didn't get the lucky breaks Tim did and so are still working 50hrs a week.
Consider an alternative reality where everybody read 4HWW, took that advice to heart and proceeded to apply it to their life. Would everyone be working 4hrs/week or would you still need some people to work those 40hr/wk jobs that keep the world running?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
If you look at the who the poor are - it's virtually all part-time minimum wage workers. It's disproportionately women of color with children. A lot of these kids were born when these women were very young, if not girls. Most of these people were born into poverty AND live in areas with terrible public education AND the sixteen states where minimum wage is the lowest federal minimum...
Further, the majority of small businesses are not hiring 1 or 2 Ivy League educated MBAs they pay $250k per year. They're disproportionately hiring disenfranchised workers from the above ground.
Granted, these small businesses generally aren't the 4-hour work week Tim was talking about.
[+] [-] ilaksh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muyuu|4 years ago|reply
Her appeals to woke tropes make no sense, especially considering she goes by the title of "influencer"* - there's no colonialism in creating jobs, much less so in places with next to no digital economy. It's based on an abstract disregard to the fact that merely removing job opportunities will hardly leave anyone better off. There's also no colonialism in spending dollars where they get you further. It's just zero-sum guilt and envy porn.
*edit: it's "unfluencer" - disregard that bit
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world.
I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice.
Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go.
That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack.
There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article.
It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
[+] [-] joyeuse6701|4 years ago|reply
Hard to take the author’s point seriously with phrases like this. It comes off as a tantrum born of envy, written in today’s lefty lingo.
There are better arguments against the 4hww here in the comments than hers.
[+] [-] whack|4 years ago|reply
> The 4-Hour Work Week enshrines entitlement, providing an instruction manual for wannabe digital nomads: If earning a million dollars is too hard, you can just jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism)
How on earth do you get angry at someone for suggesting living in a low COL location? Developing countries around the world are extremely eager to attract tourists/nomads who can inject money into their economy. And yet, the author would prefer that we shun developing countries entirely. Because colonialism.
> See, a global economy can’t support millions upon millions of people jetting around the world and running businesses online. There will always be a sub-class of people working constantly behind the scenes, in sweatshops and kitchens, in order to sustain this dream lifestyle for a tiny few. The inequality is baked in. That’s where the private, selfish audience of one becomes so dangerous. We read books like The 4-Hour Work Week as if they were made just for us, because that’s how they’re written. Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. We’re rendered invisible. That’s what should anger us. It’s not that Tim Ferris found a new way to live and then wrote about it. It’s that now millions of “enlightened” bros all worship him and aspire to be like him, as if this is what our planet needs — more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet.
Offering people advise on how they can better their lives, is now an evil thing to do? Not everyone in the world can work in a white-collar job, and therefore, it is evil to help people pursue it?
The author of this article genuinely scares me. There is no discussion of content here, no discussion about the consequences of certain actions, no consistent logical argument put forward. It is simply endless ad-hominem attacks, based almost entirely on Tim's demographics and career success. The fact that this is trending on multiple social media, instead of dying in a tabloid rag, makes me far more worried about the future of our society.
[+] [-] philmcp|4 years ago|reply
This is kinda what I'm working on:
I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance.
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
I’m a fan of Tim Ferris, bought books, listened to him for years, his material has really helped me.
But 4HWW seemed somehow off for me as it seems to fake it enough that customers stick around and even love the product, but if everyone did it, we would just have superficial stuff and not real.
So I don’t judge people but it’s not for me. And I’m sort of envious of people who can do it without worrying about it all the time like I feel I would.
I’ve never encountered a 4HWW product, other than Ferriss himself, that I liked. It just annoyed me with their anti patterns that work for some customers but not me.
Atheletic Greens is a good example in my mind, although not sure if they actually use 4HWW. I like the idea of a “healthy supplement” but it costs 3x the random green powder at Whole Foods, but it well marketed and forces subscriptions and auto renews. So it takes a hippy idea and weaponizes it for slackers like me. So I’d rather just guy the green stuff from the co-op, but now I’m always hearing athletic greens marketing and wondering if I chose wrong. The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are.
So it’s not a bad thing, people really like it. But it seems like the automation has so much potential to help customers more but instead scoops it up for the owner.
[+] [-] SQueeeeeL|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, there's a lot of irony to marketing, especially in this space. 'Authentic' products don't need marketing, leaders in a space will seek them out and stock them of their own accord. The purpose of dark patterns is to essentially circumvent this positive feedback loop authentic use produces, forcing passive consumption of a subpar product.
[+] [-] pinky1417|4 years ago|reply
Paying people overseas for what would be a low salary in one’s home country isn’t exploitation. Say you’re paying someone abroad $3 an hour while minimum wage in your country is about $8. Median wage in this abroad country is $1.50 an hour. Your employee could expect to make that if she weren’t working for you. Are you exploiting her? I suppose, based on the non-loaded dictionary definition of exploit as “ make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).”
But so what? You’re making her better off than she would otherwise be. She’s free to leave or argue for a higher wage. If you left - or were banned from hiring overseas workers - you’d be making her worse off.
[+] [-] JBiserkov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hungryforcodes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
* there were actual tariffs imposed when you imported the results of her labor, reflecting the very different costs of living in two nations
* the nation where she works had the same environmental and labor regulations as where you live.
* there were barriers to you directly or indirectly investing capital in the nation where she lives, and/or significant taxes on the profit you make from doing so.
* the nation where she lives had a strong union/pro-labor culture that gave workers the power to collectively negotiate with employers.
* the nation where she lives had a legal system that would reliably hold employers and investors responsible for their decisions.
Now, you might still choose to pay for overseas labor even if all these things were true, but you likely wouldn't be paying $3/hr anymore. As it stands, "cheap overseas labor" is about much more than that.
[+] [-] jerrre|4 years ago|reply
The luck/unequality is in that what's not much money for you, is a lot of money for some-one else.
[+] [-] afpx|4 years ago|reply
Someone below mentioned self-promotion, and I can see why it seems like it is. Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer?
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".
The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.
"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
[+] [-] sidlls|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
I don't love Tim Ferris and the criticism of the book is pretty spot on, but come on, you are not "exploiting" people if you pay them to handle your support calls, be your virtual secretary or whatever.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
The four hour work week is bullshit but it's just the snake oil we all consume distilled to greater purity. I'm sipping wine while Ferriss is selling 150 proof fire water.
You enter the global upper middle class already primed for a shot at being part of the global rich by simply being born in the developed world.
https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/davos/global-...
(There are several global wage calculators online. I use them whenever I start pitying myself.)
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
If all these curious and hardworking researchers followed Tim's lifestyle, innovation would collapse and diseases and problems would gain the upper hand. I doubt Tim would want his doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, or dentist to stop making new advances, and just do 4 hours of work a week.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|4 years ago|reply
Unless we completely change our economic systems some people are going to have easier lives than others. A medium article bitching about that isn't going to change it. There are people with much easier lives than the author - but the author also has a much more privileged life than most.
Reducing the worlds inequalities and problems to "millions of “enlightened” bros" and "fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet" is ridiculous.
[+] [-] stewx|4 years ago|reply
- The four-hour work week is a fantasy
- Comfortable lifestyles are generally only possible when other people are doing the hard work on your behalf, particularly service industry workers
Dubious points:
- The US dollar is strong in impoverished countries due to colonialism (there may be some truth to this, but there are many other factors)
- "Tax breaks" (no definition provided) never create jobs
- Universal basic income is achievable if we "make everyone pay their fair share" (depends on how big the cheques are. $100/month, or $2,500/month?)
[+] [-] cpncrunch|4 years ago|reply
A lot of the argument seems to be that you are using other employees working 40-80 hour weeks for the things you enjoy in your daily life. But I think the main point of Tim's book is that most processes can be automated or at least optimised. Consider the examples of "Someone’s gotta run" in the article: it's certainly possible for coffee shops, trash collection, food production and Amazon delivery to be mostly automated. Amazon has already automated most parts of their operation except for the flights and drivers delivering the parcels, but even that could be automated one day.
[+] [-] anm89|4 years ago|reply