When I worked for The Man, I often had long periods of enforced idleness. Accounting is cyclical by nature. We’re busy at month-end, and very busy at quarter-end and year-end, but 8 months out of the year there’s a couple weeks were the work volume is just very low. But due how employment laws and norms work in the US, I still had to be in the office 40 hours a week, even during those weeks when there was only 15 hours of work to be done.
I thought this was stupid as shit. To be honest, from a business perspective I still think it’s stupid as shit. You’re literally paying your employees to burn away hours of their life on nothing. As long as their work gets done, I think they should be free to leave the office on slower weeks. But hey, some places have it worse. I hear in Japan you’re expected to put in 12+ hour days every day and often work weekends, which results in office workers who literally sit at their desks doing nothing at all for more than half their time in the office. And everyone knows it, and everyone still does it anyway, cuz expectations.
I’ve come to miss that Enforced Idleness. Because it’s not like I literally did NOTHING during that time. I spent a lot of time reading–specifically, surfing the web. This idle time is how I discovered Overcoming Bias. It’s how I got most of my econ knowledge (seriously, the two classes I took at college level ended up just being review. They were only 100-level classes, of course. But it’s cool that anyone with the interest can get an entry-level college education from dedicated reading of economist blogs). It’s how I gained most of my history knowledge, and kept up on advances in tech fields and some sciences. I read the entirety of the Less Wrong sequences, and SSC, and so many other things. If it wasn’t for this enforced idleness, I likely would never have read the Transdimensional Justice Monster post, which was a major inspiration for Of All Possible Worlds. I’ve greatly deepened my knowledge, and broadened my horizons, becoming a better and more thoughtful person. Because I was being paid to waste time.
Now that I’ve been “working” for myself for a number of months, I have much less idle time. I chisel it out for the stuff I find really important (like SSC). But I can’t stand to have hours every day where I’m merely reading interesting things about the world, because those are hours that I am not being paid anything, and not producing anything that will maybe help me pay my rent some day in the future. I don’t feel I can afford idleness, for the most part. I don’t follow many of the blogs I used to follow, nor podcasts. I’m worried I’m missing a lot, and it’ll come back to bite me, and some day I’ll just be an old man yelling at a cloud because the world has left me behind.
So I guess what I’m saying is, maybe that Enforced Idleness was a much better thing than I’d given it credit for at the time. It basically forced me into boredom regularly, and we all know how productive boredom can be. Maybe Enforced Idleness will be the future of work, once the robots have taken everything else.