Guest Post by Jared Dillian
It’s estimated that the average person spends only 10% of their life actually working.
What? How is that true when you work 40 out of 168 hours in a week?
Well, you don’t work until age 18 or 21, for starters, and you don’t work after age 65. If you don’t work weekends and take four weeks of vacation a year … you can see how the free time all adds up.
What I find absolutely incredible is that we have built the society by spending only 10% of our lives working. Imagine if we spent 11%!
On a micro level, most people care about three squares and a roof over their head. Doesn’t matter the profession.
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What I find super interesting are the people who don’t have a “number.” For example, I talked to a businessperson over the weekend who had received an offer of $50 million to buy his business. He turned it down.
Then you have people like Amazon’s AMZN, +0.73% Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s FB, +2.12% Mark Zuckerberg, who could have sold stock at any point along the way and didn’t. Zuckerberg only recently sold stock, and Jeff Bezos is still max-long Amazon.
Bezos is now the richest person in the world, and he is still max-long Amazon. Why not sell 10% here? You can do a lot with $10 billion. Nope. He has no interest.
The Instagram guys sold for a billion, which looked pretty smart back in 2012. Now: Oops. You have to sell sometime. Or do you?
Relationship between work and money
I think we’ve lost track of the relationship between work and money. It’s a simple relationship: If you work, you get money. But somehow, we’ve come to believe that you can work less and earn the same amount of money.
This belief is widespread outside of Wall Street. I hear more and more stories of people who work shortened days on Friday, or maybe not at all.
As workers, we have become more and more productive, but instead of using that productivity to produce more wealth, we have used it to produce more leisure. And so, we are not really any wealthier, which we profess to be unhappy about.
But it is a choice.
Of course, investing is kind of a way to become wealthier without working more. I say, “kind of,” because it is still work. And lots of people say they don’t have time to spend on investing. That is also a choice.
Well, you can always sub it out to me — I spend way more than 10% of my time on it.
I am not quite like Bezos or Zuckerberg, but I have never been a nine-to-five guy. I work all the time, and I don’t generally say no to things. Years ago, I set an imaginary financial goal for myself, and sometime within the next few years, I will probably blow past it, and I have no plans to scale back.
Becoming European
I worry about the United States sometimes. We are developing attitudes about work and wealth that are similar to folks in Europe.
And it is those same attitudes that have resulted in historically low growth rates across the European continent, rates of growth that we used to snicker at over here in the States.
It’s been a while since we’ve consistently printed 3%-4% GDP, and we’re not likely to attain it anytime soon.
I think what I miss most about the old America is the crass materialism — houses, cars, boats, planes, jewelry and clothes — that people aspired to.
Now, people want “time with family.”
The irony in all of this is that we have a materialistic, hard-working president who doesn’t really spend any time promoting materialism or hard work.
Ronald Reagan did, and Calvin Coolidge really did. President Trump wants prosperity, but like most people, doesn’t make the connection between work and money.
Jared Dillian is a former Lehman Brothers head of ETF trading. In a special report, he writes about how to properly position your portfolio for what he says is an upcoming stock market crash.
For 90% my life 50 hours was short week, and that same 90% was NOT by the hour.
A person who works less by choice should shut up and be happy with the consequences of their decision.
Choosing wage slavery over a leisure lifestyle has it’s own set of consequences.
Bezos is not the richest dude on the planet. That would be rottinchilds and the rottinfellers with their ill gotten gains.
I started work when I was 12 yo. Busted ass till age 62 then retired. My 2 brothers and 2 sisters would never get their hands dirty. So at 80 now can’t set any records now. Oh well,,
Que the Negro on the right.
While the left says it’s all free.
LBJ/Obama legacy.
“Merica!
Feel the Bern.
Recipe for lazy:
1) Be last man standing after WW2,with enormous economic growth and standard of living, creating a false sense of achievement while ignoring the good fortune of it
2) Add welfare state in 1960s, and increase free shit levels markedly every year
3) Stir in large amounts of debt, both personal and governmental, at all levels, to fund ever increasing consumption, and ignore need to repay the debt
4) convince the young that they are entitled to a high standard of living and jobs that they love, without any link to effort or output
5) bake the above for 50 years and serve
Ignorant conclusion, in the first place you are asleep for 33% of your life, it is kind of difficult to work when you are unconscious . Of the time you are conscious, you spend 50% of it working 5 to 6 days a week. Even beasts of burden get some periods of rest to prevent health issues.
And even beasts of burden are not expected to be worked before maturity or after they are broken down and old…. Slavery is alive and well in the good old US and if you complain about being worked your whole life to support bankers and the government that steals your freedom you are called lazy? WTF
His calculation also left out commuting to work which runs 1 to 1.5 hours per day.
Also, it seems he only considers “work” as what one does for earned income. How about feeding and watering animals, getting kids up and feeding them breakfast before one leaves for that commute.
The afternoon may be spent at”leisure” planting, weeding and growing fruit trees, veggies ( which will end up as canning), helping kids with homework, studying for new work tech or innovation, laundry, groceries, cooking, cleaning, repairs on the house or projects like new nesting boxes, fixing fences, cutting up fallen trees and a new greenhouse wit geothermal .
I was fortunate to get a new employment contract about a year ago with a 25% pay hike allowing me to reduce my hours by 20% at the daily grind ( and still actually earn a few more dollars than the old 42-50 hours). Either way, I never get any relax time until after 8 PM.
Three hours of down time out of 24 ( I sleep like a log at 11 PM nightly) is being lazy?
Also, the premise is kinda sick to me. Aspiring for jewelry and boats is somehow more noble than time spent with family? Better than time spent teaching your kids YOUR morals and values instead of some aftercare programs or commie student clubs?
Our broker friend who wrote this piece and would like people to earn, earn, earn ( and most likely invest, invest, invest) could take some wisdom from Toby Keith—one of my favorite songs!
I never heard anyone on their death bed saying, ” boy, I wish I had spent more of my life at the daily grind instead of wasting it with family”
Well said. I use your last line all the time.
for all you guys who are quibbling w/the article,do you believe that the american work ethic is as strong today as in the past?
I think work ethic is directly proportional to your ability to prosper. The ability to prosper is one hell of a motivator, but take it away and people quickly lose interest in working like slaves to make bankers and government assholes rich.
I’m convinced that the youth are not as tough.
Every generation believes that: “Our youth have an insatiable desire for wealth; they have bad manners and atrocious customs regarding dressing and their hair and what garments or shoes they wear.”. Plato, 5th century BC
I never tire of posting this quote. It’s the reason America is what it is today.
“We cannot afford equal status to the negro. For as surely as water seeks its own level, within the span of several generations we will find our culture has been dragged down to the level of theirs”
South Carolinian segregationist, 1965
South Africa Today Is America’s Future.
Considering that blacks only make up 13% of the US population and have held there for decades, we are far from South Africa. Besides, the Hispanics will end up exterminating the blacks. Think Brazil over South Africa.
Blacks make up 13% of the pop. I grant you that brother. Now I’d ask why they’re eating up close to 65% of welfare. Why are people 150 years past slavery asking to be recompensed? It’s because they ARE inferior. And unable to cut it on their own Grow The Fuck Up.
“President Trump wants prosperity, but like most people, doesn’t make the connection between work and money.” I’m a little puzzled by this statement. The guy works 18 hours a day.
Every advance in modern civilization has ostensibly had an eye toward relieving people of labor.. but somehow that has never actually occurred. The Puritan Work Ethic Crowd tells us we have to work 40+ hours/week at a “job” in order to enrich some dude like Bezos, even when “productivity” has continually been rising.
The reason people “need to” work 40+ hours/week for somebody else is because the Bezos’s of the world (and the municipalities, and the Feds) are apparently never satisfied. Otherwise, we should all be able to work 10-20 hours a week like the old hunter-gatherers.
What the heck is the point of all the fossil-fuel subsidies if we have to work more with them than without them?
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“Labor-saving” story of the week: DH and I want to plant a bunch of potatoes, so we need to clear a patch of land, maybe 15′ x 30′ or thereabouts. We’ve done this before on a smaller scale with hand tools. DH, the stronger and he upon whom these tasks wear more heavily, pointed out that a local company rented Rototillers (hint hint). Ok, call the local company… it’s closed Wednesday afternoon. Call another local company.. yes, we have one. “Local” for us means a half-hour drive. Load the blasted thing on our truck (it seems to weigh a couple hundred pounds) and cart it to the site. Drag/wheel it along to where we need it.. and… it won’t start. And it won’t start and won’t start. After a good half-hour of fiddling, we bring it back only to have the lessor confirm: it won’t start. They offer us another which starts in our presence, and off we go with that one. Our window of work opportunity is narrowing. Off load, drag/wheel to site. It starts! We use it for about a half-hour, and get 1/3 of the area tilled. Then, after a break, it decides not to start. And it won’t start and won’t start and won’t start.
DH finishes de-sodding the area with an ancient Italian “zappa”, at a rate much faster than the rototiller achieved even when it was working. I didn’t want to say, “I told you so”, since it was mostly his back put into the affair, but I could tell that wrangling the heavy rototiller was just as exhausting as using the zappa.
There are a lot of non-lazy Americans (well, I guess we are Italian-Americans) whose labor is merely eternally mis-guided and wasted.
Seriously, get one of these!
[img
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You never needed to remove that sod. You could have left it in place as fertilizer and still grown your taters.
Back to Eden Gardening. I haven’t tilled or shoveled my garden for several years now. Earthworms as big as garter snakes….no kidding. Weeds are almost non-existent. HSF turned us onto it a few years back.
Yep, most of our garden is in raised beds which don’t get tilled. This is part of a tapped-out hayfield we purchased a couple years ago and planted out as a young orchard. When I said “sod”, I was being kind.. it’s more like.. you know when a guy has a sparse beard that looks like pubic hair? .. mostly sheep sorrel and bedstraw with some grass thrown in just to keep up appearances. After the potatoes, I want to plant it out in buckwheat and then put down a good pasture mix for eventual animals before moving to the next block. Soil is sandy and acidic, so potatoes should do ok. There is a method in my madness here. What was recommended to us, of course, was to run a tractor over the whole thing, lime it, manure it, etc. and re-seed. That would have cost a lot and set the tree-planting back and I don’t want to keep compacting the soil. Instead, I’m experimenting with small and slow.
The rototiller wasn’t ever in my plans, and the thing frankly sucked. Ever bought some kind of electrical gadget that did what a human could do, only slower and worse?
What this all had to do with “laziness” is that I see people running around trying to “save” energy that they really aren’t saving in the long run (imo). Which fits into my thermodynamic Theory of Everything.. material for another time and another comment.
The author is afraid Americans will become like Europeans , what a joke . Europeans work shorter hours but have a higher productivity rate. Plus the quality of life in general is better in Europe than the US. Healthcare services are for all not just rich people. You don’t go bankrupt in Europe if you break a leg. America is a very good place to earn money but don’t get sick , and when you retire make sure you have a large bankroll behind you because you’ll end up on the streets.
Where do you find those productivity stats, and how are they figured?
From what I find, only Norway and Luxembourg have a higher GDP per hour worked than the United States and most of Europe falls far below us.
“Well, you don’t work until age 18 or 21, for starters, and you don’t work after age 65.”
I guess I’m not like most, I’ve worked since I was around 10 and still work well into my 70’s.
How has everyone else managed to lead such a soft and unproductive life?
YoBo’s Dream:
https://youtu.be/h3_DPW8hKTI
work harder. millions on welfare are depending on you.
When I was younger I worked to support my family. Now I just want to cut back, work when I want to and rest from time to time.
At least, that was the plan. I do consulting to keep the lights on and a part-time (weekend) gig to keep cash coming in when the consulting doesn’t. That’s the way it worked last year, I think I grossed $75k or so all together.
This year started out slow, January through March was really lean. I was wondering if things would ever pick up; then in April a co-worker at the weekend gig went into labor two weeks early. The supervisor didn’t really want to hire / train a newbie just for one month’s maternity leave, so we all stepped up. I took on swing shift for the week as well as the weekend; the extra cash would come in handy.
THEN the consulting took off; a new client, a new hot project with a tight deadline and lots of hours. Suddenly I’m working about forty hours a week at consulting AND about forty hours+ at the “weekend” gig, so eighty hour+ weeks for the last three and the next two at least.
Assuming the maternity gal comes back on schedule it will ease back to ONLY forty a week consulting hours plus eighteen or so per weekend.
I told my wife sometime back I’d give up the weekend gig once we’d paid off the credit cards, the cars, and put $20k aside in the bank to roll over the slow consulting times. Now it looks like we might actually achieve that this year.
The real fear is losing my seat at the table; once you hit 55 or so, the chance you’ll be involuntarily “retired” or let go goes way up. (Yeah, right, “age discrimination” cases are a waste of time, no one ever gets hit for firing old people). Also, I like staying MODERATELY busy; a project or two a year until I can’t focus anymore would be fine, right up until the grave as far as I care. Being involved in interesting, creative, productive work is a blessing.
That pic is so fake. None of them are on phones. There isnt even one single charger cord in sight! Fake!
The boss wanted proof that he was really sick & in the hospital so he sent him this pic–[img]http://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/MsgAttachment?msgid=100635&attachno=1[/img]