this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I get the point, but this is a bit self defeatist.
First of all, 1hr seems a bit excessive for showering and getting dressed, that's like 30 minutes tops for me, I could maybe see an hour if I'm going to a black tie event and I've been doing yardwork all day. If it takes an entire hour to get showered and dressed every single day, personal grooming and wardrobe is one of your hobbies.
Then that 1hr commute can be audiobooks, hobby podcasts, music discovery, etc. With public transportation, it can be physical books, chatting with friends, researching new things, or anything you can do from your phone. You can even knock out some of that mindless scrolling early.
Personally, my "mindless" scrolling is through platforms that I've curated for content relevant to my hobbies and interests. So it doesn't really stay mindless for long, it starts to hit those fulfilling notes. And most of the jobs I've had have had lulls in that 8hr block where I could not-so-mindlessly scroll here and there.
Also 1hr unpaid overtime every day? Um what? They specified wagie so not salaried, anon has a slam dunk labor rights case.
So we found 30min in the morning, those 2hrs of commute are usable, say another 30min of scrolling at work (probably higher, but I'm assuming a more demanding job to be conservative), and fuck off 1hr unpaid work. That's an extra 4hrs of potentially fulfilling time if you use it.
Like yeah, wagie life is draining, don't get me wrong. But you have the power to reclaim some of that.
I don't fully disagree but don't you kinda believe it's embarrassing that we have to micromanage our lives to "reclaim" scraps of fulfilling time. People shouldn't have to hack their days just to have time for joy, rest, or growth. Society's standards and workplaces should be designed so basic dignity and meaningful downtime are built in, not something we beg or gamify away.
Not really, no? Originally we had to micromanage our day to secure calories and shelter, and defend ourselves. I'm fine with trading that uncertainty for reliability.
Would I prefer fully automated luxury gay space communism? Obviously. But that sort of thing takes time. The current arrangement is pretty darn swanky on the evolutionary timescale. It was barely a century ago that we bargained down to 8 hours, 5 days a week.
I can yearn , and fight, for better while acknowledging that what I've got is about the best humans have had it. Too much inequality, obviously, but still most of my ancestors would be jealous.
Reliability is still a privilege for fewer and fewer imo. For many more it’s fragile, conditional, and easily stripped away by illness, layoffs, or a single bad landlord. The fact that conditions improved over a century ago doesn’t license complacency. Those gains were forced by people who refused to accept tiny, daily violences as normal. If you think we should stop pushing once life stops being medieval, ok maybe? Not really, no. Don’t pretend that’s moral clarity; it’s settling. Your ancestors may be jealous, but they'd also argue that you maybe lost the plot.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
If you want to live a bronze age life, you can work a bronze age schedule. Sell your possessions, buy a couple acres in Bumfuck, NW, build a log cabin, and live off the land.
A huge chunk of that 8hr workday finances the difference in lifestyle between then and now. You live in a home free of pests, insulated and climate controlled, with unlimited clean water at your fingertips, and wires that fuel unfathomable feats of automation and communication. We're talking to each other on boxes of minerals painstakingly engineered to fulfill countless purposes.
Get rid of the phones, computers, video games, televisions, air conditioners, water heaters, dish and clothes washers, other various appliances, transportation, medicine, manufactured textiles, infrastructure, entertainment, food and other sundry services, etc., and you don't have to work all that long to cover your nut.
I'm a Marxist in that I don't think Capitalism is the end of human progress, and the time is nigh. I'm also a Marxist in that I think capitalism is basically an improvement on what came before. It's run its course, and will hopefully be displaced soon, but that doesn't mean I'm not getting a better return on effort than my ancestors.
The 1hr unpaid overtime every day is what got me.
If you're just sticking around for an extra hour for free, stop doing that.
11/10 trolling man, it's a masterclass ngl
If I am not intentionally hurrying up, getting some caffeine into me, waiting for it to kick in, showering, dressing, and performing all these little maintenance things a body needs to continue functioning and look presentable takes about an hour, yes.
Yeah, sure, but: that is still 1h spent doing things to distract you from an environment you don't want to be in
Edit: apparently my first sentence was not clear enough: Sure, I could hurry up. But I don't want to. I enjoy not having to hurry every waking moment of my life. Making, drinking and enjoying a coffee is one of those things that keep me from ending up in a padded cell.
Not really. Are you not interested in things?
My commute isn't very long, but I still queue up recommended songs. I enjoy discovering new music, that's the sort of thing anon is saying we didn't have time for. I listened to the original H2G2 radio series mowing the yard this summer. Everyone has to spend time doing boring things, but when those things become routine you can multitask.
I define "free time" as "time where I am able to do whatever comes to my mind, within reason". I cannot scratch my ass in a commuter train, I cannot decide to be alone, I cannot decide to meet a friend while commuting, I cannot play sports in a car, I cannot decide to take a nap on the highway, and so on and so forth.
Therefore, commuting time is not free time. It is time where I am not 100% occupied with some task, true, but tbh I could describe a lot of work days in the same way.
I didn't say it was? I don't recall using the term "free time" at all. I said it could be used productively. Just because the use of certain stretches of time are limited doesn't mean there aren't fulfilling uses.
For my own routine, I shower and get dressed first, then breakfast after. I don’t take morning coffee but that would go with breakfast if so. And then while eating I’ll usually have a show on which makes it like partially leisure time. And it gives me some time to fully wake up.