This article (in the tradition of Keynes) makes the implicit assumption that more leisure is good/brings happiness. (Hence the seeming paradox that rich people - those who should be able to afford more leisure - appear to work more.) I don't think that's true. There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming.
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
That's a misunderstanding of what free time is. Free time isn't unproductive time, its unrestricted time. Free time, if fully exploited, can't be worse than the alternative because you're free to do the alternative if its the best use of your time!
The problem is that people don't know how to use their free time, and so it ends up spent getting high and watching TV. Maybe people would be better at exploiting the time they have if they were allowed free time earlier in life. Kids are pretty good at taking advantage of the time they have, maybe if they were allowed to keep more freedom through to adulthood they'd keep the skill. Maybe if our non-free time weren't so stressful we wouldn't feel the need to use our free time just to unwind. Or maybe its that entertainment has gotten too compelling. I'd rather not believe that people have an innate need to be forced to do whatever they do.
You're right about kids: they spend much of their free time exploring and playing like they're hard wired to do it.
I think our 19th-century-style schools are the problem: we drum information and behaviours into kids until they forget how to be independent. All this time wasted sitting at a desk in a classroom means they might miss out on the chance to develop a passion for something, something that they would fill their free time with later in life. And then we're surprised that people just want to watch netflix.
Rather they "beat" the independence out of children intentionally as the trait does make them a nuisance. It is much easier to have a room full of trained animals.
That misses the point, which is that rote memorization and the recitation of facts does not lay any kind of intellectual foundation, but rather attempts to turn children into diligent factory workers.
It's the behavioral compliance of memorizing facts that you're not particularly interested in on demand that is a useful trait for factory/office workers
This is an important distinction, I obsessively avoid the overwork culture but I'm far from someone who just idles in my free time. I freelance and optimize my schedule to make a comfortable amount of money but not the most money I can possibly make. Then I spend much of the time I'm not working for a client on creative projects. So even though I may only properly book 3-4 days a week of client work, I'm working because I'm writing or filming or editing, or a client has a need that stretched outside of our booked hours that I'm taking care of or I'm just relaxing going to a museum or watching a movie. But the important thing is that I can choose what I do with most of my time. It's free as in "I have options" not free as in "I'm doing nothing."
Hey man, don't knock getting high and watching TV. I'm sure there are plenty of successful HN readers that enjoy doing just that with some of their free time. :)
I believe being really unproductive is fine in small doses. Sometimes you need to just really relax. The problem is when that's how you spend ALL your free time. I mean, have you ever watched tv all day and really felt good about yourself at the end?
Yes and an all nighter to follow! Watched a couple of seasons of Six Feet Under with a buddy of mine years ago, it was fantastic.
No amount of time spent with friends is "really unproductive", it literally keeps us alive. I didn't see a note about it in this article, but I suspect that the no-income people that are happier with their lives are doing low cost entertainment activities with friends.
I second that. Also, we don't all have perfect lives. Sometimes an escape (TV, getting high, whatever) is the best use of our time to stay somewhat sane.
Great post. It seems that often in these discussions people don't acknowledge this fundamental underlying aspect, which I find frustrating.
The implication of the statement "Humans absolutely need jobs in order to lead happy, beneficial lives" is that humans are, by their very nature, to stupid to figure out how to do it by themselves.
I very strongly believe it's a cultural problem, not a human problem.
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain.
I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
To reinforce your point, here is the Youtube channel of a database admin (by day) in Tulsa, OK who spends his free time learning how to (and building) a ~70 foot steel cutter vessel in his front yard.
A retired mechanical engineer spends his time making videos of mechanical linkages in CAD. He's was at 1700 a year ago, hard to say how many he's at now, he's still releasing them. This is what technological progress looks like I think, in a couple of years this will be shown in just about any intro class into the subject and it will reduce the learning time by like, i don't even know, 100x? 1000x? Idk how these were described before but boy do they seem hard to describe in anything but animation.
I'm also having a hard time imagining his brain isn't getting exercised just fine.
I'm not a mechanical engineer and I spent like good 15-20 minutes watching them and getting quite a bit out of it.
S/V Seeker! I love it when two different interests of my own find a match somewhere. I've spent way too much time catching up on his videos, but he's phase inspired me in some of my own projects.
In my view staying physically healthy is vital. From what I've seen of folks who are in their 70s and 80s, mental and physical activity are each necessary for the other, and have to be habits long before retirement is even on the horizon.
In hunter-gatherer times, I would hunt so my family could eat. If I hunt from 9 to 5 and didn't catch anything, I would have to keep hunting, or my family would go hungry. Nature is not a fair employer, it does not give meat to me because I worked 8 hours. I only get the meat if I catch it.
Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.
My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.
Very good comment. Those that choose the regular slice of meat at each 8 hour interval are making a trade for smaller yet (more) predictable rewards. They give up their freedom to sell their time to the highest bidder. It's well explained in the hypothetical universe where pilots are all freelancers [0].
but you chose the highest bidder on a year-to-year basis. Not an day-to-day basis. You're guaranteed a monthly (bi-weekly) salary, but, you can't quit today to do a more lucrative offer and then get your job back the day after.
Keynes didn't make the implicit assumption that it was good - he thought the potential pitfalls (a la the British idle rich) were an interesting problem that the world would just have to learn to deal with. He just assumed it would happen.
On the health issue - most of the studies I've seen cap the health benefits of working at a few hours a week. Volunteering for an hour a day seems to be just as beneficial as spending most of your waking hours on an office job.
I was recently unemployed for the second time in my career (one of the pitfalls of working at unstable startups). The first time was an absolutely awful depressive hell. The second time, I ramped up my volunteer hours at a local Museum, going 2-3 times a week instead of just once a week. I happened to be working on a part-time master's degree program as well, and finished that up while I was unemployed.
I spent just as much unemployed time between jobs both times (about 6 weeks), but the second time around was worlds better. I wasn't working full time, I had plenty of leisure time, but instead of using that time sitting around watching TV and wallowing, I had lunch with friends, I studied in cafes, after volunteering I took walks around the city, I went to bookstores -- it was awesome! I actually miss being unemployed. Having a "thing" you have to do during the day, instead of a vast blank schedule is an amazing psychological boost.
Re: Keynes, I think we're both right. He seemed to view increased leisure (discretionary time) as an objective good and idleness (the wasting of leisure) as a worrying problem. This becomes clear in the context of his full essay [0], which is definitely worth a read.
Doesn't it seem that the rising "unemployable" cohort having all that free time, and the wealthy having none is not somehow related? "Unemployable" seems perjorative, so let's use Arnold Kling's ( Tyler Cowan's?) ZMP ( Zero Marginal Product ) workers.
You get the feeling that in years past, the ZMP would have been given some measure of slack, and allowed to work their way into a more productive status. But that's what's changed. I think there's been a cultural shift - look at the relatively unpleasant reports on how peoples jobs are now. Plus, unemployment ( especially if you're of an age to live with parents in their McMansion or even your old bedroom in a more modest home ) is a lot more comfortable than it used to be.
There's been a long-term trend towards advancing the age at which people join the workforce. People had moral reservations about the abolition of child labor - after all, it had worked out okay for them. It's only when unemployment began to be a more palpable problem that the mores concerning child labor shifted. Even then, my own father was pressed into service as farm labor as recently as the 1940s. This was standard.
As production has become less and less labor intensive, the workplace becomes more and more about social signalling. And as the population of firms becomes increasingly about maintaining old guard products and services and less about actually advancing the footprint of the firm from within ( with low cost financing enabling M&A activity instead ) firms are rapidly shedding workers. You don't even need offshoring or Chinese production to explain this. All you need is the Jack Welch "neutron bomb" effect.
We see increasingly ambitious tech efforts, not the sort of thing a half dozen people can do in a year or two, to sell for a few million.
But mainly, as the workplace becomes overtly inhospitable and the cost of slacking goes down, the equilibrium shifts.
I don't think the article made an implicit assumption that more leisure is good. The article appears to be using self-reported satisfaction statistics:
"And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to"
Where did you get that "leisure" equates to "consumption"? Being productive certainly doesn't imply not consuming. I don't think I'm disagreeing with you saying that leisure time can be productive, but I think the issue of "consumption" is irrelevant here.
There is a sense in which being "productive" implies creating value, i.e., producing more value than you consume. If you restrict yourself to the realm of money, then being productive generally involves profit (e.g., producing something that gives net increase in monetary value over consumption costs). But if some person with leisure values things that other people generally don't want to pay money for (e.g., writing poetry), their leisure time can be productive (producing poetry) while they're purely an economic consumer (making no money, but spending money to live).
Did you read the comment I'm replying to? That comment specifically associated leisure with consumption:
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming
Ah, I see. I don't think the guy was equating leisure with consumption at all. You could say he was equating leisure with "just passively consuming", which is where his mistake is (along with his unrelated error of thinking Keynes implicitly thought leisure would automatically bring happiness).
I would also agree that a person having some leisure that is "just passively consuming" is fine, maybe even good. But I'm pretty sure it's bad if _all_ of a person's leisure is "just passively consuming", at least if they have a decent amount of leisure (if you're working 80 hour weeks then it's probably not bad at all to have your leisure time all be passive consumption).
I volunteer in my leisure time, but I'm not sure I'd call it leisurely.
It's not really a hard-and-fast rule, but I suspect in many cases that leisurely-but-productive activities have output that is only nominally productive, like, I don't know, amateur painting, dime novels, learning a couple chords on guitar.
Really economically valuable output usually seems to require concerted work, which (even if fun) most don't think of as leisurely.
Not working is not the same as inaction. It is more of the opposite. Unleashing ones creative potential once relieved from the alienating burden of salaried work.
> healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity.
and this is your explicit assumption and also needs justification. a better source than a fluff piece in a daily newspaper would be helpful too.
"productive" is a really loaded and problematic word to use here. why is "production" the moral underpinnings of the good life? surely a healthy person might find fulfillment in any number of different activities regardless of their impact on GDP.
I get this, but it seems to me that the simple converse is that we just happen to presently have the optimal amount of free time, which I don't think is true.
I can think of a few other things the article doesn't touch on that influence me.
1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich.
2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation.
3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).
Also many hourly workers don't get to pick their own hours. I know when I was stocking shelves, I only got to work the hours my manager scheduled me for. If I wanted to work more hours to make more money, I didn't have that option. I've got a friend who is a mechanic as well, and it's the same thing there. He only gets to work extra if they have extra work. If they don't have work for him, he goes home (and clocks out).
I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
Not only that, but a lot of employers apparently expect hourly workers to come in on short notice and cut hours from those that don't. Which leads to a different kind of job-enforced idleness that's unpaid and doesn't count as work, unlike yours.
That's another worker protection that I keep missing when I make lists.
The protection of 'on call' (in any type) equated to a type of work. Maybe not paid at full rate, but still compensated for as personal activities must be interrupt-able and other work cannot be sought.
Also the protection of a regular and predictable schedule with long lead times.
Very much this. I've family members that work for a freight train company. The schedule is brutal: get a call, have 2 hours to get to work, drive a train for 10 hours, get 10 hours off (often away from home), and then you are back on call. They are expected to be well-rested for work when they get the call. The pay is good, comparatively, but it allows no personal life and no chance of other work or hobbies on even a semi-regular basis. They are only closed for 2 holidays - christmas and new year - and it takes a toll on health.
For me salary means a minimum of 40 hours. I even have to record my time still and the tool will take no less than 40. Even if I worked 60 the week before. I do sometimes have those days where I struggle to find things to do but those become more rare as I get more experienced.
When I interview for salaried positions one of the questions I always ask is, "do I have to clock in/out?"
If the answer is yes, I politely say "thanks, but no thanks."
Salaried positions are not supposed to be 40 hours minimum. They should be measuring your output, not your hours worked. That's the entire point of not being an hourly worker.
I'm a consultant and, like most, bill by the hour. So it makes sense to track hours in that aspect but I don't know anyone who always hits or exceeds 100% of their target utilization. Which means if you don't have billable work you still need to find some BS to do until you hit 40 hours. I do go over 100% of my target utilization often, which in most exempt positions would open up some opportunity to leave a little bit early on a slow week.
I've mentioned that I'm exempt and still have to track time and most people just respond "you're not exempt, you don't know what it means".
When I read your first post I was going to respond "I'm a consultant and while I have to log 40 hours in the time tracker, I don't always bill 40 hours to clients". Much like yourself, if my clients don't have 40 hours of work for me, not much I can do about that. But next week they might have 60, so it balances out.
I've never worked a job where I didn't have to track my time, though. Four different companies, employed as full time staff, I've always had to justify where my time went each week.
Yeah. Even if you are a staff software engineer there is usually someway for the company to track what you actually are putting your time towards. Then I hear from tons of salaried workers who don't have to track time at all.
My wife gets jealous when she finds me playing Civilization during work hours (I work from home). But then she's upset when I'm on the phone with a client until 9pm and I miss dinner. Those hours pretty much balance out over the year, though.
All joking aside, it is certainly a downside to the job I do, but she understands. "Upset" is kind of a hyperbolic word to use, she fully supports the work I do as it affords us a lot of freedoms we might not have otherwise. I can't say how often we've turned a business trip into a vacation just by switching the credit card on file with the hotel to my personal card, or left for vacation in the middle of the work day as long as I bring my phone and take my calls from the passenger seat. Not to mention she doesn't have to work full time, so she can pursue her own dreams and hobbies.
Not that any of that matters to you, I just didn't want anyone thinking I was being selfish or insensitive to my wife's feelings.
I think your point #2 is right on. This article is wondering why recent observations are not behaving the "backward bending supply curve of labour" [1]. But this curve assumes a constant return on hours worked (i.e. a constant wage). If it really behaves more like overtime -- where additional hours are worth more but only if you've already worked a certain amount -- then the marginal hourly wage can rise as the marginal leisure value rises, and the equilibrium is pushed further out. In other words, it changes that curve to strictly increasing.
Your comment touches on how this happens, but not why.
If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours?
I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
It's pretty simple really: making money feels good.
I run my own business, and as a result I have a very highly correlated effort-to-earnings relationship. The more I work, the more I make.
I could spend my time doing "leisurely" activities away from work and I'd still make more than enough to live on, but instead I spend the better part of my work days (and oftentimes weekends) grinding away, trying to make this my highest earning September yet.
I don't do this in the pursuit of some end goal. I have fairly modest tastes, and 90% of the money I earn goes into a bank account or brokerage where it sits forever.
All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. When I was a kid I played World of Warcraft relentlessly, and gaining another level in that game gave me the same sense of forward progress. Money feels like the grown-up version of that.
Wonder if this is somehow upbringing-related. I've never felt the "making money feels good" thing. Sure, it feels great to have a surplus on my bank account, so that I don't have to worry about not having money for food, or buying quality computing equipment when I need it, or helping a friend in need. But the act of making money? It always felt to me (and still feels today) as a period of grinding you have to endure, a painful sacrifice, that will ensure the bank balance will maintain its level.
In school, one conversation with a close friend made it clear what this was about.
I'd been brought up with a strong influence from my father who believed the pursuit of wealth for wealthy sake was pointless. It mattered what you did as a person than what you earned. My ideal job would be to become a scientist.
My friend told me that he wanted to earn money, not because he wanted to be rich, but because he liked seeing that number go up. He knew that it was a straight up numeric increment for him.
Now that's a relatively deep insight for a teen, which applies to everything from gaming to work. It's obvious and direct behavioral reinforcement.
Oddly it doesn't explain why he grew up to be a scientist (bio-analytics/genomics) and I ended up wading into finance and business.
Maybe self awareness is the pre requisite to being more comfortable with less than comfortable choices.
>>All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found.
You make money when you generate value for someone. It's OK to tie it to a sense of achievement, but at the end of the day you also have to remember to generate value for yourself.
>It's pretty simple really: making money feels good.
The money is part of the feedback loop of motivating you, you get your level ding in WOW, you get a cold beverage after mowing the lawn, you get your paycheck after expressing yourself for two weeks. A CEO isn't going to be a good CEO if he has the same amount of job satisfaction as a germaphobe janitor who has a graduate degree in Literature no matter who much you pay the CEO.
Not making simply money. It's working on something that satisfies you.
I think it's the same addiction cycle that drives MMO addicts. If work is the only thing in your life going well you may focus on it rather than fix what's broken.
Many successful people are less happey in retirement because that don't get a social circle playing up the importance of what they are doing. Sitting on a beach is simply less rewarding than landing a major contract. Thus, these people are not checking email on vacation because of dedication they are chasing a reward cycle.
> If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours?
There's probably a correlation between being rich and being more inclined to spend time on activities which return money.
In that, ceteris paribus, having less of that inclination will reduce your probability of becoming rich.
I'd turn it around: Being rich provides you with the opportunity to spend time on activities which return more and more money, opportunities that do not exist for (or are out of reach of) the poor.
i'll give it a shot. i own a business that could potentially make me rich if i sold it, but haven't considered it yet. (it could also make me go broke, but that's another story).
a poor or lower middle class person would probably disagree if they saw my income and business bank accounts, but hey, everything is relative.
anyway. here are some reasons that may or may not apply to myself and my group of peers (all business owners end up hanging out with a bunch of other business owners or sales-type people, it just happens).
1. they like working. they may deny it, but they do. they like making things happen, making things in general, etc.
2. they feel like if they stop working, the money will disappear, or be taken somehow. this may or may not be rational.
3. they are compelled to do it, it is simply an inner drive they can't overcome. i.e. that's how the money was made to begin with.
4. they like having a high level of disposable income to spend on nice things/experiences/influence. this is the polar opposite of how a lot of people on HN think, who seem to constantly trying to humble-brag about their rankings in the frugality olympics.
i definitely fall into #4, the others maybe, maybe not. i like nice shit, so i work hard. if i wanted to not spend money, i'd just be poor and not work much. i did it for 4 years in college, i could do it for the rest of my life if i wanted to. it's not hard to do nothing and spend nothing. it's literally the easiest thing in the world, you just don't do anything, all day long.
Another point is that people have their sense of self-worth tied up in their occupation.
I get paid a lot => I'm an important part of the world => if I stop then the world will fail (in some [tiny] way).
You see a corollary of this in retirees, their occupation defined them. Pre-retirement they say "hi, I'm Joe, I'm a professor" - a professor isn't a professor when they're relaxing and enjoying themselves (the thought process goes) so in order to be a professor I must work long hours at teaching students.
1. Because the mindset of work > leisure is rewarded in the U.S., so wealthier people aren't choosing work because they're wealthier, they're wealthier because they choose work.
2. Because they have more leverage not only in how much they work, but in what work they do. If you draw a stark line between your job and what you enjoy, naturally you'll want to minimize that work and maximize your leisure. But if you actually enjoy your job...
Because, generally speaking, by the time you get to that point, work has become your life. Some people can't handle the disconnect. Much like when a pro athlete retires, they often lose their sense of self-worth because it was so closely tied to their profession.
It does implicitly answer the "why". If you have more choice in what you work on, you can choose work that you enjoy. If you enjoy your work, you'll do more of it. It's no longer a paradox when you take into account the fact that high-earning professionals consider work to be "fun".
Some people really like working. If I was independently wealthy, I would work like a dog on the things I'm interested in, and I'd enjoy the hell out of it.
It's not so much doing the work, it's having to do the work, and not having control over my time, that gets under my collar.
I think they keep working because they achieve a lot of success with it so it's very rewarding. I am sure I would enjoy work much more if I felt that my work really makes a difference.
When you get rich, your life becomes much more interesting - You get more opportunities and you get 'lucky' more often. Also, your work actually makes your feel good about yourself. In effect, life feels like a game; you actually get to win from time to time.
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
I wonder if my theory explains why games are so popular these days (and so lucrative).
Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
Because all of those things you listed are about passive consumption. Games are active consumption: they have you actively participate in them.
What happens in movies, books, sports games, etc. are determined by others. You simply watch. In games however the outcome is tied (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) to your own actions. That's why they can be addicting, especially for people who otherwise feel like they don't have any agency in "real life."
I read a book by looking at contents, notes, bibliography, and index. Then the intro and conclusion. If the meat is worth reading, that.
This means reading for information rather than pleasure, for the most part, though for me, reading for information is pleasure. Yes, there's some fiction I'll read, but that's different.
There's also note-taking and organising my own thoughts as a consequence of what I'm reading.
Very interesting theory - I think I agree. I would add though that a good portion of the causality is going the other way, where people who find work fun and stimulating become more successful, and those who are bored by it stay poor.
These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
I think that your argument assumes a certain level of job attained already. Sure, software engineers who enjoy it more become more successful. I doubt that people finding stocking grocery stores correlates with their success at all.
I had a checkout clerk at Target the other day with Down Syndrome who seemed to LOVE her job and was very good at it. Unfortunately I don't see her working her way up to CEO.
"When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life."
I know a lot of poor people that have interesting jobs, super-cool trips during their 7 weeks of vacation (French here :-) ). I have colleagues at my well-paid software engineering US office that have delayed their "dream" 3 weeks vacation for years now. Who is happier here ?
"Life feels like a game" really resonates with me. I've actually used that phrase before. I don't play video games much because I find tons of math and programming stuff fun and interesting. So I just "let" myself pursue those interests, and thankfully, those interests happen to be financially rewarding.
That's not true. The returns in happiness are just logarithmic with respect to income (diminishing returns but still positive at each level). The story about no benefit beyond a certain threshold was generated by journalists misreading the plots in those studies.
I'm "rich" in the sense that I have a good job and don't have more responsibilities in life than I can afford/handle.
I make good money which means my employer thinks highly of me and invests in me. And this means that because there's money behind all this, they can afford to send me on business trips which are inherently more interesting (a few times a year) than sitting at my desk during that same time. And because I don't have more responsibilities than I can handle, I can just bail on my home life for a week or two to be away. And because I'm not on a shoestring budget, I can afford to do interesting things while I'm away on business.
I can't help but think if I was working at a subsistence level, I wouldn't be able to afford to leave my wife behind for a few weeks, my employer wouldn't be paying me to do work that could even require travel, and the trips would be out of the question because they'd represent a relatively large % of my compensation. And even if I went, I wouldn't be able to afford to do anything fun, so I'd dread it.
Just like when I've worked for poorer companies doing the same job.. sure, the work is roughly the same, but they can't afford to invest in hardware as much, so we don't get to do things "right".
I know it's somewhat tangential but I just feel like the very fact of having a higher-paying job opens up all kinds of opportunities that aren't necessarily so easily represented.
Yes (though not exactly related to money in my case; but I've seen firsthand how money affects other people). I've experienced this pretty strongly after my open source project got some traction - And it's not even the most popular one in its category.
I often think that if the effect was so strong in my case (with such a relatively minor win), it must be far stronger for the 'big winners'.
My open source project got popular almost entirely because of luck. I worked really hard on it for many years but if it hadn't been for a single event (which came about because of pure luck - AKA "Good timing"), it wouldn't have gone anywhere.
After my project got some traction; people started treating me better at work, I started getting more (better) job opportunities, founders of various promising SV startups started reaching out to me with job offers.
Also, in the past 2 years, I got in contact with 3 people whose open source projects I liked (back when they only had a few hundred stars or less on GitHub) and now all of them have over 2K stars each on GitHub - One of those people (whom I met in person) raised over $1 million in seed funding for his project (several months after I had met him). It all seems oddly related though I can't quite put my finger on it.
That said, none of it has translated to financial success for me personally (aside from maybe a few really good job offers).
I read this piece and was very saddened. Take it from someone who has been around a few more years than many others who contribute to this site. There is nothing good - long-term - about sitting around idle for extended periods. It kills your initiative. It kills your character. It kills your options in life. It kills your soul. I saw this happen to several people who were very close to me growing up and I still grieve at what they suffered in later years as the price paid for the extreme short cuts and high life of their youth. And this survey fact as reported in this piece - that is, of one in five non-college-educated young men in their twenties being so very much out of work for sustained periods - is not cause for celebration or for launching into philosophical discussions about the value of leisure in a developed society. It is instead a real tragedy, and I don’t care how many survey participants check a box attesting that, for the moment, they can say they have had lots of fun doing pretty much nothing beyond partying and playing games over the past 12 months or more. I know that today it can often happen that there are very limited options in the workplace and this so-called leisure is really an enforced leisure not of people’s own choosing. But that does not mean we should rationalize this to say that, after all, they do seem to be satisfied in their leisure. That is nothing more than a superficial covering-up of a bad situation. It is decidedly unhealthy for the individuals involved and for society as a whole to have large numbers of young men involuntarily idled for sustained periods in this way (wasn’t that what we used to call the Great Depression). Work is not an evil. It is a big part of how we grow and develop as people. It is a big part of how we negotiate life. Let us hope there comes a day ahead when enforced “leisure” is no longer a norm and the leisure people enjoy is of their own choosing.
You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy.
But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything!
What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character.
But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.
My experience has been that a great amount of work is simply idle. Forced idleness. Survive this for 40 hours a week. Factory work: Do these things over and over. Retail cashier? Do this over and over while some of these people treat you badly, including management. Fast food is worse. I worked in a call center once - inbound collections for a phone company and heard horror stories about how soul-sucking telemarketing was. There isn't much personal growth in many of these: I'd say that by the time one works 40 hours in some of these jobs and takes care of one's needs (and family), there just isn't any room left. And it isn't like there is much flexibility - you are expected to put the job first.
This is precisely why I didn't want to work in a factory when I was young. I lived in a town surrounded by the shells of people that used to have life in them, but after 20-40 years of boredom, repetition, and merely being a piece of the machine had severe effects.
Work may not be an evil in itself, but the culture of it really can be and most work out there simply isn't a rewarding experience outside of getting money. I'm not convinced that this sort of idleness is preferable outside of having money.
If the culture should change, it might be different. Encourage outside life, make policies so that folks can have family time and take care of them, discourage overtime: make sure folks have wages and free time enough that they can do something after taking care of things they need. This won't fix the horribleness of some jobs, but it will trap folks a little less.
What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
There is a difference in what the article presents as an escape for young men with no job vs someone who plays games in the evening to relax.
That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.
I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.
While I agree with what you're saying re: Relaxation after work vs no work at all, the use of words is perfect to describe what I and probably many other people struggle with in regards to bettering their situations. I understand that I have a degree of self-improvement impulse that would be destructive if I indulged it fully, but I definitely have ideas for products and side businesses that I would really like to get around to but it gets washed away by this "narcotic undertow of cheap entertainment" as the author so eloquently puts it.
Yeah, have to agree here. Further, sometimes after a long week I don't have any creative energy for even thinking of side project ideas, and games are the only way I can recharge.
I used to be fine with that. Now as I get older I see it as a vice which causes major cognitive dissonance since it is my main way to recharge.
Very indirectly and entirely personally: EVE Online.
I unintentionally became more accustomed to delayed gratification, taught myself how to make micro-optimizations in my life to clear up time, chose to re-invest my time saved investing in new skills, learned (when trying to get a job/promotion) to frame my value in terms of what fulfilling someone else's needs, learned the value of researching both how to do things AND why people recommend those methods over others, and developed a decent sense of risk:reward-informed decision-making.
as maligned as mmos are, being the gm of a guild gives you a lot of free training on how to be a manager: you have to learn how to motivate people to work together, defuse issues, deal with egos, even try to figure out ways to incentivize "unfun" activities so they get done (i.e. farming for raid materials etc.)
Not sure if you would put it on your resume, but IMHO if I was a hiring manager and I was hiring for an entry level mgmt position and somebody had "ran a successful wow guild with 50 members for 2 years" it would definitely be something I would see very positively
The local office manager was a successful wow guild leader, and he does put it into his resume and bio :) (not sure if it actually helped him land the job).
Honestly, compared to Dota 2, where you're spending probably 45 minutes playing with uncoordinated teammates, everyone doesn't speak the same language and you probably lose, its a walk in the park (I love both of those games).
I remember coming home for Christmas/summer vacation while in college. I was good for about 10 days, enjoying my leisure. But then I wanted to get back to work. Leisure is boring.
The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
I've heard a lot of people say this, but I've never felt this way. After 10 days of vacation all I can think about is that I'd love to figure out a way to get 10 more. I also get bored/tired of sitting around doing nothing, but I guess that's just not really how I vacation. I use vacations and time away from work to explore and work on projects that I enjoy, and to me that's very fulfilling. I also really loathe working for someone else, so going back to work isn't particularly intriguing. Although I've been transitioning over the last year to working for myself, and that is starting to change the way I see things - partially because I can take long (multi-week) 'vacations' where I work in the evening and explore during the day.
Whilst I understand the sentiment, I do wonder if the boredom you're experiencing isn't just a transitional phase.
When it comes to leisure, I personally believe there's an art to being good at doing it. What I find is that it takes time to unplug from 'work mode' to truly enjoy 'leisure mode', and that time of unplugging often comes in the form of doing nothing/very little. As you say, that's fine for a while, but soon you want something to do. However, if you think about it, there are tons of things you can do with your leisure time, in some ways the choices are even more vast than those you can find paid employment for. What is required is time for the boredom to subside and imagination to kick in.
For example, if you taught yourself the chemistry behind photosynthesis just because you were interested in it, would it matter to you if you weren't paid for knowing it?
I agree, although it depends on what you want to call work. For example, if I had enough money that I didn't need to work, I would still have plenty of productive projects to work on, but they may not make any money.
There are plenty of open source projects I'd like to start/work on that would benefit greatly from being able to work on them "full-time", but I wouldn't make any money off of them (at least not without being more creative about how to monetize them than I've been so far).
> I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
A good number of people work by puttering around doing meaningless tasks. Even smart people at successful companies. Does it matter if you increased conversions for a game by .01%? It matters to The Company, but does it actually matter?
I think what's missing is how much more engrossing higher paying jobs are. Working on processing lines or customer service, you completely check out mentally. I wouldn't have been able to bear the thought of working more than I have to.
But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field.
So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.
The executive function of the brain involves decision making and creativity. Many blue collar jobs are repetitive of just following a standard operating procedure over and over. It becomes taxing and creates an intrinsic limit to how much can be done. With many white collar jobs especially when promoted to higher levels of management and autonomy, the pleasure involved with decision-making makes work as rewarding as playing that game plus there's a monetary reward. The basic premise of the article is that if the undereducated people were afforded similar opportunities than we may have a different situation.
I'm not even sure if education has anything to do with it. I have lots of peers who chose careers where they "work-to-live" vs "live-to-work". An example may be a pharmacist who chose their career, and makes decent money, but the average pharmacist doesn't feel compelled to work extra hours. If you offered her more money at less hours, she would take it. Where you offer me more money, it won't really change the number of hours I am compelled to work.
The article points out a possible interesting reason why crime dropped around 1990 all over the developed world.
"So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown."
Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.
That's interesting - though it doesn't disprove the theory in the US. For example, the declines coincided with the dates individual states legalized abortion as well (some predated Roe v Wade).
The author avoids an obvious arrow of causality: some people like work, which causes those people to work hard, which is more likely to make them rich.
There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox.
It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.
It's not difficult to understand why anyone might not want to argue that "poor people are poor because they're inherently lazy" from a strictly political perspective.
In addition, thought, how many children of wealthy families really turn out poor out of laziness? How many of those wealthy families were impoverished in the previous generation? If your explanation were as important as you seem to be saying, maybe those questions shouldn't be easy to answer.
> It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status.
One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries.
> However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries.
Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.
I'd add another factor the author did not mention: the market in which those "Elite U.S. men" compete is vastly more competitive than it was a generation ago.
I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.
> “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.
> The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least.
Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes.
Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)
Absolutely. I'm SO glad I'm not hourly. I'd never take vacation because I'd think about all the money I'm 'losing'. I'd have a hard time enjoying unemployment for the same reason, even with ample savings.
I make it a point to use up all my allotted vacation, which has the side effect of making me more productive, and makes me more respected at work than the guy who is trampled all over because he never takes time off.
Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field.
The one who loves money is never satisfied with money,
Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke.
The more loot you get, the more looters show up.
And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight?
Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep,
Whether supper is beans or steak.
But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia.
Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen:
A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him
And then loses it all in a bad business deal.
He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him.
He arrived naked from the womb of his mother;
He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing.
This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went.
So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke?
All for a miserable life spent in the dark?
Half the article talks about how one theory is that they work because they take pleasure in their work, that they are no longer driven my money but by the creative process or working.
While this might have only been true of a few people, a more mobile job market, more opportunity, more choice of field, more education, and other factors all allow more people to find jobs that they simultaneously love to do and get paid well to do. I'm one of those lucky people I guess. I absolutely love what I do and the more successful I become, the more I want to do it. Work has become almost game-like to me.
I'll see your out of context quote and raise you The Parable of the Talents. If you have a gift for creation or investment, don't be ashamed of it, but nurture it and use it.
The context I meant to suggest was that people have been wondering why rich people keep working so hard that they miss out on their lives for about 2,400 years at least.
You can put up with whatever working conditions you want. You're certainly free to accept your lot in life.
Me and a bunch of other guys, we don't agree that "nothing can be done about it". We're gonna fight the good fight. Lucky for you, when we fight the good fight and win, that stuff filters out to those of you who gave up, too.
Oh yeah, definitely. It's a fantastic way to check out from the mundane crawl that is average life in America.
Honestly though, it's better than watching TV. Atleast you have to interact and think. There's also the fact that multiplayer gaming allows us to meet new people with similar interests. Someday people are going to just put on the VR hat and practically live in another world.
Depends on how you count. Do they mean 6hrs of games per day but then no more games at night and weekends, or do they mean 6 extra hours of games per day?
Economists have studied this kind of thing for a long time.
From Wikipedia:
"
In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1]
The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time.
Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time
"
This points out another issue with providing basic income -- while basic income is preferable to just letting people starve and probably better than expensive-to-administer welfare programs, it does not provide a substitute source for people's self worth.
For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.
I don't understand why you would require UBI to provide people's self worth.
Some picture UBI to be this utopia that solves everything. Please evaluate it based on being an improvement (however small) to the current system.
Also, playing videogames all day is an often heard scenario with UBI. But as the article states, this seems to happen now too. The question is: if it would be implemented, and after the dust settles, will so many more people be unproductive (in the narrowest sense possible)?
That's something I took away from the article: video games (and games in general) actually make people feel happier and worthy (although it's a "fake" accomplishment).
I personally experienced that, during a "down" period, I took a lot of solace in games (particularly M:TG), getting some accomplishments there (national vice champion) made me feel less worthless.
But it also made me pursue goals that weren't in my own best interests in the long term and neglect more important things.
Overall, I'm glad I quit, since an unhealthy amount of time spent on games eats up on time that can be spent on skills that are valued by society, and I get obsessed very easily.
Your point about getting paid as a status signal also rings with stuff like NBA stars arguing about getting paid less than X player, even though they're both extremely well paid, since it signals a preference. And lots of studies about fairness and wages.
Honestly I feel like a lot of this is social. I'm motivated to go and work because my peers all do that to and it's been that way since I was a kid. People I knew in high school went to college. Now my college peers are getting jobs, etc...
Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of.
On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.
1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded.
2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan.
3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.
I think gamer culture is a vast invisible swath of humanity. If you look at the communities on Twitch or YouTube around certain popular games, it's pretty clear that billions of human hours are poured into gaming.
Before computer games there were also sports, cards, books, alcohol, drugs etc. It's only a consequence, not a cause of humans inclination for exciting their reward centers with least possible efforts.
I think there might also be a very strong correlation between being rich and doing what you love, especially has job opportunities and mobility have drastically increased in the last couple generations.
I don't know too many top 1 percenters that would say that would love what they do. Very few.
And I do know of many that would say they never really made it -- because independently wealthy -- until they found what they really loved to do: from going into a new field to opening up their own store that grew.
I think loving what you do has a lot to do with wanting to put in the effort to really getting paid back what you put in.
I like the bit about 4am being the most productive hour. I have always been a morning person and for most employers and customers I have worked early in the morning until mid-afternoon. Quiet time is golden.
As far as the main theme of the article: having more people idle is something society needs to adapt to. In the extreme of insufficient work, I would like to see a very low minimum income and a policy to promote breaking up jobs so people at least got 15 or so hours a week. Looking forward a decade, I bet there will be much less for people to work on.
It is not "free time" that people want. It is "time to do what I want" is what we all want. For someone like Elon Musk running Tesla might be actually use of that free time.
For many of us writing code is the use of that free time.
On the other hand I can understand why unproductive people are unable to do much in USA. Most things are automated and minimum wages lock out people from mundane work.
I think part of what is happening is that people with less money do things themselves (cooking, cleaning) that wealthy people pay someone else to do. So wealthy people can spend correspondingly more of their time on the kinds of activities that count as economic activity in our current system- their jobs. The amount of time they have left for exploring/learning/resting is most likely still much more than what poor people have, though.
Certainly part of the explanation of the paradox is that a great deal of what elites work on is (intentionally or not) finding ways to automate lower-skilled folks out of a job.
til: people who are not working have a lot of free time
I guess the author has never heard of homelessness. instead of being homeless, or being forced to find work, young people are living with parents longer
I think it means males. The males are staying home, playing video games, watching porn, etc. while the females are attending college in droves and "leaning in" and discovering that they can get by just fine without the males around. I halfway suspect that video games and porn are this eras circuses and bread and that there is a secret feminist cabal backing the game and porn proliferation ;-)
Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... I'd disagree quite heavily with this assertion. Would be interesting to see the reasons.
My hunch would be more in line with much of the "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations. It takes surprisingly little money to lounge playing video games when you don't have a car/house payments.
What I've seen is a little more nuanced. People who front-load their effort by doing well from high school through grad school or early career get a cushier life after 35. This contrasts with those who don't put in as much effort in their late childhood and early adulthood who then need a much more solid work ethic post 35 to get a worse result.
I'd be inclined to say that the middle class work differently than the poor, and the rich work differently than the middle class. Working hard is the difference between middle class and upper middle class, or between upper class and upper upper class.
Take 100 rich people and ask them "how hard did you work to get there?", do you think most of them will say "haha i didn't work hard at all! You don't need to work hard to get rich!"
My point was, all other conditions being equal, the people who try hard in their life tend to be more successful that the ones that don't.
Which is why if you take the rich people set and observe how much they work, it is obviously going to be that they work hard.
It sounds classist only if you interpret it that way.
That may be true, but if you take the set of all people who have worked hard, not all of them will be rich. Being a hard worker is not a requirement to be rich and there are certainly people who are rich not through any hard work of their own (inheritances, for instance). To paint everyone who is poor as likely being lazy is insulting.
Where did I say poor people are lazy? I keep getting downvoted for this comment, but in my opinion the ones who downvote me are the ones being classist for interpreting it that way. This is basic "logic 101" man, "If you work hard, you have high chance of becoming rich" does not equal to "If you are poor, you have high chance of being lazy".
The article is not talking about how hard it is for poor people to get rich. It's talking about precisely the rich people set.
And I'm simply saying, if you take 100 rich people and ask how they got there, majority of them would have gotten there because they worked hard.
Let's save the "poor people have hard time becoming rich and the world is a fucked up place" argument for another day. In fact I even agree with you on that part. I'm just criticizing the logical flaw in the article.
> And I'm simply saying, if you take 100 rich people and ask how they got there, majority of them would have gotten there because they worked hard.
I'm pretty sure, yes, if you asked 100 rich people, they would say that, the question is whether that attribution is accurate.
I'd suspect that it is true in some respect (specifically, if by "working hard" you mean "spending time in activities directed at getting rich"; there is plenty of hard work people do that isn't directed at getting rich) if you compare them to less-rich people with similar starting conditions. I think, though, that starting conditions and factors outside of the individuals' control are pretty big contributors to becoming rich.
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...