Coulda been born on a planet of ants that just work until they die.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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Go read about the whites first contact with Polynesians, they literally stumbled on utopia and HATED it. They were FURIOUS these naked people surfed and sang and danced all day and farmed for about 15 seconds and had more food then they ever needed. They literally never heard about work, they had dance crew battles and picked their leaders by if they could do any cool tricks on the waves.
Why is this sub committed to undoing all of the good work that was done on reddit? This should not be a screenshot.
Just some important history, the 40 hour work week was developed as a labor concession in the automotive industry.
Most workers rarely work only 40 hours, especially when you include the on-call time when employees are expected to respond to call messages and emails.
Maybe we need to learn something from our grandparents and have another movement for 40-hour work weeks.
100% actually.
And it took a bunch of labor strikes with brutal crack downs on them to even get it down to 40 hours.
Hey, it could be worse, we could have landed on Carboby-16, which has an 80h workweek.
TALLER
Lol. I had these guys beat in terms of hours, and their job was nowhere near as physical as mine was.
Now I get to be a desk jockey, and it's fucking sweet. Gonna milk it, because I put my hours in.
Milking the fuck out of mine. It's not quite a usual "desk job" but i spend a lot of time sitting at a desk.
Thanks for having a sense of humour about the meme. I'm also a desk jockey. Be sure to stretch frequently and take care of your back! The tension has a way of sneaking up.
40 hr work week would be great to be honest.
So how fucked are You? 40h is actually quite a lot for Europe. In Poland I work 40, in Ireland I worked 39 and in Denmark 37.
Canada checking in with 37.5.
But let's be honest working through lunch eveyday it's actually 42.5
I work a flat 40 with paid breaks. Canada too, but it's a union plant.
That's the trick. Don't work through lunch. Leave the building if it's unpaid.
48 hrs a week contracted. That’s not counting the extra hours needed to keep on top of things. I try to limit myself to 1 hour overstaying at work …the amount of work piling up is getting uncontrollably out of hand since I started limiting myself to these hours. It used to be a routine of 2 hours of overstaying and 1 hour of logging in remotely before bed.
If you want the full answer to the question of "how fucked are you", then this work involves constant people "coming at me" (disgruntled and immature employees I'm managing and endless barrage of service user complaints) and needs to fit around 2 young children (1 has additional needs) and a wife who has a nightmare employer plus exams coming up; and a house that has an ever increasing list of maintenance tasks that have been pending. So overall, I think this describes my situation pretty accurately.
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I hate the random black pixel in the down left corner. Go away, leave me alone!!!11!
When the 40 hour workweek was invented, most workers had a wife at home to do chores. Now that women are working, we should all be working 20 hours a week.
That's absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was "invented", men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They'd sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn't as though that's all they did.
This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker's day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.
Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn't something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.
If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.
The capitalist economy did fine in the 1950s when the women were so bored they had to put random things in gelatin. Nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour workweek.
The 1950s economy was the result of:
- The New Deal
- A world war which destroyed the infrastructure of every developed economy except for the US.
The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.
The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.
So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.
Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren't going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn't just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.
But making the workers think it would be cool is the first step to getting them to die for it.
Nope. 40 each minimum to pay the mortgage.
Fucking kill me.
Could've lived in the galaxy where this meme was white text on a black background
Be glad you weren't born 100 years earlier with a 100 hour work week.
Or be sad you weren't born 10.000 years earlier with a 15 hour work week.
Personally I'd prefer to not get eaten by a cave bear.
Cave bear sounds adorable. Would cuddle.
You absolutely can, right now. Once.
You didn't end up here, but you are a product of this environment, and "you" couldn't be born anywhere else.
Alan Watts go brrr
anthropic principle go brrrr
Make no mistake: This planet did not have a 40hr work week until we brought it here. We only have ourselves to blame.
On top of that, as another comment points out, the 40hr work week is the improvement on the system.
We really fucked it
Mine's 35. 40 is illegal unless you're a medical doctor. And legally I have to be paid overtime for every minute over but it's my choice.
That’s bizarro world. Here doctors work like 6 hours a week. Unless golf counts as work. Which it might now, there’s probably an executive order about that somewhere.
Damn bro just solved the Fermi Paradox with a Dilbert punchline
Imagine living in a world without being voluntold to do overtime every week.
Either it happens, or it doesn't. I'd say that's exactly 50/50.
I have a 40 hour work week. And two more jobs than are ten hours work per week. And I need to do these, or I don't have health insurance and can't afford my rent.
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