alt Hacker NewsWill you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?
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My father spent more time in the office than with his family. My ancestors spent more time in the field than with family. My distant ancestors probably spent significant family time hunting together.
Is there any way to make the profession a family affair again?
Don't be so hard on yourself. Yes, valid observation and time to curtail it a bit. But I think the 'stare at a screen' thing is a bit oversimplified. A computer is a medium of connection, mostly to other humans, or at least indirectly to human's work, art, etc.. So it's mostly using a tool for 'connection.' With anything, moderation is good, even moderating the moderation. But you're not staring at a brick. Don't oversimplify it.
This reminds me of Tim Urban's excellent post The Tail End[1] he wrote a few years ago.
He calculates that when a person reaches age 18, they have spent more than 90% of their in-person parent time. As a parent and a son, that hits pretty hard.
Obviously, YMMV.
Shouldn’t the title actually be “Will you have spent more of your life AT WORK than with your family”.
For white-collar jobs typically translates to, computer = work.
Why is this front page? This is just a strangely framed ambiguous question. Here's more of the same: Will you have spent more of your life sleeping than with your family? Will you have spent more of your life walking than with your family? Will you have spent more of your time working than with your family? Will you have spent more of your time blinking than with your family?
I had this same realization while playing video games and my senior dog came over for pets. Realized I felt like I was wasting my downtime on essentially meaningless filler when I could be spending it with him instead.
Mind you this was solo video game so I wasn't even spending quality time with friends online or anything.
I agree with the sentiment of the other comments here that its been like this for longer than OP gives credit for (10 years). But I don't think that makes it right. As hunter-gatherers, when we weren't hunting or gathering, I feel like people were probably just spending time with each other? If we take that 40 hour/week figure as canon for how much hunter/gatherers worked, anyways.
Yes, thankfully so. Computers probably got me out of my teens alive.
I feel like 'screens' have been a major issue for probably well over 50 years now... is it all that much worse it's a computer than a TV?
I recall having the TV on all evening when I was growing up in the 80s. I just checked and the average family had it for just over 7 hours according to an '84 study. I hardly watch any TV now aside from streaming one or two shows at any given time, and my personal use of a computer outside of work is likely a fraction of how much I used to space out in front of a TV in the years leading up to university.
Given that I got my first computer at 12, given all the screen time with video games and programming in my youth + my day-job in software I absolutely guarantee I've clocked more hours on a computer than "with my family". I'm OK with that.
Computers have consolidated work, media, and entertainment all within the same "box" and even a good deal of close friend interactions are now mediated "on the screen".
I'm certain early hunter/gatherers would've been equally as shocked seeing factory workers "leave the home" and "constantly meet strangers".
Different praxis for different eras.
Valid point. Using a screen for your daily work is one side. Another is sitting with family members together who are staring on a screen like zombies. I guess it’s the latter part that the author claims to be different than 10 years ago. I feel it.
I should hope so. You can't play Dark Souls on my family.
"The worst part is that it wasn't like this 10 years ago."
I'm from the United States. I'm not sure about you, but smartphones took-over my social circles in 2011. So it definitely was like this 15 years go for us. Before that, laptops were everywhere by 2007 and people spent a huge amount of time with those. Before that, people had been spending tons of time playing video games, watching movies, and reading books. This is how life was from as early as I could remember (the late 80s, early 90s) to be honest. Maybe just the family I grew up in? We all seemed to love to read and tinker with computers and video games.
If anything, I spend less time in front of a screen or a book today than I did 20 years ago. Just as a personal preference to spend more time with my wife and kids and more time in nature.
You can do so many different things with a computer. If you spend hours watching AI generated YouTube shorts instead of playing outside with your kids, then yeah, that's too bad.
But if you spend all those hours building a retro/modern sim city game pair programming with your 12yo, designing the artwork, crafting the story arc, writing the music, finding and fixing bugs, building new levels -- you don't need to regret that you weren't idling around at the park all that time.
I am taking an opportunity to learn how to make an iOS widget that can display dynamic text or an image from a URL.
It's because my dad always forgets exactly when and what channel his (our) sports team play. He has a phone but push notifications, texts, opening an app or website is too much friction, ultimately, for someone that can read yahoo, check email, and make calls, but not good with texting.
Anyway, a widget is the most immediate visual cue I could think of aside from a push notification but pushes are too fleeting. The idea is my dad just has to "swipe" to see today's games and I can curate it exactly to our teams and whether or not he can see it on the TV or needs to open streaming service X and so on.
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Is this a good use of my time connecting with my dad? Is it better to call him instead of touching the keyboard? Should I be talking to him now rather than about him?
And before that it was TV. And before that newspapers.
This is breathless polemic.
You could say the same thing about differeng hobbies or tools. Ive held a hammer multiple times longer than I could hold any person. Ive spent unknown number of hours in a garage or barn working on various mechanics.
Time with family is valuable, but so is time doing other things. You don't need everyone involved in everything 24/7.
I could say that we spend more time at work than with our family - ~40h. Why are computers worse?
I had a similar thought in the shower today: will the last conversation I have be with a person or an AI?
If you think of your screen is a big glowy box of noise that fails to contribute to a good, meaningful life, that's a problem! Put better things on your screen.
I think a better way to ask this question is if I was entertained by a computer more than by the company of friends/family.
Of course I spend more time looking at a screen - it's my job description. It's never been different in the past. But outside of work, that's a different story.
Is this really that weird, considering labor now involves mostly looking at a screen? In other words, is the total amount of time we see family really going down vs say the 1800s, when people used to work many more hours.
That's a big advantage of remote work. I can pause for a couple of minutes, interact with my kids, and come back.
No way, a taxi triver spends more time in his car than with his family. Same goes for truckers. Farmers spend more time in the field than with their families. Vendors can easily spend more time on the market or in their store selling goods. And don't even get me started on military personnel or sailors.
What a tragedy. What a horrible revelation - work can often take more time than being with your family. Oh no. Horrible horrible computers, how can this happen to us. It's not like the same is true in many other occupations.
Will you have spent more time working a deadend job than with your family?
You haven't met my family. Half the reason I got into this stuff when I was young was to get away from them.
"Can you stack your family?" - Michael Falk, The Onion
My life has been more aligned with computers, and I prefer it that way. Computers don't lie, they don't pressure you. At least they respond honestly to my input, almost all the time. Everything outside of computers was awful. So I like everything that involves computers. The internet let me read and learn so much, which made computers good for me. There are downsides, like YouTube and some communities, but overall, I enjoy building things with computers and making them work.
On the other hand, the world outside computers was mostly bad—people who deceived me when I was just starting out, fraudulent contracts, and all the physical pain I went through in manual labor. Looking at it from the other side, people with real-world capital tend to have good relationships and good people around them. But for those without that capital, the world inside a computer can actually feel more real than the outside.
I've come to realize that trustworthy colleagues and respectful relationships largely depend on social status. And it feels like I don't really belong there.
Computers don't get angry when I can't do something. They don't ask me to meet some standard, and they don't get frustrated when I fail to meet it. I can learn at my own pace, doing what I want. In the past, I had to reach out to people online and exchange emails during that process, but now even that's been replaced by AI giving me answers.
For me, computers aren't a cheap substitute for human relationships. They're the infrastructure that gave me the autonomy, knowledge, and productive capability I never got from the real world.
A shelter and a prison can look the same from the outside. But I chose to be here, because this world inside the computer has been less painful than what I experienced outside.
When code fails, at least I can investigate why it failed. People, on the other hand, can twist the same words depending on relationships and power, and exclude you without ever explaining why.
That's why I like computers. At least when I turn on my computer, work on something, and see it run, I feel a sense of accomplishment, whether it's AI generated or hand written code.
Honestly, I'm not sure if having my own home or meeting someone compatible would change anything.
If I am luchky, yes!
Yes, certainly, first because passion for computer can more often than not predate being able to co-make a family. Then like any work, current societies make far easier to get room to work with computers than any other kind of activity one might want to engage into. Finally, other humans don't want to spend none stop time in company of the single same individual, no matter how much they might love them: they need space for there own personal development. Computers will respond tirelessly to any human wanting to interact with them H24, and don't have any extra psychological and sociological need to fulfill.
So on sheer level of time spent on computer, other humans don't stand a chance. Time spend on something doesn't tell much about how much we feel emotionally positively connected with this thing though.
You can't think of it as computers vs. family, but work vs. family. And working with computers is a pretty decent job to have in this day and age.
the computer lets me stay home and work with my family around, so it's not all doom and gloom... 50 years ago I'd be in the office ~40 hours a week and commuting for another 5
Date format in the blog has an error. D M Y doesn't have a comma.
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The sentiment is valuable but screens <-> family comparison bleeds too much into the polarization camp for shock value. "Time spent doing X" as opposed to Y will always have shock value. We sleep too much. Too much time reading on the toilet.
My main pushback is solitude. I don't actually want to timemaxx family interaction or any human interaction. I don't want to be the only one on the planet either, we need one another. But a life well-lived includes deep experiences in solitude if you ask me.
EDIT: and another thing! human interaction here focuses entirely on the living and the related. Why? Human connection can span all of humanity. And it should.