How do people work 40 hours a week?!

Hm. I’m not so sure we should be propping up a “real world” philosophy that has destroyed the mental and physical health of millions of Americans. Most workers literally kill themselves in the long run to make someone else rich. Other countries think we’re nuts.

This may be the way it’s always been, but I don’t think it’s the way it always has to be. If the next generation demands better work-life balance, eventually, employers will have to get on board or find themselves unable to hire the people they need. It’s that simple.

First of all, I don't think we need to be beholden to the 40 hour work week and we need to rethink that.

However, I think her main point (I only read the article and didn't see the TikTok), isn't as much the 40-hour-a-week job...that is hard enough, but that she has to add on commuting and that brings it to almost a 12-hour day because she can't afford to live where she works.  Yeah, how do you balance work/life?

I'll just say that I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I absolutely do believe that the world would turn just fine if we had a three day weekend.

I will also say that this particular girl's commute is a bitch. In the precovid days, before remote work was as huge as it is, I specifically chose to live a 7 minute drive to work. So I also get that for many people there is an element of choice with where they choose to live. However this girl sounds like she simply couldn't afford to live closer. And that's a shame. I wish we could make our city centers more affordable so people could more often choose to live close to where they work.

I also know that for me, COVID brought about a more flexible schedule. I no longer am required to work 8-5. So like this morning I could log in at 6:30 and be done by 3. I sympathize with people who are stuck, in person, on a rigid schedule. That was my life for years.

But, here's where I get lost with this. On the one hand, I hope that a lot of these post COVID changes are coming into play more and more. I wholeheartedly don't believe that because I suffered, others should. I really feel the pull of being a mom without dad involved, working full time and trying to manage a home and a spousal relationship. I even threw graduate school in there for three years. I was busy, busy. Now, I'm in this phase where I work 40 hours a week, but feel (probably because of all the years paying dues to the grind) that I now have plenty of time to myself. So sometimes when I hear a single, childless person complain about working a 40 hour week, I don't have quite the same level of empathy as I do for the working mom barely keeping her head above water. Those years I hardly had anything left for myself.

So I guess my feelings are mixed. I want people to be able to have a better work/life balance. I want people to have more flexibility. And too, we all have different levels of tolerance, our abilities differ. But I want these young ones to know that if they are struggling single and childless, that they might not be able to handle parenthood unless something significant changes about our work culture.

I'd add into the hopper that, historically, parenting was expected to be much less intensive. My mother is *amazed* at the amount of things that are just "things you have to do as a parent" that parents 30-40 years ago weren't expected to do (let's start with the fact that someone called the cops on my then-sixth-grader for *walking alone down a residential city street "unsupervised" a few years ago -- the level of intensive parenting and supervision expected now is very high and I think not great for kids if you are asking). It's a lot!

Wait until "Brielle" realizes that people who rush to the door at "five on the dot" are not impressive to bosses, so she'll be stuck.
Wait until she gets her first paycheck and sees how much is taken out for taxes and other incidentals, after she's already gone out and spent that gross salary money (at least in her head).
Down the road, wait until "Brielle" realizes that she needs to go back to school for a graduate degree if she ever wants to get past entry-level employment (in many fields). That means those hours on the job AND school, and possibly a second job to pay for school.
Down the road, wait until "Brielle" realizes that, if she chooses to have children (assuming choosing is still a choice at that point), more than half her take-home pay could go to child care, if she can even find a place to leave them that doesn't scare the daylights out of her.
I'm sounding as if I'm mocking, but I dislike this reality for our young people.
Remember when we were all promised that computers were going to do all the work, and we'd have to figure out how to spend our leisure time? Well, the system that's in place doesn't benefit from that, so nobody should hold her breath for it.

We were a tiny farm compared to your operation. However, I agree with the 365 days a year on chores thing. Livestock depend on us every day. (We had goats, chickens, rabbits, dogs. At one time we also had a horse, shorthorn cow, pigs).

I don't think this comment is fair. Very few people have said anything that could remotely be interpreted this way. This discussion is far more nuanced and I think there are a variety of opinions that are relevant to this discussion. You implied that there was a dismissal, I'm saying there's been enough comments here to feed an actual discussion.

Bravo!

I am sitting here hoping that the so-called bitching and whinging Millennials and Gen Zs can make a change so that they do NOT have to work 40 hours a week. One of my greatest wishes is that my kids and their kids have a better work life balance than what my generation has/had. And if they can bring about that change, good for them!

The company I work for would prefer that all employees are back in the office five days a week. So far we are still at one day in the office, though we will soon need to go to two days. A friend of mine who is very high up in HR said to me that companies need to understand that the world has changed. People have now had a taste of the work/life balance that is possible when working from home. In her words, the genie is out of the bottle, and if companies are not going to let their staff work from home at least some of the time, then they risk losing talent to companies that will allow WFH.  

I think social media might be impacting things. If you look at influencers you might be led to believe that this is what life is supposed to look like. That podcast Under the Influence really brought forth some ideas both good and bad about what influencers have done to the psyche of younger generations.

But I think we also can't deny that the biggest influence in kids lives is their parents. I mean millennials have the lowest birth rate in recorded history. It's so low that people are wondering if there will ever be an uptick again or if it will just continue to decline. If you follow any of the younger crowd on Twitter it's easy to see the attitudes of younger generations that were shaped by working mothers who had to handle everything including the house and they don't want that. Millennials gave up having kids. Gen Z might turn that around by instead trying to give up the rat race of work and instead reclaim their lives and having kids.

I tried to read the linked article but got an error, so I may be way off base here. I’m responding based on the OP and responses on the thread.

Working 40 hours a week IS hard. I can’t argue with that, especially when you have to also take care of a home, do home repairs (even in a rental you have to be home for service people), make and go to appointments, and manage life. It’s hard. Plus, jobs seem to be 40 hours minimum, so when there’s an emergency or a crisis or an end of year surge or whatever, it can add up to more.

Then factor in a commute with traffic. It’s hard.

Before working from home became more normalized with covid, I used to leave my house at 7:15 to get my ds to school, go to work (sometimes on the phone for 7:30am meetings), get to work at 8 (thank goodness for a short commute), work 8-5 (often working through lunch), scramble to leave in time to pick ds from after school care by 5:30, then get home and rush through dinner to get to evening swim lessons or whatever extracurricular activity. Then it was home, shower, bed, repeat. That’s only with one kid. I can’t imagine managing more schedules and kids at different schools and activities.

I felt badly for ds so I arranged my work schedule to be 7-4 so we could have a breather before dinner which meant my dh had to take ds to school, but it meant that dh didn’t have to worry about leaving by a certain time to pick ds up if I had a work crisis come up. Luckily I had that flexibility available and had a boss who understood. I was able to leave by 4 or 4:30 regularly and my kid wasn’t consistently the last one getting picked up every day.

One of the things I’m grateful for with now working from home is I can take a few minutes to go pick ds up or I can start early or late and make up the time whenever. It’s also been normalized to have kids in the background interrupting or asking questions because my boss and my team recognize that it’s hard.

I intentionally chose to live close to my office so I didn’t have a commute but I’m lucky that I was able to do that, especially in a big growing city like Phoenix. I don’t know how I would’ve managed getting ds to/from school with a 30-60 minute commute.

When we transitioned to working from home, some people I worked with saved 1-2 hours a day (and some had up to 2 hour commutes one way in traffic) by not having to commute in rush hour traffic. When we were asked how many people wanted to come back to the office when it opened back up, out of about 250 people, I think 4 or 5 said they’d like an office. Everyone else wanted to stay remote and only drive into the office when in person meetings were absolutely necessary. I now go in about once every month or two and usually only for a morning or an afternoon (because I live close enough that I can be efficient driving mid day without impacting work.)

I’m not sure what the solution is but I consider myself very lucky to have flexible hours and to be able to work from home. I don’t want to go back to going into the office regularly. I know some jobs have to be in person but there has to be some way to improve overall quality of life while managing a full time job, a home, and potentially a family. Weekends shouldn’t just be for getting chores done that you were too exhausted to do during the week. People need downtime and I’m not sure what the answer is to improve things for everyone. Long commutes, long hours, and more than one job sure isn’t it though.

when I was young, I worked as a park ranger at Lowell NHP.. Lowell MA. it tells the story of the industrial revolution, as it came in USA in the textile industry. we talked all the time about the young women who came off the farm to work in the mills.. they worked 12 hours a day.. 6 days a week and though they might have stayed a few months or a few years, there are many writings about how easy it was compared to the farm work at the time (1820's).. and how they had cash in their pockets and a big social scene to enjoy.

my son in his mid 30's is for the first time, commuting to an office and working 9 hours a day there. it has been a big adjustment..as he has to walk the dog before and after work and his days stretch to 12 hours.. then there is dinner and too exhausted to do much more. they will never have kids.. for various reasons.. but the work load is part of it. (he was a shift worker--bartender before)..

our lack of a social net.. or much help for parents and others.. has consequences.

So ... just because that's what people have done, or were expected to do, for decades means we shouldn't want better?

Most of Europe does way better than us.  Work life balance is way better in other countries.

And as to the remark that 40 hours is only 24% of your week.  For most, 40 hours is simply scratching the surface.  Add in an hour for lunch, and a commute both ways (1.5 hours total for me as an example) and all of a sudden I'm away from home 53ish hours a week - and that's if I don't stop to get groceries or run errands after work.  So, let's round that up to almost 60.   Then, if you get a good amount of sleep each night, that's another 56 hours.  So now all of a sudden you have 52 hours over the course of 7 days to do all the rest of the shit you have to do, including anything fun you might want to do.

I think it's way to easy to roll our eyes and blame "Millennials" or "Gen Z" mentality.  Honestly, they have the right idea.   

I’m a teacher and would *love* a 40 hour work week. Usually 50 hours at minimum plus commute. I’m exhausted when I get home physically but especially mentally. My family gets next to nothing of me because I bust my butt at school every day. I love my job but am not sure how much longer I can keep it up. Starbucks, which will provide insurance at under 40 hours a week, looks like a viable alternative once my daughter graduates. I need more of myself to be a wife and mother. My job is my life and that’s not a life I want to live.