Imagine anger when you live in poverty, you work 9 hours/day (minimum, from workweek in Korea) manual labor, some people at work die or get disabilities in work accidents. As a worker you know that everyone lives from surplus you produce, the food, etc, programmers do not make food. You can only do programming since they made food for you. So as a worker, you know you do something useful, right? So you deiced to talk with your boss, you told him all this and ask for better working conditions, little less working time, etc. He fires you. On the next job, you try to not make the same mistake, you organize collectively and strike. But this time, government use force to stop the strike and kills someone of your friends. Not surprising that some workers will be very angry.
May be will not help you prepare for marathons, but I saw a job posting with 2 hours or so of manual work in the morning or/and a few hours before sleep. They even advertise the job as exercise. Pros:
1. doing something useful and paid
2. manual work
3. + to your social status, since you will be worker-programmer
As I understand, happiness is free time from necessary work. Quote from book Hunnicutt, Free time:
Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently
the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress:
If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some-
thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out
of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and
happiness.
Also Epicur:
"Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "
Life improvement is more free time. Free time is time free from necessary work. This includes free time from cooking, cleaning, etc, life support activities at home, too. In total, the number of working hours on average is higher than in 1990, I think, for full time workers. For some workers the work day increased to 12 hours/day, from 8 hours. It is unlikely the worker will be able to use his free time after long work day so even with non-work productivity improvements, he may not see the improvement. It might be that just 1 hour of additional free time is a better life improvement than anything. Universal cable, he list as a life improvement, is hardly worth longer work day.
I want to say that IMO: the workday should be lowered. It is possible to produce all necessary things for living in just 2-4 hours/day, including houses, cars and many more. See productivity growth. Free time can be work too, but it should not be seen as necessary work, everyone should be able to make a choice: work necessary time (2-4 hours/day) or longer. If you think something worth your free time, OK, work at your free time. But what happen is that you try to tell me that I have to work each day 8-12 hours/day so you can have an universal cable or a new video game, etc. Not cool.
Lets consider more common case with working poor. At the same time we see high income inequality. We see unemployment. We see that productivity is a few times higher than it was in 1930. What is the solution? I think you know it, it was done once, 100 years ago. The work day was reduced to 8 hours/day. It could be reduced now to say 4 hours/day. No wage cut. In the past, who reduced the work day? The workers organized and reduced the work day. Why they do not do that? I think they do not know that they can work less. They still think they need to work more to produce all the food, more houses, etc. While in reality they produce income inequality, lots of bullshit jobs and unemployment.
You can help, agitate, organize, join union for shorter workday same wage.
I do not know, I use scholar.google.com and most of the publications not accessible for free. It is impossible to ignore a publication if you do not have access to it, it is highly demotivating, like doing something that is already done.
Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.