I just started I Didn't Do the Thing Today and within the first few pages I found an excellent summary of how society tries to explain your value. You're more valuable if you do more1. More time at the office. More volunteering for whatever others think is important.
Just more.
How dare you think that you might decide to have a fuck it Friday, which is when I decide that writing this single newsletter is enough and I do nothing else "productive".
The incredulous looks I get when I tell people I work 3 days a wek about 5 hours a day to earn my income and then I do what I want with Monday and Friday are often shocked. They wonder why I work so little and figure there must be something wrong with me. Yes I could double my income if I worked more...but who wants to do that when there are interesting books to read, long lunches to have with my wife, and naps to take?
Hardcore Twitter
This comes the same day I read about Musk saying that employees need to be ready for hardcore Twitter. Evidently hardcore Twitter means you can expect to work long hours, under immense pressure, for exactly what you're making now.
The thing about sallary is that you don't get paid more when the expectation is set that you work long hours. That means that there is every incentive for employeers to bully you to work more hours because they'll get "more" productivity out of it.
The big problem is that people will say they're "hardcore" for Elon and then slowly substitute looking busy as a way of showing2 they're productive3. This fact goes alongside the one that shows us overwork and getting less sleep leads to mistakes that cost you more to fix than the extra hours of work you gained by skipping out on rest4. Employees will slowly bleed away from the service because they're never given the time to build great things.
It's been shown repeatedly that you have between 3 and 5 hours of good focused work in a day5 and then you're barely good to shuffle email around.
Rich People Aren't Smarter Than You or Me
Really as I look at the crazy shit Elon is doing with Twitter I'm reminded that just because someone has money, doesn't mean they're any smarter than me. In fact in all likelihood they have less intelligence, they can cover that fact up by throwing money at problems so they don't have to deal with them or so that they simply go away. As a society we regularly confuse expertise (or luck) in one area with expertise in all areas of life6.
This is why we listen to what movie stars have to say about street design or poverty or economics. Sure they can act, but what does that have to do with any other field? Most of society doesn't care if they've put in time learning about these other fields, they take what they say at face value and build opinions about it.
Ulitmately, I don't care much if Twitter stays around or goes away. I've got a Mastodon account but even then I wonder why I should bother much with Social Media now anyway.
I do feel sorry for the engineers that fall under the spell of some rich dude that are going to ruin relationships in the quest for being hardcore. I do feels bad for employees that have financial burdens that don't let them walk away from Twitter right away and have to deal with abuse until they find a new job.
Elon seems to be in the midst of destroying a service I've loved, and harming the people that work there merely for some bragging rights that he saved Twitter.
Rich guys are dump.
Further Reading