4/9/2026 at 7:00:19 AM
I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob. (Honest disclaimer: I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble, no idea about blue collar to be honest. Not much contact with people from that field unfortunately)So we surely made progress here in the direction of being more idle (though one could question wether you are truly “idle” if you fill your free time with staring at your phones screen, consuming the latest societal rage bait. But i’d say in the spirit of the essay, yes, we are much more idle thanks to tech).
BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While we Europeans are super idle, Chinese arose to be a super power. The US dominates tech and the future technologies. Russia is banging on our front door and we dont have the military means and will to put an end to it. So while idle ness is a great mode for Being, is it a great mode for making sure the own civilization survives?
Thats always my problem with those ideas. They sound super nice in theory, but in the harsh world, there will always be a predator who just works a little bit hardwr to get you …
anyway! loved the essay. thanks for sharing
by lmf4lol
4/9/2026 at 7:22:10 AM
European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not the issue.Edit: I’ve recently started spending a lot of time in Switzerland and the contrast in mindset (and wealth) with the EU is staggering. There is a healthy amount of communal paranoia. They don’t work any harder either, if anything it’s the contrary.
by zemvpferreira
4/9/2026 at 8:10:05 AM
Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.Even those who might accept this is no longer true intellectually find it hard to internalise.
by graemep
4/9/2026 at 9:31:15 AM
I don't think that's the current problem. It was up to, perhaps, the Suez crisis or up until decolonisation, but since then I think we've mostly internalised that America (and more recently China) have been the leading powers.The current complacency, one which we are currently still in the process of unwinding from (it will take years) is that of trade turning violent enemies into mutually beneficial growth opportunities. Russia was the first wake-up call there (but even then for the current situation not for Crimea), and over the last year also the USA. China is, I think, currently mostly seen as opportunity rather than threat.
War is expensive, and not doing it is good when possible. It is bad for everyone that we now feel the need to put 5% or whatever of our GDP into defence when it could have been spent on infrastructure, education, healthcare, or even startup grants.
by ben_w
4/9/2026 at 8:15:43 AM
Why should we care to be "at the top"? The average person gets no benefit from this; on the contrary, they would do a lot better if underperforming countries in Europe's neighborhood raised their standards of living.by zozbot234
4/9/2026 at 8:27:50 AM
I agree with you about "at the top" in terms of being a global power. It does people little good.The problems are security, sovereignty and economic stagnation. Being dependent on super powers and vulnerable to their whims is not good. Weak supply chains are not good. Neither are worsening standards of living.
by graemep
4/9/2026 at 8:26:33 AM
> The average person gets no benefit from thisYou are proving the point. The avg. person gets an enormous benefit from it, even in countries like USA, Japan or Korea with far less generous welfare. The gap in standards of living of somebody in the US and somebody in Georgia or Vietnam are ridiculous.
by ernst_klim
4/9/2026 at 8:45:25 AM
Poverty levels are roughly the same between Vietnam and the US from a quick search. Mean standard of living is a poor way to calculate inequality. If you have a link to a median one it would help to compare.by vinaigrette
4/9/2026 at 9:42:55 AM
>Poverty levels are roughly the same between Vietnam and the US from a quick search.How is this an argument? A poor person in the US has a massively better standard of living than a poor person in Vietnam.
Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.
by joe_mamba
4/9/2026 at 10:17:13 AM
> Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.That worked before globalization. Nowadays, having a small apartment in a city of McMansions means you're upper middle class. Poor people in the west have no apartments and no goats.
by TeMPOraL
4/9/2026 at 10:54:20 AM
> but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're richNo, you need more than one goat if you want to be rich, regardless of what other people have. Really, you need a few dozen.
One goat can't do anything but age and die.
by thaumasiotes
4/9/2026 at 10:50:40 AM
I always found it interesting that homeless folks in the US seem to live in tents a lot of the time, but in my country they rarely have more than a piece of cardboard. I don't know if my perception is incorrect, or if I'm ready too much into this, but my conclusion has been basically what you said: at every socio-economic level, the people at that level have higher standards of living in developed countries than in developing countries.by nisegami
4/9/2026 at 8:47:36 AM
> Poverty levelsPoverty levels are measured relative to median. Poverty in US and poverty in Bangladesh, Russia or Vietnam are completely different things.
In the US poverty line is about $16k, while in Russia for example it is $2300. Even considering the PPP it's like 4 times the difference in living standards. I guess Vietnam or Bangladesh are far worse.
Upd: downvotes with no counterargument. Orange site is becomming more and more a reddit.
by ernst_klim
4/9/2026 at 9:37:49 AM
"The average person gets no benefit from this" this is a very bad take.In Europe, innovation in the end help everyone. Better healthcare starts with the rich, and ends distributed to everyone. The same is true for everything else.
by jiriknesl
4/9/2026 at 10:03:17 AM
Ah, the good old "trickle down" theory of Thatcher and Reagan. Remember how much better off we became when we gave more to the wealthy?by bregma
4/9/2026 at 9:20:33 AM
> Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.I wouldn't say it's a matter of complacency, but rather a convergence of problems. To solve those problems, there need to be radical changes, but radical changes are not popular. Politicians win elections by promising stability, not by disrupting lives. The politicians that rise to the top are the ones that don't have any visions for a better future nor the desire to make a difference, because the system does not reward that.
by plastic-enjoyer
4/9/2026 at 7:52:46 AM
I'm reminded of the somewhat derogatory term "carebear" from the EVE Online community, for players who focus on PvE and profit, while avoiding PvP.by HPsquared
4/9/2026 at 7:44:03 AM
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
by joe_mamba
4/9/2026 at 8:27:22 AM
If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.Our success story is the same as recent India one - we're just much smaller. We have educated population that was underemployed and poor, and western companies jumped at opportunity of replacing entry and mid level positions with cheaper workers, across both factory and office work.
by KptMarchewa
4/9/2026 at 9:10:58 AM
My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
by _puk
4/9/2026 at 8:42:19 AM
The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.Calling India a success story feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the better known Chinese case, or indeed Eastern Europe itself. They still have huge scope for further improvement.
by zozbot234
4/9/2026 at 8:05:59 AM
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote. (Connectivity used to be a key barrier for the latter case, but fast mobile and sat-based connections have changed this quite dramatically.)
by zozbot234
4/9/2026 at 8:14:30 AM
>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.Productivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.
by joe_mamba
4/9/2026 at 8:29:22 AM
Urbanization is a problem and not enough people acknowledge it.by sheiyei
4/9/2026 at 9:40:39 AM
The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.by Telemakhos
4/9/2026 at 8:40:31 AM
But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.by gzread
4/9/2026 at 9:38:05 AM
In China, Russia and America the government doesn't pay you generously in welfare to not contribute to society.by joe_mamba
4/9/2026 at 8:26:00 AM
> We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours,You don't, (Western) Europe is just a rentier-place at this point, living on other people's backs. For example look at Maersk, from the much-beloved and relaxed Denmark, their business would crumble over night if it weren't for the Americans keeping the seas open for them.
by paganel
4/9/2026 at 8:30:14 AM
The Americans are keeping the seas open for their own self-interest, and this is great. Other countries in the broader West do also chip in with their own military assets. Why should Maersk have a problem with this?by zozbot234
4/9/2026 at 9:25:23 AM
Americans seems to be intent to cause as much damage to everyone including themselves.USA is the only country that ever triggered article 5 of NATO and got military help out of it. And now acts like victims when others don't rush to help them with absurd badly planned war where they are clear aggressors.
The second real use of NATO was to send armies to greenland to discourage USA to attack it just 2 months ago. So, now is really not the time for America to pretend ever do something that is not primary for itself.
by watwut
4/9/2026 at 10:04:34 AM
> NATO and got military help out of itThat was token help (the Brits excluded), let's be serious here, we're all grown-up men.
by paganel
4/9/2026 at 7:51:30 AM
It's not that Europeans embracing being idle. It's that they realized typical white collar workers hardly produce any value (unlike Americans who still pretend they do) so it makes no difference for them to work less than 40 hours per week.Junior doctors across Europe reported working an average of 57 ± 17 hours per week (216 ± 61 hours per month)[0].
[0]: https://www.juniordoctors.eu/assets/rest-report-DeLrwvob.pdf
by raincole
4/9/2026 at 9:27:27 AM
Junior doctors slave away for senior doctors so that they can one day become senior doctors with 10x the pay and have junior doctors do most of their work. That’s not going to happen for the average white collar worker.by mr_toad
4/9/2026 at 9:24:33 AM
There is also a general mindset of worklife balance and enjoyment from life.as someone who spends a lot of time in Spain but lives in the US, the Spanish prioritize social interaction much more than the US (sweeping statement I know) - you go to many towns and cities in Spain and locals are socializing multiple nights per week in vibrant bars and cafes an having so much fun. London has a bit of this with pub culture but less family friendly.
The US on the other hand, the focus is on work and friends rarely get together and we study why people are socializing less (bowling alone etc. ).
by navaed01
4/9/2026 at 7:24:37 AM
As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
by nekitamo
4/9/2026 at 9:31:00 AM
There is also one big thing, Europe even though it tries with the EU, is still a group of countries, not a single country.It’s a lot easier for a business in one US state to expand to another one, but cross border business expansion in EU is still difficult.
People speak different languages, bureaucracy is different and often in a different language as well etc.
On top of that businesses are a lot more regulated than in the US.
by DrProtic
4/9/2026 at 7:53:20 AM
> Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally.In DE I would argue that this is due to punitive taxes and I wouldn't call it progress.
Poor people work their asses 40+ hours and up to overwork since it's always paid here. White collars work less time and often switch to 4 days because at this tax progression working your ass is not worth it. Time is more valuable, indifference curve is screwed.
It also have negative effect on women's careers in combo with 3/5 tax classes thing. And it hurts EU economies very hard since the most productive ones are disincentivized to work more.
by ernst_klim
4/9/2026 at 8:09:21 AM
I think it’s more that at a certain income, you kind of plateau. You can afford all the little pleasures you want, but you couldn’t meaningfully improve your life without doubling your income. It would not get you a nicer apartment, would not make a house more affordable, and would not give you more time to enjoy travelling.It seems to me like in Germany, the rock bottom is high but the glass ceiling is low. I am very happy with this, but if you are nearer to the ceiling, it can feel cramped.
by nicbou
4/9/2026 at 8:22:23 AM
> I am very happy with thisI'm not. If you are european and will inherit something it's fine, but if not you'll barely be able to afford a house and a tiny investment portfolio. And at the face of the immense collapse of a pension system it's pretty grim.
by ernst_klim
4/9/2026 at 8:27:26 AM
It’s a mixed blessing. I am Canadian, and I prefer my quiet life and small flat to always being at work or mowing the lawn. I am always stunned to see how much people back home work. My friends in Germany have much more balanced lives.If it makes you feel better, the pension system is collapsing everywhere. The scarier part is how we will find the workforce to care for us, but I digress.
by nicbou
4/9/2026 at 8:45:28 AM
This is all about how the housing market is structured, not the amount worked. If people worked even more, house prices would rise further to cancel it.by gzread
4/9/2026 at 8:49:10 AM
The housing market is heavily location dependent, if you want to avoid rising prices you should just move out.by zozbot234
4/9/2026 at 8:44:54 AM
Is this actually a problem? We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office. The average - everywhere - is more like the equivalent of 20 hours of solid focused work per week day.Does more white collar work beyond a threshold produce more value, anyway? Sometimes yes but often no.
by gzread
4/9/2026 at 8:46:12 AM
> We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office.Yes bc now this worker works same 3-4 hours but 4 days instead of 5.
by ernst_klim
4/9/2026 at 9:44:20 AM
From an employers perspective it would make sense to have people working five six hour days rather than four seven and a half hour days.by tonyedgecombe
4/9/2026 at 9:41:28 AM
I saw this when I worked in Germany. They might not have worked as many hours but they worked hard during those hours.UK workplaces where much more relaxed in comparison so even though people put in more hours the results were similar.
by tonyedgecombe
4/9/2026 at 7:51:23 AM
interesting. want to say most people i know, same countries, works more than 40 hrs a week. It really depends on your circles i guess, this perception.I do see more people with higher wages chose more for time off than more money, and work 4 days for example..But the majority of the population does not fit that category i think. (i dont have the exact numbers, but most jobs are not high income in general)
by saidnooneever
4/9/2026 at 9:50:15 AM
Your most important point:> (Honest disclaimer: I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble, no idea about blue collar to be honest. Not much contact with people from that field unfortunately)
Even ignoring your "BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While [...]" point - try talking to the farmers and blue collar workers upon whom your day-to-day life is critically dependent.
by bell-cot
4/9/2026 at 8:38:28 AM
It's not strictly necessary to be a super power.I don't think idleness is what's preventing it anyway. It's more about capital ownership. I'm not deploying high speed rail because I expect it would be impossible to get the land rights, not because I wouldn't work enough hours.
Actually I myself would be a terrible entrepreneur in any field, but I feel that I produce good value at a good rate at the actual work that I do. I don't think there's a shortage of entrepreneurship even though I happen to have none. I do think it's not being deployed on things that make the country more powerful.
by gzread
4/9/2026 at 7:27:47 AM
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
by joe_mamba
4/9/2026 at 9:47:46 AM
It’s interesting that the countries with the weakest economies in Europe work the longest hours.During the financial crises Greeks were getting a lot of criticism from Northern Europeans for being lazy but the reality was they did far more hours.
by tonyedgecombe