Escapism versus Reality

Does part of a student's job include improving the class curriculum on top of doing the assignments asked of them? If not, that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

If doing said reading translates into greater and optimized job productivity, most militaries would promote the soldier for that sort of ting.

edited 19th Jan '13 7:13:13 PM by KingZeal

Education improves productivity in general, and thus applicable. Promotion is not being paid for doing extra work. Otherwise companies wouldn't be paying new employees for training for their new job.

And I think we need a new thread.

edited 20th Jan '13 4:32:29 PM by IraTheSquire

You're still comparing apples and oranges. A student learning to be more productive due to a class curriculum is not the same as an employee increasing job productivity.

If a soldier uses time off the clock to research and learn ways to, say, reduce the time it takes to train a unit of 30 soldiers, that has real affect on the institution in which he works. A student learning productivity through education does nothing to improve the educational system.

Ok. Then the said soldier should be paid for the time spent reading manuals. It's part of his job, after all.

Also, casual cashiers who gets paid by the hour should be paid when for each hour they spent reading manuals for their cashier machines in their off-hours.

edited 20th Jan '13 4:46:09 PM by IraTheSquire

On the first part: Finally.

On the second part: Hardly.

Bringing work home becomes slowly more and more necessary the more responsibility you have. A shift-based or hourly position will not have as much necessity as one in which you're on-call (like a repairman, cop, etc.) or one in which quality of results is more important than results themselves (most arts, and most forms of entrepreneurship, or positions of authority).

So bringing it back to the actual thread, in the latter type, escapism starts to become a luxury, and is often detrimental to performance.

edited 20th Jan '13 5:03:25 PM by KingZeal

Less necessity does not mean that doesn't happen. If a causal cashier ever needs to take work home that he should get paid for that work done, regardless of how rare that happens.

Unless you believe that bosses are should be allowed to use this exploit to get around the minimum wage/related labour laws (hey, your official hours are 9-5, but I'll give you work to do in the off-hours so that you will do me extra work for free). Then that's just exploitation.

On topic: I'm of the opinion that escapism is necessary because sometime one needs a rest from real life, especially when with difficult situations. Mind breaks when this doesn't happen.

We do naturally do it in a way, or else But It Really Happened isn't a trope.

edited 20th Jan '13 5:32:47 PM by IraTheSquire

Most hourly wage jobs do not have opportunities for work off the clock or taking work home. In fact, most such jobs specifically avoid this to discourage employees from exploiting it. These jobs are meant to be expendable; you can replace a person doing it fairly easily. But the higher you go up, the more employers expect you to prove that you're a cut above others. If a cashier has to work overtime to do their job, most employers will see that as a sign that something's wrong. Best case scenario, they'll give the cashier a promotion to a position in which their secondary job becomes their main job. Worst case scenario, they just make the poor bastard work.

But like I said, the more responsibility and authority you have, the more costly escapism becomes. I'm not saying it's in itself a bad thing, but in highly competitive job markets, it's practically suicide. Hell, they have a word for this in Japan. Karoshi, which means "Death from overwork".

edited 20th Jan '13 6:51:03 PM by KingZeal

Hence why I say "should". Doesn't mean that employers are doing the right thing.

Well as I said, ideally, you wouldn't even want to have a job that depends on your hourly cashier working off the clock. If you do, something is wrong.

The type of thing I was describing is known as "occupation as identity", or in other words, someone who works hard off the clock because their work is a part of their personal identity. That's not the same as someone who works a job simply for the pay, or to wait until something better comes along.

But those types of jobs are really difficult to come by, risky to aim for, and hard to balance.

If it is for something other than pay, I won't count it as work. For example, a programmer who loves his job enough to write his own stuff off work.

edited 20th Jan '13 7:44:43 PM by IraTheSquire

I'm all for escapism, it's what keeps you sane most of the time. I have no love for this "reality" or the sadistic asshole who created it. Hell, if I could break through reality's Fourth Wall right now and find the little turd nugget, I'd wrap both hands around his neck and squeeze until he stopped breathing and dropped limp and lifeless.

As insane as this sounds, there's actually little difference between escapism and reality. Many physicists believe that we are simply just holograms and if that is true, we are simply composed of information. Books are information. Movies are information. The human mind is information. What we see as an example isn't exactly real... our vision only absorbs a very small amount of colors (magenta of which doesn't exist). Our ears have a rather small range of hearing. Our very perception is a lie.

The human mind is in essence a very complex computer and whatever communications we have are, rhetorically, networks. The difference is that reality, all that currently exists is simply a physical copy of that information. For us carbon-based lifeforms, the format is DNA (Thankfully not VHS or CD-R) and that can be divided into even simpler compounds. For anything that no longer exists, will exist, or never exists, the information has yet to be copied onto a physical format, matter.

To conclude this extensive metaphor, anyone can dream and a introspection never hurts, but you can always realize. You're your only limit.

That's fine and dandy as a philosophy goes, I guess. But, that external set of patterns known as "heat, radiation and pressure waves" thanks to a core pattern of "unexpected nova" or, a bit more likely, "megaflare event" would still denature and pulverise the proteins that make up your sorry arse, regardless of how your brain processes the data.

edited 12th Jun '14 10:30:43 AM by Euodiachloris

As would oncoming traffic and that's many orders of magnitudes more likely. I never said that perception could withstand anything. But... we're always open to experimentation if one would like to volunteer.