Buying time
I spent the majority of my childhood having very little expendable income. That's not to say my family was poor, but rather that my parents didn't see the need to provide me a consistent allowance. After all, I had a roof over my head and food to eat (I didn't really go out with friends that often, opting instead to play video games or read). This made child Mason long for the freedom and presumed expendable income of adulthood, when I could purchase all the video games and related microtransactions that I wanted.
My childhood self (and really, all the way through college, I) didn't have an understanding of just what it takes to live a comfortable life. Fulfilling the baser needs in Maslow's pyramid: food, water, shelter was taken for granted because my parents took care of all of that and after I moved away on my own, I was caught off guard by how easy it was to spend thousands every month on what seemed to me like the basic necessities.
As a recent college graduate, of course I was renting an apartment: $2,000 a month for something closer to downtown where "things are happening"; living with a roommate.
Food: $500 a month, budgeting $100 a week to groceries (letting a quarter of it rot in the fridge because I'm too lazy to cook) the remaining $100 for fast food or restaurants.
Car payments, car insurance, gas money: $500 a month, thanks for helping me get my license earlier mom and dad, otherwise the insurance premium would probably be double; n.b. in most parts of America, it's hard to hold down a job without a car.
We'll leave off utilities, internet, and phone costs to simplify the example a little. After tax withholdings, you're looking at having to make $4,000 a month to be comfortably in the green. Just enough over breakeven to build up an emergency fund in case an important unanticipated expense comes up. For most of us, the only way we're securing consistent income of that magnitude is to join the 9-5 workforce.
The 9-5
The archetypal 40 hour work week. Let's crunch some quick numbers: of the hours of the week, we dedicate hours to sleep, leaving us 112 waking hours per week, and subtracting away our idealized 40 hours of work to leave 72 hours per week to do with what we please.
This doesn't seem like a terrible deal; we're trading away 40 hours a week to enable 72 hours a week of comfortable, free time. This keeps a roof over our head, the heat on in the winter, food on the table, our entertainment subscriptions paid.
If we're in the majority of people who don't have their vocation aligned with their life's ultimate purpose and lifegiving mission, we're trading away 40 hours per week of drudgery to get 72 hours that we can dedicate to what we really want to do.
In my experience, however, this is not really what happens.
Firstly, we rarely dedicate exactly 40 hours to maintaining gainful employment. Most people have to factor in their commute times (even in tech, as we see RTO mandates pop up across the industry). Maybe you have to pack a lunch. Stay late a couple days to make that deadline, or attend that inconveniently scheduled cross timezone meeting which always drags long after the end of the usual end of the workday.
Secondly, unless you're wealthy enough to afford hiring extra help, the "free" 72 hours are eaten into by all the repetitive tasks that sustain our lifestyles. Cooking, cleaning, maintaining the landscaping, grocery shopping.
Finally, and most importantly in my eyes, our energy, attention, willpower, focus, life force, is not uniformly distributed throughout the week. We are not necessarily as capable at the end of a work day, or on the weekend after a stressful week at work, as we would be if we didn't have the full time job.
It's a trope. The salaryman is so spent at the end of the day that the only thing he wants to do is drink and watch television. There's not even the opportunity to stop and consider whether or not he's happy with the state of his life. The only realities to acknowledge are the bills that need to be paid, the job that needs to be kept, the ennui inside that needs to be numbed with psychoactive substances.
Employers want us to offer up our best, brightest, most attentive, focused selves and spend it in pursuit of what makes or keeps them profitable. If you're lucky, that aligns with what gives you or sustains your energy. If you're unlucky, tough luck, we got what we employ you for; you should be grateful you get paid to do this for another month. Your happiness and fulfillment are not among our KPIs.
So in practice, we dedicate at least 50 hours per week to get back 50 hours of time we can dedicate to chores or coping with the reality that we are dedicating the majority of our lives to something that we don't really want to do.
We aren't buying 72 hours of fulfillment with 40 hours of work. The time and energy we pour into the 9-5 buys us the chance to do it all again the next week. The money we make keeps the mortgage paid, the lights on, and food in our stomachs so that we are ready to go back to work on Monday. Whether deliberately or not, our capacity to dream, envision, and work towards better lives for ourselves is diminished by the system, and so most of us trudge onwards on this Sisyphean treadmill.
The escape
I have a hypothesis about the FIRE (financially independent; retire early) movement. For those unfamiliar, the goal of FIRE is to save up enough money that you can sustain your lifestyle off of returns from your financial investments and... retire early. The more your income outpaces your monthly expenditures, more escape velocity you build up beyond "buying another week of work by working one week" to eventually ending with "buying a lifetime of financial freedom by working X years". My hypothesis is that FIRE came about when enough people (either consciously or unconsciously) made the calculus in the previous section and realized it was a bad deal to trade a month of work for the chance to work another month. Instead, minimize monthly expenses, and have income overshoot expenses by as much as possible to eventually break free of the treadmill. Buying time back.
The "retire" part of the movement isn't necessarily the traditional retirement. If you have a good idea of what you would've wanted to do instead of your full time job, you can fund that with the nest egg you've built up.
A sinister obstacle towards accomplishing FIRE is lifestyle creep. After all, when you're making more money than you spend every month, it can be easy to see the extra as expendable income as opposed to money going towards being financially independent. This doesn't only mean eating out at fancy restaurants more often; maybe you take out a bigger mortgage than you initially plan for - after all the bank thinks you can afford it so why not get that bigger house? Long term financial obligations (especially those which accumulate owed interest) really hamstring the process of buying back your time.
I took an intermediary path between being dependent on the 9-5 and full financial independence. I used up most of the money I earned from working in tech to buy a house in a rural town in cash for the certainty of reducing payments that would otherwise have gone toward rent or a mortgage; I bought myself enough peace of mind (I hope) to figure out where I want to take my life.
I think there's a long term toll the system takes on our psyches. Not just the full time employment system, but the context in which that exists: the culmination of societal pressures through schooling and social media which solidify the sense that the only sound way to go through life is to work hard in a traditional career. I remember having real aspirations, and hopes of what I could accomplish when I was younger, but that vision has grown dimmer and dimmer as I settled into the reality of working in my 20's. I'm taking the present time to try to heal that capacity to dream.
For most, the only expectation is to continue unfulfilling work for decades, so it is small wonder we see things like quiet quitting and burnout.