Tangentially, the physical labor jobs I had when younger never really tired me out the way that the mental/bureaucratic/political job I have now does.
Physical work actually energized me, I mean this is all confirmed today as well, we know all the benefits exercise brings on well being.
There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking and literally mentally draining in a way where when the day ends, it's as if you suffer from temporary depression. Even getting motivated to do things you want to do is hard, resorting to the laziest activity is often what happens, phone, social media, television. Sometimes I can't even get myself to play a video game and I love video games.
And when the night comes, you'd think sleep is what you need, but that same day of desk job actually gives you insomnia, falling asleep is hard, and while you sleep it's as if all of that mental activity is still happening in your head from the work day.
If physical labor work paid me as well and provided the same benefits, I'd probably switch back to it honestly.
Thats too romantic - physical labour isnt funny when its repetetive and continuous, which most are. Also not using your head is frustrating / degenerative.
What helps me most is keeping a balance, making mid day breaks for long runs outside or a nap does miracles. But I agree, it also needs mental relief to regenerate, but doing sports gives at least minimal breaks.
You're right, I think I need to be more specific, assembly line work in some factory might count as physical labor, and that might not be any better, I can't say as I've never had that job.
I'm thinking more in terms of the article, construction work, farming, and the more pre-industrial kind of physical labor.
For me specifically, it was construction work, bus boy, landscaping, janitorial work and military training. All these just involved constantly moving my body in various ways but also I'd say not in a repetitive at risk of RSI kind of way. So it really just felt like exercise.
While exercise is good, it's worth noting that in those lines of work your body wears its out after decades of doing it, and injury rates are fairly high.
When I lived in Cambodia I saw a lot of Abercrombie-model looking guys in their 50s. They were farmers, I think. I’m currently in Italy living with a farmer in her 60s who’s in great shape. The other day she dropped cold into a front split. I don’t want to say farm work is a panacea — I know it depends on what you’re doing and how you do it — but my own experience plus a book by Esther Gokhale have convinced me that healthy work builds your body and doesn’t tear it down.
I do think there’s a lot of physical labor that isn’t healthy. And there’s also labor that’s kind of on the line, like heavy lifting — if done properly it’s safe, improperly and it can cause damage.
Probably the most common pre-industrial job was farmer, which is super repetitive. Imagine a task like tilling with a hoe, which would be a very repetitive and strong swinging motion.
It’s repetitive in the sense that one does the same thing many times but not in the sense that one does the same thing day in day out as there are many things to be done and they vary throughout the year.
It’s also a lot more complicated, at least now. While some tasks are repetitive, the activities rotate throughout the year. But it’s even more than that. I worked for a farmer before joining the Navy, and talking with him was interesting. Incredibly intelligent guy who I believe could have went on to do anything in world if he wanted to. Why did he settle with farming? It was his family farm, he ran his own business, but the answer that struct me even more was this, he said, “I get to wear a lot of hats. I am an engineer, those tobacco barns, I designed them. I am a mechanic, my old IH tractor breaks, I fix it. I am a business man because I make deals with local restaurants to sell my produce. I am a scientist, I work with the state university on soil studies and have a plot dedicated to running experiments with the university.” He listed some more but I can’t remember them all. The point is, for him, being a farmer let him be everything he wanted to be.
Hoeing is a great full body workout. You go pretty fast if you swing from your hips without moving your arms too much, and your joints don’t feel strained either. I have seen people swing the hoe like an axe but I suspect this is not the most sustainable technique.
I’ve done factory style extremely repetitive physical labor, it’s almost meditative as you can kind of zone out. Manual labor generally means issues with injuries, age, and low pay. But I have had plenty of much worse office jobs.
Personally my all time worst jobs was nothing to do for 3 months at a stretch while sitting on a client site so I couldn’t simply read a book.
I didn’t find that to be the case at all. In the beginning it was ok but once the days and shifts start to blend into a large unmemorable mess of tedium my mental state very quickly made me find other lines of work. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m wasting my time away as some kind of a almost literal cog.
Some manual labor you actually produce somewhat unique things in the end but some you just do the same thing every day and nothing ever changes or matters in any way.
Personally, I cannot sit at a desk and be productive for more then 2-3 hours a day. It's just how it is, I'm a physical person.
If I go for a ride, do some physical labor, then sit down at about 3-6pm, I actually get quite a lot of work done in those 3 hours so long as I've planned my day accordingly.
To the parent, I honestly felt like you did for a long time, but I've realized that I had just worked too much, I was over a threshold and the only way out of it was to take some time off, regain some personal time.
Once I felt a bit better, I started to plan my days (around working 3 hours) and committed to the minimum I could at work, even gave up responsibilities which meant I had less bureaucracy to deal with. I still do have a few days a week with some crazy meetings but I just count those into my 3 hours.
Sorry if this isn't a luxury you can afford and therefore it's bad advice, but I actually didn't think it would be possible either, but I did some how manage to work it so far.
Also, huge cost to your body. Every relative I know who is was the trades, now has issues all the time directly attributable to their work. Their body has aged x2 compared to mine.
There is a whole lot of kids here with romanticized ideas of what physical labor is.
My dad is a contractor and every summer through college I’d go work for him as a low-skilled laborer.
I hated it at the time - all these years later I’m grateful because a) it taught me a lot of useful handyman stuff and b) I have no illusions of how great it is to “work with your hands” or outside everyday.
No one I worked with ever wished their job for their kids and everyone said how lucky I was to get to go to college.
It's kind of weird. I've worked both physical jobs and desk jobs, and could never imagine actually wishing a computer/desk job on either of my kids (thankfully they're not at all interested so far, so I think they've dodged a bullet). Interestingly, I have a good friend that was a bed-side nurse since she was 16 all the way through 36, at which point, she switched to a nurse manager position basically being behind the computer all day. This woman has worked a 12 hour shift most of her life, standing or walking, and lifting during the vast majority of that shift, yet couldn't understand why her back, hips, wrists and knees were killing her after 8 hours of sitting at a computer (not to mention her weight gain).
On the flip side of this many actually do prefer their manual labor jobs. My father in law and brother in law both run their own contracting businesses (one does concrete, the other builds Med Expresses) and their workers and themselves have both said they would never want a desk job and don't know how I stare at a computer all day long.
I recently started my first pure computer-at-desk gig. I've worked in labs that were 70% code 30% hands-on for the past ten years. I really miss it. That last 30% of pure, windowless, blinkless, coding has put a hefty mental burden on me.
It's far from the biggest tragedy in modern society, but I have learned something valuable when looking for future work.
I feel that. I'm quite open and creative but writing poems and bringing 10 different music instruments to a novice+ level won't pay my bills.
So I studied some STEM and worked in a field that interests me. But working in consulting brought me to a burnout in just under 2 years. I quit and now have a chill desk job, but even now - I often can't motivate myself and I see no point in sitting 8 hours at a desk, when I can work in 2 bursts of 30mins a day and get all the things done that a urgent.
So what then? I google stuff, look at my phone and chat with the one nice guy at work. Apart from social communication, all that time feels so WASTED.
And then at home you crave to go online and sit at your desk again, but this time it's a gaming desk. So because it's your hobby its cool - ?. No, honestly it drains your energy as well because it's no contrast to your work setting.
Fuck I need a cabin in the woods with a garden and a 15 hour remote job, I guess.
While in college, my summer job each year was working for the city in manual labor. "Street specialist" was the job position. I experienced three summers of hot asphalt shoveling, vegetation removal, catch basin cleaning, and traffic flagging.
I had a lot of fun working there, and so did most of the other guys who were my age. The job paid well and gave us more freedom than we were used to. But I noticed all of the guys who were aged 40+ had bad backs and were addicted to chewing tobacco. There's only so many OSHA-approved ways of paving a quarter mile stretch of road in one afternoon, and that can take a physical toll on someone's body over decades.
Did you have older coworkers in your physical labor job? I did. Those people were not happy or healthy.
I think you are looking back through tinted glasses. I also liked my physical labor job when I was young, but I also know it would be terrible when I was 40 or 50.
Oh ya I did, and I don't mean that I'd trade my job back for that now, you're treated like shit, you're not paid well, you get no benefits, safety protocols are always subpar. Obviously that's why I'm doing what I do now and didn't pursue those jobs as careers.
What I remember though is the nature of the work didn't leave me exhausted, depressed and with insomnia when the day was over.
So I'm imagining if those jobs paid just as well, had similarly good benefits, treated you with respect, I would definitely consider trying it out again, maybe I'm just forgetting how much crap your body can take when you're younger I admit, but I'd be curious to compare.
Yea don’t underestimate the impact of youthfulness here. I’d be willing to bet that the same work you do now wouldn’t have the same impact it does today.
Though I will say, working in UPS facility during college definitely left me exhausted most days. I was an athlete in good shape, but it was still a very taxing job. Kept me in good shape though, which certainly helped stave off any of the psychological impact of a sedentary office job due to physiological changes in my body.
Not entirely true. Visit some east asian countries and you'll see the physical work is literally what keeps the elderly so physically fit and in good shape for very long.
I know you don’t mean China, life expectancies in the villages where they have that kind of hard life is way lower than the cities. That hunched over Ayi still farming when she looks like she is 80 seems amazing, but then you’ll find out she is only 55.
Actually, I don’t think this is true for any of the East Asian countries I’ve visited, it seems to be a romanticized myth of the west.
Can you be more specific? After visiting China and Vietnam and seeing the very difficult and tiring conditions people have to endure as a way of life, I don't think the elderly there can say they're in good shape or physically fit.
Most likely you were only exposed to older people who were still physically fit enough to continue being able to provide for themselves, and never saw the vast majority of people in their 50s and 60s who are permanently physically impaired.
A lot of that is the work philosophy. Ideally you'd work at exactly the speed that seems appropriate, on an appropriate schedule.
But so many of the jobs require you to work faster than you should and longer than you should even if you're tired. I even had a boss tell me once that my work was too good therefore I was working too slow. They really want you to just thrash it out like a maniac. Which is exhausting and dangerous. Really takes the fun out.
I've also had sane bosses who knew what's sane. And now I'm my own boss and I keep a very sane schedule.
Here I sit, at my local farmers market working a stall. Looking around at the farmers and how hard they work, I don’t know many young people that could keep up. Above a certain age and physical condition, maybe. But I know both men and women pushing late 50s that would put a lot of young people to shame.
Probably survivor bias here, you see a bunch of older fit people doing stuff you have a hard time with and you think damn, not realizing how many people have been pushed out of the career over the years due to physical constraints.
Aside from that is the matter of physical characteristics. I am over 6 feet, naturally scrawny but bulky due to lots of strength training. There are many jobs in which I would not last because my body is not made for it.
One of the worst jobs I ever had was making concrete walls that would be shipped around the west to make big buildings. We were working at a windy area, which would sometimes blow the walls around when moving etc. People died every now and then when accidents happened and they would get crushed by a wall. It was cold and physically grueling, much of the workforce were illegal immigrants who would call in sick almost once per week. At one point a foreman told me how much he appreciated how much I showed up for work - I was calling in sick once per month because I couldn't take it.
There was guy there who had been doing the work for 20+ years, he was in astounding shape. He was probably 5 feet tall, extremely wiry, and could walk along a thin concrete wall hanging 20 feet up in the air by two chains without hesitation and if need be walk onto another wall, pick up a tool, turn around and walk onto the hanging one to do something. We would watch him in awe of his abilities. But of course he had done 20+ years of training for this, and had the body type that made him a perfect fit for the job. The other guys who had been there for 20 years worked as hard as him, but they were less well suited to the job than he was.
People underestimate how much experience and conditioning matter for all jobs. When I started working on an LTL dock, I was shocked by how easy it was for guys more than twice my age to do certain things compared to me even though I was younger, stronger, faster, etc...
This is the romantic side of physical labor. The downsides are evident to anyone who knows someone who has been in the trades for 25 years. They walk kind of funny, their knees and back are wrecked, and they've spent decades breathing in materials that have devastating effects given prolonged exposure.
It's really tough on your body to do physical labor day-in, day-out over the course of a lifetime.
I worked as a carpenter for several years and also as a health care worker and those jobs gave me a satisfaction that my desk job can’t give me. But I saw coworkers, that worked their whole life, completely destroyed by these jobs. They seem all way older then they are. At my desk job most people are health conscious and trying to avoid the bad health effects of office jobs. Most people in the other jobs where just working and and not caring about themselves. Mostly because they where not aware or didn’t care about long time negativ heath effects.
Now I work freelance IT jobs and sometimes I work as a carpenter just for the change. But honestly if you have the possibility go for the desk job and do sports.
All I remember of physical labor is disappointment as rain got through my rain gear, biting wind on a cold day, unable to feel my hands, fatigue, repetitive stress aches, beating sun. Hoping for mild weather everyday. Hoping for small orders so I can fit my work in easier.
It was hard. I got paid terribly. It motivated the hell out of me to get out.
I don't know if I totally agree. At my (software) desk job, if I'm working on designing or investigating something it can be very exciting and engrossing. But there are definitely days where it feels like I'm just minding deadlines and priorities and schedules. Those can be very tiring.
Agreed. Another great thing about physical labor (to me at least) is that you can avoid most of the forced social interactions, politicking, and drama that happens in offices.
Go in to work, put in my headphones, do repetitive task, go home. It's simple, keeps me in shape, and doesn't make me loathe myself or my hobbies. If I were skilled and smart enough to get jobs that were more interesting/less evil than setting up corporate infrastructure, administering Windows, or churning out spyware, maybe I would have a different perspective, but I'm not.
The best I had was in a chemical plant. The work was highly intellectual but it also required implementation which you couldn’t do in an office chair.
Probably walked 2 miles a day and stood for about 4-5 hours in periods varying from 30 min to 3 hours. Nothing overtly physical. I have done hard manual labor jobs and they kicked my ass when I was in my 20’s. Couldn’t do it now. Not without some damage.
Couldn’t that just be because you were young and now you’re less so? A long career of physical labor definitely takes a toll on the body. Young people can just take a lot before it catches up.
That's possible and hard for me to know unless I were to try one of those jobs again at my age.
It's true that physical labor can cause injury that can hunt you later in life. But also:
> Sedentary lifestyles increase all causes of mortality, double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and anxiety.
So I'm not sure desk jobs are any better. They just create less obvious problems, where a shoulder pain from an old shoulder injury is easy to trace back to the cause, desk job injury caused from sedentary life style are hard to trace back but could be worse.
Also, I'm talking about a bit of a different problem, which is not how it leaves you later in life, but how it makes you feel when the day is over. Feeling physically tired can almost be nice, you take a bath and it feels so good. And when you go to sleep you have this nice deep restorative sleep from the physical exhaustion. Your brain isn't tied up with work. And all that.
> Tangentially, the physical labor jobs I had when younger never really tired me out the way that the mental/bureaucratic/political job I have now does.
Every single physical labor job person I speak to complains about back issues, being tired, or work significant overtime. They're all stuck and can't shift careers cause they're too far in.
>There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking and literally mentally draining
It sounds like you were either in the field for money or are just in a shitty company.
I guess so. For myself though I had to do almost a decade of soul searching before committing to programming. Didn't get my BS until I was 27. Having worked numerous garbage tier jobs, any of the crap that gets sent my way is nothing in comparison to the low waged crap in those other positions.
Completely agree. My most enjoyable job was working shipping at a factory (think playing tetris while loading/unloading trailers all day). Farming however, is my most enjoyable 'value-generating' activity as opposed to job. I highly recommend it: getting more than adequate daily exercise while providing most of your family's food needs.
I was a carpenter, then a coder, now a carpenter again. I strongly prefer carpenter (independent contractor)(and by carpenter I mean generalist). But I still have coding projects.
I have a theory that we can eliminate 90% of the required labor in our economy with the following strategy:
End “consumerism” behavior where every problem is perceived to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and rarely solves the real problem.
Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.
Design machines which can produce those vital things in a fully automated or highly automated way. The point of this part is to reduce the marginal cost of one more item as close to zero as possible. This makes sharing easier as it becomes cheaper to share with one more person.
Make those machines completely open source, designed for repair and long life.
Create a system where people can acquire equal ownership shares in the machines they rely on. For any given machine those users work together to keep the machine operational and producing.
Land must be held in common (the legal device used today would be a public land trust) and housing, farmland, and manufacturing space is allotted to people based on need. (Look at the public housing system in Vienna Austria as an example.)
Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible.
Then everyone shares the output of their machines with their other shareholders. Each person owns shares in many machines.
Under this system, there is no ownership class which can suck up all the surplus value. Instead, every person receives the benefit of automation.
In such a world I believe the average persons necessary working hours would be maybe 5 hours a week. We could spend our lives with friends and family, or reading and writing, painting or programming. Most of the necessary work would be done by volunteers who enjoy what they are doing. Work that people do not enjoy could be shared in rotation.
It’s all a voluntary and market based system but captures the main thrust of Marx’s critique of capitalism - the problem with an ownership class sucking up all the surplus value in society.
We could do this. End consumerism, make everything open source, share land, know when you have enough and work to serve others in your community.
>Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.
I assume someone must be in charge of determining what products are essential and what products are frivolous consumerism. I assume you have someone in mind for the job. Yourself perhaps?
I'm a big girl. I can make my own decisions on what is essential and what is frivolous in my own life.
No. You’ve completely misunderstood. This is a free market. People decide for themselves what is essential. When a lot of people in a region buy certain machines which they considered essential, that region will have an abundance of those goods. It happens organically. I am 100% opposed to authoritarian control and there is always someone who makes this quip without bothering to actually consider what I have written.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive of the public relations industry. Sigmund Freud’s newphew Edward Bernaise is regarded as the creator of public relations, and he wrote multiple books and talked widely about his theories for manipulating the public. These theories have been put to the test multiple times and they proved successful enough that the industry is thriving 100 years later.
a tangent: I remember reading that historically, Chinese doctors were paid by the healthy people in order to keep the community healthy, and a sick person would not pay until they recovered. I would compare it to insurance, but that's not really the same, it would be of doctors were the insurance providers, but the current model just makes a third party really rich and incentivises the doctors to wish general cough and cold on the community (I'm not saying that doctors are evil, just that the current system doesn't make sense to me)
I'd love to hear an opposing view, and why you think that way. cheers, have a great day yall
Any that definitely supported some form of individual rights? As a total weirdo it frightens me to think that I might have been born into a society where my differences may have caused me great suffering at the hands of tradition.
I’m not sure I follow? In today’s society a lot of people suffer because they are different. Disabled people for example, who would have been cared for in indigenous cultures. Yes the Iroquois supported individual rights. They just had a culture where whatever you did, you kept the needs of others in mind and did what you could to help. You were still an individual.
While true, without advancements in modern healthcare, many of the disabilities people go through life with today would result in a much earlier death. Cystic fibrosis for example is to this day incredulously expensive to treat but with a much greater life expectancy than during the heyday of the Iroquois.
I believe we can to some extent have both: a culture that supports all people and also produces high end medical equipment. The point of mentioning other cultures is to point out that human nature allows it.
I'm willing to believe that we could continue to produce the equipment we do today. But what's the motivation to advance?
Take programming: we could all easily cut down our work hours by just maintaining current systems, which do a huge amount already. There are artificial forces that make us continue to trade one-time innovations for the same living standards as yesterday. Why not automate food production etc, and share the minimal maintenance required?
I think the reason societies that stand still in this way haven't stuck around is ultimately that nations compete with each other, and will come and take everything once they advance further.
There are a lot of motivations to advance. Why do we research cancer cures? We use profit motives to encourage the formation of specific organizations but the reason we really care about curing cancer is that we lose loved ones that mean the world to us.
Similarly, the developers of Blender are able to get paid for their work, but it seems that they choose this particular task because it interests them. If they had all of their material needs met, they might take a break and work fewer hours but I’d bet they might still work on blender for fun.
That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just obsessed with designing new robots because it’s fun. In the last three months I’ve created a four axis robot arm from scratch (each gearbox is custom designed and integrated with the 3D printed frame)[1]. Nobody is paying me. The only reason I do paid work is that I need money for survival. But I would still be working on robots if all my material needs were met by machines. And I’d also teach classes on how they work and how to design them, and I’d be in the shop making new designs because that’s already what I spend all my time on.
And we can automate food production! See my profile for the open source farming robot I am designing. And the robot arm I am working on as a personal project is something I hope I can use in a free food production system. You can make a super healthy vegetable and lentil curry for $2 per dish in raw cost. The machine that makes it can be the size of a van and it doesn’t need human workers. If a community owned such a machine they could all eat a really healthy diet for a few dollars a day.
I think it depends on the society. With automation to reduce absolute labor needs and a people that prefer living in community with the basics to slaving away at a retail job, I think it can be done. People like to work and they like to help one another. We've created a system that isolates people and many of us are sick of it. We would way rather have a hot meal and the company of friends (who are not themselves stuck at some job) than slave away for hours at some retail store that jerks you around for a pittance.
I think if you could build the systems and attract some early adopters, you could prove how much better it is. Once people see it, they would fight to keep it running. They would volunteer their time to keep it going. Or they would agree to a more defined schedule and voluntarily participate in this work agreement to keep it going. The alternative is that they're forced to work for survival so I still think it could be a better deal.
And how did those indigenous cultures fair when they came in contact with Western systems of resource collection and distribution?
How can a system be both agrarian and strong enough to survive contact with non-agrarian systems? How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?
Well, we just watched the greatest military in the world™ scuttle out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, so we know that a primarily agrarian society CAN resist a militaristic society as long as its prepared.
Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the biological warfare of the Europeans first. Now America turns its taste for biological warfare on itself. But, anyway, I digress.
I think you're ignoring the context of my comment.
The USA entered alright, but the common meaning of invade is
> (of an armed force) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it.
and subjugate in turn:
> bring under domination or control, especially by conquest.
American did not intend to annihilate Afghans, nor the Vietnamese.
> I don't see the point of this line of questions
That the resistance you describe depends on the behaviour of the aggressor. Could the Japanese resist the atomic bomb? Could German Jews peacefully/non-violently resist the Nazi regime?
False. We learned that an agrarian society can resist democracy and nation building. They were incapable of withstanding military destruction. They didn't even last 90 days.
In fact they've already destroyed the military infrastructure we left them. "Soldiers" are literally parting out $20 million helicopters for $10,000 in scrap metal.
They didn't really resist, because they knew what the long game was. The people who planned the war didn't.
We should have bombed them for 90 days and declared victory and went home -- it would have been symbolic and pointless, but a lot cheaper in treasure and blood.
> How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?
I am talking about a voluntary system that works in some ways like wikipedia. I want to get together with others, under a libertarian system of free exchange, and build systems that are designed to meet core human needs as cheaply as possible. Then people can band together and buy those machines if they want, and they can share the output or whatever.
If 10 people want to go do something else, that doesn't affect me any more than Apple affects Wikipedia.
You cannot have "voluntary communism". The point of communism is to ban certain things -- e.g. make it illegal for private people to own capital. The entire definition requires that it be involuntary.
In capitalism, there are worker-owned companies living side by side with privately and publicly held firms. People can go off and create their own communist utopia and share their wealth. You cannot go off and create a capitalist utopian community in a communist system.
Because capitalism doesn't ban ownership structures (except for anti-trust against monopolies). It doesn't care about the outcome, it cares about the free choice. Economic liberalism -- for all its faults -- really is based on the principles of free association, enforcement of contracts, and voluntary trade. You can argue that the outcomes don't capture externalities, but you can't argue that they are involuntary.
Communism, OTOH, cares only about outcomes -- is this distribution of resources fair -- and does not care about free choice at all. This is because you have to forcefully take stuff from one person to give to another, and forcefully ban someone from running their own for-profit business. Of course communism couldn't do that perfectly -- there was always a black market of people who bought and sold for a profit. But they risked prison time for that, and sometimes were sent to Siberian labor camps.
Under capitalism you can create a contract in which people voluntarily pool resources and then distribute them according to some rule, say everyone gets a fixed payout irrespective of their position in the company. Therefore the economic system in which a group of people can choose to collectively own property is called "capitalism".
> what happens when some people don't want to participate in your voluntary communism and insist on inventing new things and marketing them?
What happens when someone decides they do not want to contribute to wikipedia?
> You'll note that membership in intentional communities is quite low.
Which is why I am designing an open source farming robot. Maybe if the work is fixing robots it will be more appealing than laboring in the fields every day. Sure is for me.
Open source tractors and other agricultural equipment have been around for quite a while now, but don't really have much uptake. People still prefer to buy John Deere. Why do you think that might be?
Well I’m not designing a tractor. For large equipment it is probably difficult to compete on the manufacturing side. Luckily our vehicle is much smaller than a tractor.
The positive "alternative" presented at the end seems like a friendly veneer over the same dystopia.
Having an AI referee permanently embedded in my spine ready to cut motor functions at the first detected bad behavior sounds almost as hellish as the first scenario in that story.
...and/or idealized socialism. i agree that consumerism is an issue, but the solution isn't 'end consumerism', as that's just completely unrealistic. it'd be more realistic to think of ways to redirect our esteem-giving activities toward people who produce real and essential goods, and the rest would balance out much better as a result. that's diametrically opposed to our corrent system of giving esteem to the wealthy, which is why this approach is also very difficult, but not impossible.
The way "esteem" is distributed today is if you produce something I want I "esteem" you by buying it. If you don't produce anything I want I "disrespect" you by doing absolutely nothing to you. I don't give you anything, I don't take anything away from you. I simply smile, nod, and move on with my life.
Seems like you want to take freedom of association away from the rest of humanity and put it into your own hands. It's hard for me to imagine a mentality that is more self-centered and more selfish than that.
that's an odd and quite uncharitable interpretation. there's not even a remote connection to (restricting) freedom of association, much less with my own hands (how would that even work?).
the underlying point is that money isn't the be-all-and-end-all of what we value and what we exchange in our socioeconomic lives. money collapses a multidimensional social calculus into a single-dimensional metric, with all the undesirable consequences of that kind of collapse. hoarding wealth is selfish, but it's worse when it also hoards power and esteem along with it.
not many wealthy people deserve respect (or power) along with their riches. people who make stuff with their hands and brains, not passively through wealth (e.g., rents), deserve esteem. that's the point.
Would you change your opinion if you were presented with hard data proving that 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth by delivering goods and services to people who voluntarily paid for it, and only 20% of the wealthy inherited it and that inherited wealth does not last more than 3 generations?
More likely they hired workers who created that wealth. And while in today's system we say that the person at the top "earned" that wealth, we could just as easily arrange firms differently so they are cooperatively owned. And in doing so they would not produce super wealthy people but instead a society with broader wealth distribution.
>More likely they hired workers who created that wealth.
More likely they hired workers and everyone created wealth together. A worker can't work until someone builds the assembly line, buys the materials, and sells the final product.
If it's so easy to do the whole process that anyone can do it, what's stopping you? Marxists claimed the capital class denied the funds to the working class to start their own companies. Well since the world went off the gold standard there is no lack of funding. It's the opposite now. Inflation is an attack on wealth. Wealthy people are ravenous to get their wealth out of currency and into "things" like property and businesses. Venture capitalists will fund the most ridiculous ideas in the desperate hope that one of them will "hit".
The binary metric you're referring to is simply an answer to the question "are you interested in an exchange?". This question is fundamentally binary. "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association - which of these would you get rid of to abolish it?
> "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association
No, you have misunderstood. I am 100% for freedom of association and freedom of contract. "Consumerism" is not just exchange, it is something more specific. It is the idea that buying more is directly tied to happiness and well being. Look.
"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. "
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp
just zoom out and really look at the scope of the issue: 7+ billion people in the world want stuff. there's a huge matching problem between the want and the stuff, and a huge geographic/wealth/information asymmetry as well. there's going to be a lot of friction and waste in that huge, inefficient matching process (e.g., 30-40% of US food goes into the trash, 30-40% of stuff is returned to retailers). to achieve your goal, you'd have to be able to control (aka coerce) a majority of those people to want only an arbitrarily narrow set of "acceptable" things. that's just not tenable, even in a small, remote country.
You and I view this very differently. First of all, getting people goods that they need is not consumerism. Consumerism is the idea that buying a new car or a Pepsi will make you feel better. Or that doing so will make you “cool”. So for example most car manufacturers come out with a new model every year and then push the idea that buying a new model is an indicator of success. But I claim we would be better off if cars were more similar year to year so that replacement parts were more common year to year. This would make repair easier and lower waste. The problem is not getting people cars (well, cars in particular are a contentious example…). The problem isn’t getting people goods they need. Is that the companies who make those goods use psychological tricks to convince us we need to upgrade even when our thing is working. And they design their products with the upgrade in mind and it all leads to more waste.
To be honest it’s difficult for me to describe what I mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods they need is not in and of itself consumerism. Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It creates problems to feed a bloated production machine that consumes more and more because it benefits those in charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool and we all believe we must work day in and day out to compete in an endless game of consumption.
That is very different than, say, manufacturing electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but we can focus at first on the extents.
They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades. I see the process you describe, despite it's perceived but necessary inefficiency, as resulting in a system that delivers the most progress and the most resiliency. There's a reason that self-driving cars are being invented in one place and not another. The driving force behind that reason is much more important to preserve than any incidental waste or excess along the way.
But in another way, this is exactly how open source works. They do not sell you a new release and push ads showing how stylish you will be if you dump version 13 and upgrade to version 14. They just push a point release as needed. Some software is updated daily and some is updated once every five years. There is no marketing team trying to drum up artificial demand for some python package.
> They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades.
The soviet system was an authoritarian one and I am proposing a free market solution. I am basically just saying people can save money if they band together and buy machines which provide for their basic needs. But also it would all be open source, and like software it would be updated as needed.
Actually the example with cars was just an attempt to explain consumerism. I might as well just paste this definition in to this comment like I just did elsewhere.
"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions."
i understand your position. i had that sort of idealism once upon a moon. but i now realize that the causation is backwards. people want, full stop[0]. that is natural and universal, and trying to take that away from people is tantamount to stripping humanity of its animus.
given this universal truth, the question isn't 'how do we limit our wants, and our desire to induce others' wants to fuel our own wants?', but rather 'how do we repurpose this innate desire for the greatest collective good?' capitalism tries to provide one answer: redirect greed into productive drive by rewarding economic novelty and efficiency. however, even that idealism has been subverted by the political economy and the complex interactions between government and business, to the detriment of social harmony.
[0]: note that what we all really want is to be at the top of the monkey pile, and everything you're talking about are various proxies for how to tell where we are in the pile. we're never going to overcome that with solutions like 'end consumerism'. you're literally working against human nature with that line of thinking.
For a long time I wanted to be at the top of the monkey pile.
A LOT of that came from received culture growing up in California as a boy in the 1990's. I no longer want to be at the top of a pile of monkeys. I want my daily labor to support others in my community (broadly) rather than working to enrich a few people who will own everything and control our economy.
I think if you grow up in a society that tells everyone "greed is good" then you're going to think being greedy is human nature, but actually anthropologists know that societies have again and again existed based on mutual support of one another. I am simply suggesting we drop this "greed is good" mantra and focus on helping one another. And I think it can be more economically efficient when you value each person's life more or less equally.
no offense to you personally, but that's a naive position. "greed is good" is a movie platitude, not the basis of our complex socioeconomic system, so it's practically useless to argue against it. more crucially, your solution says nothing about the universality of human desire, which is why it's simply a non-starter.
if you really want to improve social equity, distributing esteem more widely[0] will be more fruitful as a guiding light than trying to devise a more perfect, automation-based socialist/communist economic model. extreme automation will inevitably increase inequality as capital will find ways to corner ownership of the machines and hoard the productivity gains, no matter your good intent.
If we could mandate that a product can only be sold if the entire lifecycle is sustainable then technically it could continue. This includes the company taking responsibility for disposal and recycling of anything they produce.
The current model of transferring materials from source, through consumers and then direct to landfill where they sit forever can only end one way.
probably not. it's hard to consume lots of stuff en masse by most of the population. in the developed world, we've already largely moved to service economies and have less than replacement population growth, and so in that sense we've "maxed out" on consuming stuff. that's not to say that we're doing a great job at being efficient and frugal in what we consume, but that running out of resources isn't that big of a problem (for the foreseeable future).
I mean yes I do call it libertarian communism, tho I often leave that part out since people will be totally onboard until you mention the name. But also it’s a specific scheme that has the goal of lowering the marginal cost of living. And it’s totally voluntary which is not true for all schemes for communism.
Sure, while you are in charge. But when a more ambitious leader bashes your head in and takes over, maybe not so. How much of Lenin remained when Stalin took over?
It's communism that reduces one of the notable downsides of communism, the social loafing aspect, due to reliance on machines instead of your fellow man for productive effort(labor equivalent).
Are the machines centralised in mass-manufacture-scales and products distributed (as they are now); or de-centralised but also less efficient (wrt manufacture and supply chain) as a result. What would the raw materials be, and how are they powered (given the carbon-crisis).
I'd also ask what specifically are the essentials. Food? Shelter? ok. What about healthcare?
I love that you are asking these questions. Indeed I think any writing meant to describe an entire economy in a few paragraphs will necessarily be a bit hand wavey.
I did try to answer one of your questions: the machines are serviced by the members of the collective. In any plan for a society education must be considered. But much the same way that any halfway technical person can learn how to fix a 3D printer, these machines should be designed with repair in mind and along with open source designs there would be freely accessible repair guides.
Production should be somewhat decentralized so there should be many places manufacturing motors etc. but when it comes to putting the machines together I’d expect that different collectives would focus on certain machines and they would trade with people near them. Remember that you can always fall back on “people use money to exchange goods and services” I’m just imagining a model where that isn’t really the dominant way people manage their day to day survival.
I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.
Getting the raw materials is one of the more serious questions. Generally falling back on non-automated things, firms should be cooperatively run. Also raw material consumption would arguably go down for westerners who move to this model, as there would be minimal waste and the machines would all be designed for repair.
Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.
I am an engineer and I love to fix machines. I would rather spend my days fixing machines than working a corporate job to enrich a few executives. People who want to be Doctors or teachers often feel similarly. They need their material needs covered so they can do what they value most - helping others. I basically just think we can really streamline the whole production side of the economy and design things so everyone benefits and actually stops needing to work 40+ hours a week forever.
How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it? And if you don't, aren't you back to square one again?
> How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it?
You don't.
> aren't you back to square one again?
No, why would that be? We live in a world with a million top down owned capitalist corporations. If by some mass movement we get a few thousand collectives to band together, there will always be churn. Groups that dissolve, or change their aims, or seek profit over the cohesiveness of the group. You would do the same thing with them as would have been done at the beginning. Do you best not to trade with them. If you actually need what they have on offer, clone it. But the whole point of this system is to create some semblance of independence. Either people value that enough to stick with it, or they don't. IMO it's worth trying even if it might fail.
But isn't it the profit-seeking capitalists who actually bring innovations to market, to the benefit of everyone? Why would you deprive yourself of the benefit of trading with these groups? "Independence" isn't really a thing in a world with a global supply chain. It's simply not realistic to produce everything that we consume locally for anything approaching a reasonable cost. Economies of scale are extremely powerful.
I think your vision makes sense. It might not be optimal currently but as A.I., automation, and other technologies advance (Fusion fingers-crossed) I can see it becoming plausible and even desirable over the "pure-ish" capitalist economy we currently have.
Thank you. I should say that critically, this scheme is not dependent on advancement in technology. It does take advantage of the fact that computers can perform labor for free, but there are examples of the elimination of hunger and equitable distribution of food without using any advanced technology. Specifically the Sikhs in India [1] serve over 1 million free meals a day in facilities all over India, and in Vienna Austria housing is built by the city and distributed equitably [2].
Advanced technology changes what is possible, but we can do this without advanced technology. 3D printed homes for example don’t really solve the problem as framing a home isn’t expensive: it’s the land and finishing the home that cost the most.
Point accepted.
Yeah technology isn't necessary, but if tech can do the same amount for the same cost removing much of the labor requirement then that's a tremendous win. Additionally the lower the cost the easier it is to append a welfare or socialist cost on the the tax payer's bill. Providing decent food, housing, and some minimal healthcare at 5% of GDP vs 40% of a nations GDP makes a world of difference.
At thresholds of 5% combined with high automation mean such social programs won't be as vehemently contested and their absence might even be viewed as a unnecessary cruelty.
Some mutant hybrid of what the Sihks do in India, and these automations might be interesting:
A hybrid mutant that maximizes yield, minimizes cost and labor, if such a permutation is realistic and technology-wise permitting.
Socialism partially generates such an antagonistic response (at least in the USA) because how much of a burden it is on others, Minimize that burden might change the fundamental collective consciousness to how people view what the government should provide.
Yes!! That is a big motivation. If supporting others is very cheap people are more likely to support it.
And I love that you're on to the food machines. I have obsessed over the idea of automated production based on the Sikh systems. I hope I can build it some day. Or even if I don't, that someone does.
> I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.
So, maybe your vision of focussing on the essentials - food, shelter etc rules out microchips which definitely benefit from specialised employees, and centralised operations; but that will rules out a lot of future advances wherein microchips are embedded in everything, or at least until a suitable de-centralised equivalent is found.
In the meanwhile, I'd worry of the problem of being over-taken; i.e other free nations that do subscribe to capitalism and the centrally managed resource model outcompete and invade you - which is arguably the fate of many of the American tribes that lacked the weapons to fight colonialism. Not having microchips can cripple any modern army/defence-force, least of all an ad-hoc decentralised one.
Also, things like injection moulding might be out to - modern products manage cheap mass-productions by producing expensive master tools, and using them to churn out millions of items - unless tribes specialise on produce (in which case we are back to trading goods and services) then no more of these items either.
> the machines are serviced by the members of the collective
This limits how complex these machines can be, and or numerous - which in turn limits how prevalent. Also, back to the question; are all the machines going to be bare mechanical contraptions of wood and steel, or can they contain silicon - which unless you have an answer for fabrication/manufacture, cannot be repaired forever, and will need to be replaced. Modern open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy around it - 3D printers still contain Atmel mcus and intel cpus, not to mention the motors, rotors and precision belt/shaft/bearings.
> Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.
Where do the doctors come from? Are we hoping as many people are willing to spend a large amount of time training, or being trained, as surgeons; as there are people who need surgery? Will we still punish negligent doctors, at risk of no-one wanting to bear the burden of liability if we did?
What about law? Would anyone want to be a lawyer if it wasn't well paid? Would many current lawyers do law if it wasn't well paid?
> I am an engineer and I love to fix machines
I feel this is a strong bias colouring your opinion - many engineers love their jobs, and the things they fix/design/repair/manipulate. You seem to be arguing for a society of engineering, based on the manufacture of things (machines and their products) - but society needs more than things, and people are often motivated less by things too; by wealth and status, for example; I'm not sure everyone can find the same joy in engineering as those who select for it.
> Doctors or teachers often feel similarly
Not so sure that's true. Many engineers care more about the things than the help they provide people, and I'm sure doctors are the same too. If feels too much that everyone needs to subscribe to the same philosophy for this to work, and even then there will be some roles that are neglected in favour of more "engineery" ones..
While I do not advocate for a state-based model, I want to point out that the soviets beat the USA to orbit on a centrally planned economy. I see no reason to assume we cannot have machine tools and other high end equipment. Especially because:
> open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy
A parasite harms the host. Open source is symbiotic with the capitalist economy. I do fully expect that these machines will be built by products of the capitalist system at first. The point is that over time these people would rely less and less on the capitalist system for directly meeting their needs. Over time if this works it would behoove them to replace the entire economy they rely on with one they control. But there are first order needs like food and clothing and then there are second order needs like parts for the machine that brings them food. They can gain a lot of freedom by just covering their first order needs with machines they own.
As far as engineering, yes my examples all center around engineering because I am an engineer speaking mostly to other engineers here. But there are other people: therapists, grief counselors, teachers, doctors, librarians, carpenters, etc who would love to provide those services to friends for free if their survival was ensured.
I am imagining communities inside of the USA which simply trade with one another instead of buying from capitalist corporations. So only people who want this lifestyle would actually choose to live there. People who are super selfish and don't want to help anyone can simply keep living in the capitalist world, and see what it's like when no one cares for anyone else.
I’m not sure why you got downvoted. This is completely correct. Providing for everyone by trapping human beings in a giant production machine is inhumane. But machines are (generally) happy to do this for us.
>End “consumerism” behavior where every problem is perceived to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and rarely solves the real problem.
>Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.
>Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible.
There are two versions of this: communism and Religious asceticism (particularly Christian, given the concern for all individuals.)
Yes. One could call this communism and I often do. But note that this is a voluntary system, so it is libertarian communism. It is not based on authoritarian rule as many people who mention communism will associate it with.
> I have a theory that we can eliminate 90% of the required labor in our economy with the following strategy:
Until we had extremely advanced robotics, endless land, and infinite energy/resources, this will never become reality, even then, I have an endless amount of vanity uses of human labor/resources and I could trivially think up. By way of example, if it were the case in which money no issue for me personally, I could choose to then have constant military parades wherever I go, and I shall choose to go anywhere on my 10000 acre plot of gold and diamond covered land.
> End “consumerism” behavior where every problem is perceived to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and rarely solves the real problem.
This is a quick way to a very poor quality of life. I've been poor, desperately needing basic household items and yet unable to obtain them, it's much, much better from a quality of life perspective to have problems solved with trivial tools that I buy off the shelf. That said, anyone is free to choose this life, buy less things, and retire slightly earlier than our peers. The reality is that cost of most consumer spending purchases is not what at the root cause of preventing people from retiring early, 'stuff' is damn cheap today.
> Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.
Hmm, I've heard this line of thinking before, it leads to living in abhorrent conditions. I mean, nobody really 'needs' a 2000 sqft living space, why not just put people in a 20 sqft area instead? Nobody really 'needs' carpet or nice decor, lets build with nothing but cheap concrete. Yeah, let's push for living like prisoners! Thanks, but no thanks, I'm fine with working a little extra to avoid the extremes of this line of reasoning.
> Design machines which can produce those vital things in a fully automated or highly automated way. The point of this part is to reduce the marginal cost of one more item as close to zero as possible. This makes sharing easier as it becomes cheaper to share with one more person.
Like we've been doing? How do you think everything is so cheap to begin with?
> Make those machines completely open source, designed for repair and long life.
You're free to spend your time making this and even doing it, but it's wasted effort at this point, we already have extremely efficient 'open source', long-life and 'easy' to repair machines. Visit the US patent site and look at the plethora of old machines that you could go build today if you so pleased.
> Create a system where people can acquire equal ownership shares in the machines they rely on. For any given machine those users work together to keep the machine operational and producing.
Or I could just buy shares of a manufacturing company, and we can use that money along with the revenue generated by the machines use to create goods, to keep the machine operational. What you're describing already exists.
> Land must be held in common (the legal device used today would be a public land trust) and housing, farmland, and manufacturing space is allotted to people based on need.
So who, exactly, is getting to decide how to use this land? Because I need about 100 acres to be happy and live on. In your system, would I be allowed to own that? Or would I still be stuck needing to live in a cell? What about 1000 acres? What about 10000 acres? Why should some group of people or laws prevent me from doing so? Groups of people already get together and prevent me from doing what I want with my land, why would I want even more people in power over me?
> Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible.
Or we could just let individuals make up their own choices on how they want to live and consume life. Those that want to become rich will, those who want to dick around all day drawing pretty pictures or writing poetry will do that. Much like we already have. People create a social hierarchy, even if we got rid of money, there are still going to be people that attempt to be at the 'top' socially. How do you deal with that in your system?
> Then everyone shares the output of their machines with their other shareholders. Each person owns shares in many machines.
You're just playing with words and wealth redistribution. Companies are income producing machines, and the business units are the companies individual machines of production. Each unit shares their output by feeding it into the shareholders already. Each person who decided to buy a share, gets that combined output.
> Under this system, there is no ownership class which can suck up all the surplus value. Instead, every person receives the benefit of automation.
And here it is, saw this one coming. This system fails each time it's implemented, from one reason or another. How does your system handle doctors? What about lawyers? There are no machines there, are they expected to not be allowed to benefit? This is a question that more generally extends to service style roles where there are no machines present, those people don't 'benefit' in the way you're describing from this system. In western reality of course, they benefit by being able to purchase items that were historically extremely expensive to produce, for essentially nothing. The multi-thousand dollar chair, made from the hands of a skilled wood worker becomes a $100 and affordable for all. Also under your system, I don't have a way to retire, I have no hope but to work. If I can't own anything, and thus I can't own to be ahead, I am stuck, forever a slave to these machines.
> In such a world I believe the average persons necessary working hours would be maybe 5 hours a week. We could spend our lives with friends and family, or reading and writing, painting or programming. Most of the necessary work would be done by volunteers who enjoy what they are doing. Work that people do not enjoy could be shared in rotation.
In such a world, I know the average person would become a slave to whomever is on top calling the shots, they would work endlessly to supply more and more to wealth to a few people on top. Be it a dictator or an elite political class, I want my life ruled as little as possible from those people.
>It’s all a voluntary and market based system but captures the main thrust of Marx’s critique of capitalism - the problem with an ownership class sucking up all the surplus value in society.
Except it's not exactly voluntary if I can't own anything that would allow me to stop working altogether, I'm still stuck being a slave to the state. There still exists a power structure that both capitalism and marxist systems have.
> We could do this. End consumerism, make everything open source, share land, know when you have enough and work to serve others in your community.
Thanks, but no thanks. I would rather buy what I feel I need than have you telling me what I actually need. I've been around people long enough to know that sharing land is about the last thing I want. People fuck up public places and there is no incentive to clean other peoples shit up. We already decide when enough is enough, it's just that most of us will always want more, welcome to the human condition. I work to serve myself, and my work is paid for by providing value to my community already.
>Anyway that’s my theory.
I don't mean to poke at you personally, don't take it that way. But this is an awful theory that will lead to more human suffering. If YOU want to live this way, by all means, please do! Just don't suggest 'we' should do it together.
Why? Literally what is the harm in sharing my idea for a voluntary automated society and asking others what they think of it?
> Except it's not exactly voluntary if I can't own anything that would allow me to stop working altogether, I'm still stuck being a slave to the state.
You're inventing this. I never said anything about the state because my philosophy is intentionally designed not to need the state and to avoid it. I am literally saying we can and should build facilities in US cities which will produce high quality healthy meals and give them away for free. I am specifically interested in how to marshal the material support to keep something like this going without the use of a state. So that is things like, buying farmland and using the farming robot I am designing to produce large amounts of food for cheap. Or partnering with farmers who want to donate a portion of their food to the free meals program. It is like wikipedia. If it came in to existence it would be because enough people came together with the common goal to provide this service for free to everyone. If some people nearby want to get really rich, they will simply not participate. And we will still feed them!
There is always someone who hears that I want to ensure every person has a hot healthy meal and they see the ghost of Stalin himself in front of them. But feeding each other is what we have done for ages. Since before we were human. I simply want to make it more efficient.
This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc.
Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull).
And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)!
Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances.
Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests.
Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday.
Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course).
Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy.
That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.
> example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom
Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books).
But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating.
I'm tired from just listing them all!
The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud.
I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
Oral traditions, including fables and mythology, along with their mnemonic structures of repetition, reference, allusion, rhyme, meter, character, plot, etc., were early stores of knowledge and wisdom. Education for youth, knowledge of when to plant, how to spin, what natural resources (plants, animals, trees, minerals) were valued, skills in hunting, sailing, fishing, and war.
These were finally recorded in written form around the 6th century or so in much of Europe and Asia. Subsequent scholars (Idries Shaw who's 1970's World Tales is a collection of such stories being an exemplar) has found that the same stories occur again and again across cultures.
The etymologies of Zeus and Jupiter (*dyeu-peter- "Zeus Pater", literally Sky Father) are from Sanskrit, and similar / related names are shared and found across Eurasia.
> I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
My understanding is that women would do most if not all of these activities in groups with other women and use it as an opportunity for talking.
Point taken about sitting around drinking still being an activity of choice!
But many of the listed activities were either only available for royals in the medieval period (fencing, racquet games, table games, a deck of cards in the 1300s was reportedly worth a small herd of sheep), or simply weren't recorded until that flurry of leisure innovations in the 1700s.
Perhaps this is all due to that pronounced rise in literacy that came at the same time. But I suspect literacy is one of the things that coincided with the huge material gains of normal people, and not unrelated.
I don't want to completely write off progress, because there's been a lot of that and I don't envy medieval peasants, however I think there's a tradeoff.
They were bored most of the day waiting for the bocce-precursor or cock fight to begin, while we've got something to play with constantly that appears to give us anxiety and insomnia.
Boredom isn't usually fatal and may even protect against other problems.
Me neither, I think it's time for a review about some hidden principles we assume are good for us (constant availability of easy pleasures) but may not be.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.
Fair enough! But I think it would also be fair to say that if we shouldn't assume peasants had idyllic lives just because we compare their medieval timecards to our own.
We could start by looking at their equivalents in developing countries. In many respects, they have it better than medieval peasants. They can obtain tools made by machines rather than days of artisan labour, have electric light in the evenings, usually have some level of education and access to some and the harvests aren't any more arduous. And yet curiously, the leisure time they get isn't widely envied, not necessarily even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops...
they are, in some ways. Efficiency gains can mean you work less, but they more often mean you have less people doing the same work. Back then one peasant had much less land to cultivate, a third of all fields were fallowed each year, and 90% of the population worked in farming. Now it's more like 10% and in some countries even less than that.
The problem with being a peasant wasn't the hard work - it was the constant risk of starvation or sickness killing you and your family. So they optimized for lowering the risks instead of optimizing for better profits or more free time.
> even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops
Sweatshops are harder work but less risks than farming.
The Cooperites of New Zealand have an even more secluded lifestyle, very religious, they seem to put on a lot of skits, plays, singing, things like dunk tanks for fun. There’s a lot of working and time for seriousness but they definitely seemed to have a good sense of humor and find time for fun. Plus working communally you’re always around other people socializing.
I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
That's partly what I assume. I think our social side came from survival in harsh condition. Falsely comfy society remove the need to live together, while subjecting us to a strange chaos.
Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling.
And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
This debate -- noble, enlightened savages vs. modern culture -- comes up again and again on the internet.
To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.
Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.
One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
How I see the last 200 years of progress was that past life was indeed harsh and chaotic (how do you handle potential deadly diseases popping anywhere without biological models.. not easy). Ensuring more food, more time for the mass was an obvious unstoppable benefit, but to a certain extent.
> One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization of cultures which seems impoverished.
> I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization
Yes--- . The problem is that there are massive economies of scale and interconnection driven by trade and global markets. In turn, the large scale of the marketplace doesn't leave much room for labor or capital to not be allocated "optimally". In turn, the amount of ability any given entity (individual people, businesses, or even nation-states) have to experiment with significantly different systems is very limited.
For experiments on the smaller scale, there's a big chance they are not applicable to broader groups. And experiments on the larger scale (revolutions, massive policy changes, etc) tend to have unintended consequences and a massive body count.
We're in a stable-ish equilibrium, but it's completely unlikely we're near any kind of global optimum on material wealth, or quality of life, or any other given chosen axis.
> of cultures which seems impoverished.
This is an interesting one, too. There was a certain threshold of wealth reached just before industrialization which allowed a massive growth in cultural expression and we have wonderful things from many cultures that emerged then... that then, with global media and global trade we've been able to enrich further-- we've played off of and learned and enjoyed the riches (culinary, musical, artistic, literary, ....) thereof. But in so doing we've strip-mined this heritage and permanently weakened the nation-scale incubators of new ideas.
> If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each.
Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
> Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone
Yes-- that's exactly what we've done: mostly selecting for efficiency. And now we're so locked into a local optimum of efficiency, diversity in business culture and mainline economic practices is difficult.
> minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
While capital markets try to optimize return on investment, and happiness is one component of economic preference that drives ROI... they hardly try and optimize happiness, per se. They are also relatively short-sighted, don't foresee all consequences and externalities, and tend to fall into local rather than global optima.
In temperate zones winters were times of diminished activity probably because things were centered around agriculture and some hunting. In winter though you got to chores you didn’t have time for in the plant and husbandry productive months: fence mending, spinning, textiles, fixing thatch, cleaning house, making preserves, storing grain and other produce, etc.
In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot.
That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.
I think they had Sundays off for religious reasons, but not sure how much choice peasants or farmers had given fields need clearing, seeds need planting, crops needed harvesting and animals needed caring, reproducing, feeding, butchering and preserving, irrespective of day of week.
Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
In Catholic Europe it was culturally enforced apart from exceptional situations (like you have to harvest your grain and rain is coming). Sabbath literally means "Saturday" in many central-European languages, so celebrating on Sundays had no Jewish associations. In fact it was the opposite because Jews didn't observed Sundays, so you could be called "a Jew" for not observing Catholic holidays including Sundays.
Feeding animals didn't counted as work, just like nowadays people don't think cooking for your family or brushing your teeth is work.
I agree that many people today tend to over-estimate the 'simple' and 'idyllic' aspects of the average pre-industrial person's day to day existence and we should be careful to remember the stark differences as well as to discount the influence of fiction and history's focus on the extraordinary, influential, wealthy and powerful.
I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.
The issue with modern people is they don't even know how to put on the old clothes. They would be technologically-illiterate trying to use complex pre-industrial tech, and so would have a very hard time, much harder than the people of the time.
There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success.
If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS.
So they just sat around and were poor all day? All the rich culture being brought through the generations, it meant nothing?
I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's.
My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today.
Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival.
These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...
Don't a lot of people actually enjoy their coworkers and working, too?
I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable?
One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too.
Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?
>Music and dance
Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts
Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports
Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago?
Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work.
Today's labor is different in that the individual is commoditized. You're indentured to your client, who then accrues a debt to be discharged in an agreed upon time with various contingencies appended, like showing up on time and regardless of completion of your given task (10 baskets/8h) you're nonetheless expected to put in your contracted time.
Basket weaving done in your home, with performance left to your own scruples, and a personalized schedule is leagues different than slaving away for someone else.
I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime.
The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too.
EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).
>Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Not even close.
Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade).
In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day.
(Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem).
As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too.
Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines:
I have visited a pre-industrial villages in Eastern Europe and not once did I feel the urge to trade places. I have no idea what you are on about.
The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us. And they ended the meal with a plead for us to help them get visas to the West.
And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
We need to stop romanticizing other people's poverty.
>I have visited a pre-industrial villages in Eastern Europe and not once did I feel the urge to trade places.
Well, this is beside the point, this was about whether "household chores took the best part of the day". Not whether you would trade to rural living or not.
>The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us
So? I've roasted, cooked, etc. for decades, and it was never a big deal, nor you have to be over the wood-stove or grill for the whole time (when you do, the cooking is very fast, like with some meats). And if there are 3-4 persons in the household (as there always were, families lived with several children and grandparents where never far away), it's dead easy to have rounds keeping an eye on it and still be free to do whatever else.
>And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
You're vastly overestimating.
Kids restrained is modern helicopter parent hysteria. Kids generally roamed free up until the 70s in most places in Europe, and well into the 60s in most neighborhoods, even in cities like New York. It's not some medieval phenomenon, or something associated with "high child death rates". The ocassional kid could stil e.g. drown in a lake, like the ocassional kid today can be hit by a car. But that was not where "high child death rates" came from. Increased child death rates were indeed a thing, but were in birth or small age due to the lack of modern medicine (and most of it basic stuff, like cleaning hands, penicilin, etc, not high test medicine). In any case, not something particular to "kids roaming free".
I am not sure why you think you can compare to a rural place.
One, the number of children then was far higher, and there was no school.
Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume).
Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times, this was not the case for most of the year.
Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
I would suggest reading a book about social history rather than attempting to compare with some other period of history that you think you know better (your views of pre-20th century life are also not correct but that is a whole other story).
>Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume)
I don't need to "understand". I come from such a place, which was mostly like that until I was 10 or so well into the late 20th century. That's where my parents grew up too.
Being poor in monetary terms in such rural places means little (it's not the same as an equivalent poor in New York, which would be not having anything to it, no house, no shelter, and so on). Most of the living wasn't about paying for things with money.
>Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times
Women worked fine, not just in rural places, but also in the cities, in all kinds of jobs, all the way to antiquity. The conceptions you have are all about richer families, not the average person. Of course in argiculture it was absolutely the norm that women worked. Women also worked in all kinds of jobs, from selling and serving in the agora in ancient Greece ("women at home" was for the richer families) to keeping shops and tarverns in the medieval times.
>this was not the case for most of the year.*
It wasn't "most of the year" for men, either. That's part of TFA's point to begin with.
>Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Comparable to what? To the tasks you might know in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or wherever you grew up?
All these tasks (like gardening) and the for the most part "non-existent market economy" extended all the way into my childhood, and all earlier generation, in the parts I'm from, and many similar parts. They're still a big majority of what people do, though for the last 30-40 years they also have electricity.
Yes, people in my village (not any extraordinary example, most of Europe was alike) didn't have electricity (including fridges, microwaves, washing machines), money was small part of their life, and had gardens they ate from a lot of stuff (from olives and grapes, to potatoes and watermelon), including having farm animals. Well into the second half of the 20th century.
And they still had ample free time. Due to lack of modern entertainment, in a sense, boredom, and associated e.g. drinking, gossip, petty squables, etc. to pass the time, was more of an issue than lack of free time was.
>Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
Seriously, do some research yourself. Start from TFA, there are plenty of other sources on antiquity, middle ages, and the pre-industrial society.
I studied this at university. I have done the research. I am telling you do not (your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?).
Keith Wrightson is the basic textbook used on this subject (Omrod has written one about an earlier period). Pls, even for HN...this is wild, wild, wild levels of delusion.
>I studied this at university. I have done the research.
A, that settles it then. "your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?" -- no, my evidence is having lived that life and knowing people who did well until 30 years ago (and even after then, slowly changing).
But sure, an English academic of the peasant classes on that island would know more. He read books about the matter (but probably not Sahlins or ethnology on the leisure times of even primitive tribes. Not much for other political environments and warmer climates, e.g. southern europe either. And probably has never cooked on a wood stove, grew plants and fed chicken animals).
>Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!*
They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides...
The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history.
Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too
Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Maybe the monks' prayer days should count as work.
In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves.
My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles.
>>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century
Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties.
IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.
Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.
> Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too
But do you or your partner have to spend ~1200-2000 working hours/year spinning clothes for you and your household?
This was absolutely the norm in pre-industrial times. You couldn't just go down to the thrift store and buy a pair of jeans for $8.
When you clean, fix, wash and butcher, you have a dishwasher. You have a washing machine. You have a dryer. You have running water. You don't need to go down to the well, or to the river, to bring water up in buckets. You have electric heating - and you don't have to spend hundreds of hours a year chopping, seasoning, and splitting firewood, and then hauling it to your home. (And even if you do, you have far better tools to do it than were available back in the day.)
The nature of the work is different, but the amount of time spent doing work is still quite substantial even if we are mostly just operating machines. Plus other stuff has stayed the same, It hasn't gotten any faster to cook a piece of meat since that's limited by the laws of physics.
The Hedonistic Treadmill. We're incredibly richer, but we are wired to always want something nicer.
We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
I do my laundry once a week if not more frequently with a decently heavy load. I don't go down to the river, but I've lived in apartment complexes where the laundry room was a few hundred yards and several stories away. You still do some stuff on per clothing bases, like folding, ironing, special care like certain things being air dried on hangers or some other surface. Some stuff washed cold or hot even. Some people have to shlep their stuff to off site laundry businesses much a kin to a walk down to the the river. I'm sure back then you'd only be washing a handful of thin linen underclothing regularly, outerwear if at all. These people back then also probably weren't washing bedding. Some doctors say the modern beds, while comfortable, are worse for the spine than a firmer surface still used in some cultures.
I’ve spent a bit of time in the rural areas of a developing country when I was younger visiting extended family. These were farmers that were fairly poor. In the summer months, lots of work, from dawn until dusk. But after the harvest until the next planting season there was no “work” to do. It was not fun.
People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
They had their church, their taverns, brothels, and gambling. They were poorly educated and often illiterate. I think your expectations are unfairly modern.
You comment reminds me of this article that I can't put my hands on, that explained that the generalization of washing machines actually increased work time in some situations, because with it came the expectation of wearing cleaner clothes.
I think I use much more utensils, pans and plates than in those times. Cups too. Also I wear clean underpants everyday ( well, this is a small lie ).
I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.
It isn't clear. I'm sure I wash my clothes more than they did. I suspect dishes to them were rarely washed, while wash every use. Sure I have machines to do the work, but I suspect I spend more as much time, but im getting better quality results.
The wild part is that a human being surviving in much of the world today has to know essentially nothing at all about how to survive in actuality. They just need to find a way to get money in one way or another.
Exactly my thoughts. Mere clothes washing was a full day activity. Go to the well, bring water. Chop wood for heating. Milk cow, tend to chickens. Fix the fence...
All this coupled with less then abundant available calories, and the slow paced work does paint a different picture.
Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?
This brought to mind something from Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture (all of which is interesting, btw)
"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."
Even so, we're getting more educated than ever and with the advent of inflation, it's hard to say that collectively we're getting ahead of our ancestors.
> I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty
I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
> I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
Really? Who has that choice available to them? I certainly don't - land tax necessitates profits (and $$$$$/acre to buy arable land in the first place!). The diggers and levelers certainly didn't seem interested in being forced off their land.
Enough arable land to feed family of 4 can be bought in USA for $14k (and you can buy it outside of US). Add $7k for next 50 years of property taxes.
You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious.
You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.
> And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities
Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.
> And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).
This goes against everything I've been taught, that the plebian class basically toiled endlessly, from Feudal Times to Industrial Revolution before labor laws to today's "multiple low-wage-jobs to survive".
EDIT: Also odd that the author doesn't point out that ~2040 hours is the yearly hours in a modern 40-hour workweek in the US, give or take a few holidays.
Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.
They all pooled their money together for some heavy machinery too...so even that has cut down a lot of time spent on prep & harvesting.
You could get jobs in the city when there's no farming to do, too. But you'd need a place to stay that doesn't eat up your wages. It's easy to do if you have family in the city already and just crash in their living room.
Another question to ask is what do you do when you're near retirement and too old to work? Well, you live with your kids and they take care of you with their income and chores. It's not like now where you're sent off to a nursing home and retirees need to be able to afford that.
> Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.
So replace computers with agriculture and this xkcd really is timeless.
Yeah, cloth and bedsheets make themselves. Fabric just exist and don't need to be created. Animals don't need continuous care. Tools and houses don't need fixing. Candles appear from thin air. Wood cuts itself.
Before there were artificial lights and other things there really wasn’t much you could do when it was cold and dark.
Factory workers at the end of the 19th century definitely had a horrible life. They had to fight for 6day weeks and often had to work away hours a day under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions.
"Artificial lights" were a thing as far as pre-recorded history (and for rural illiterate peasant activities, much of middle ages is essentially pre-recorded history relying on oral tradition, artifacts and e.g. 18th century documentation of old-at-the-time practices instead of contemporary writing) - especially in northern areas where during winter months you get sunlight for a quite limited time, if you look at the medieval and earlier research of "evening work" i.e. various activities that can be done under candle light or the meager light from "wood-stick" (I don't know the proper English term, essentially very narrow pieces chopped off of firewood, placed in special holders to provide evening light for the many people for whom candles were too expensive). We have descriptions of "pre-light" rural work, of preparation activities for e.g. breadmaking that were done in the morning before the day enabled to do the proper work, and which had to be done earlier in order to not waste the scarce daylight hours on it. .
Artificial light is an important piece of social technology, and improvements to it had a big impact, but people have needed and used artificial light to sustain their non-daylight activities since pretty much forever; stone age communities did their social activities next to a fireplace in the dark. Like, today is going to be 9 hours of daylight for me, and for December-January there's going to be just 7 hours or so of daylight; people are not going to lie down for 17 hours, they do try to do the same things just with less light.
As far as I know there were lights but they were very limited. So you could do some things but it wasn't like today when work almost doesn't get interrupted at all when it's dark. At least that's what my grandmother told me. During her youth she lived on a farm without electric power and oil lamps were also too expensive to be used much. You also had to be very careful not to burn down your house.
It's generally suspect when someone preaches that "this is what life is like in Feudal times", considering that spans 500 years and a whole continent. Likewise for the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah even these days the friends I have that are active in the agricultural sector. Pretty much still work those hours where it peaks in the summer time and there is pretty much no activity latter half of fall and winter. Maybe except preparation for the next season and some maintenance on machines.
Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to anything that exists today, even third-world nations today aren't close to the poverty that existed then).
I think the surprising thing is that anyone would conclude that anything about feudalism was better. The reason why people didn't work long hours was because the economy was stuck in a Malthusian trap, and there wasn't enough productivity or work to actually feed people (apart from after mortality crises where close to a majority of the population died).
The only reason the argument is being made is so that it can support the OP's conclusion about work in the present. It has no real significance by itself, this isn't history (incidentally, this is why history is important...it is taught so badly in the US, so badly...but everyone makes these bizarre ahistorical comparisons, everyone looks at the past when trying to understand the present...it is unfortunate that we have the knowledge to inform the limits of this process, but people just ignore it).
I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.
Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.
Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that that's "not what history for" is just not true as a descriptive statement. Perhaps you believe it should not be used that way, but if your only lens to look at things is the present, your imagination will be incredibly constrained.
The "cohesive narrative" stands alone. History exists only on its own terms. You cannot look at something that happened in history and say: we can do this because it happened then. It is not absurd, it is the basic aspect of how histography is taught in university (and btw, if you study politics...you will find the same idea, "path dependence"...you see parallels in every social science because it is a fairly common mistake made by people who haven't thought about the issue deeply...the "why don't you be like Denmark" meme is a classic of comparative politics).
I am not saying that the present is the only lens (again, you haven't even started to understand what I wrote). The point is that the present is the only present. The past can only be understood in it's own terms. You are not constrained in any way because the past provides only information about the past, not the present.
The past leads directly into the present, so how could that possibly be? When do you think it’s cut off? Does yesterday not suggest anything about today?
It can possibly be because that is what history is. It is the study of things which are not the present.
It is irrelevant whether yesterday is like today because history is not about yesterday. Again, if you are interested about this subject, I would read some books about historiography (EH Carr and Elton are two of the most important books of this last hundred years...but, again, I don't think you will find anyone arguing for the position you are taking because it so clearly is an attempt to justify a political position today...this isn't what history is, any political position today has to be justified in the terms of today...historical relativists do not take your line, no-one does, it makes no sense unless you have no idea what history is).
I can agree as far as the point that the past must be understood on its own terms and not in terms of contemporary categories, but if EH Carr and Elton truly believe the past has absolutely nothing to tell us about the present, they're about the only people on Earth, including academic historians, who think so. Looking them up suggests their ideas are rather controversial and not simply accepted as consensus ones either (and indeed rejecting the concept of "contingency" would put him out of step with pretty much every working historian I've listened to).
Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?
I was taught that as well, in what retrospectively was blatant capitalist propaganda. That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
Albeit my school district was really into right wing propaganda in general, describing the civil war as "the war of northern aggression" in its text books.
The industrial revolution did give us a lot more leisure time if you're willing to live with at the same standards as people back then did. But we don't find those standards acceptable.
The lack of leisure time peaked during the industrial revolution, as the article this thread is on highlights. Victorian era work houses weren't really known for amenities, even by feudal standards.
> That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
This is the opposite of what you expect from one perspective. When a task becomes more efficient people want to put more time in it since they get more out of it. So the more efficient we make jobs the more people will want to work to get more and more stuff. There might be a cap to that, but as of yet we haven't reached it, even programmers making $500k a year still wants to work more even though they could easily spend most of their time not working.
There's a huge push for reduced work weeks. And even where it's not official a lot of those software engineers spend their work week on reddit, so I'm not sure your example checks out.
It's not "capitalist propaganda". There's a reason humanity moved in this direction, away from feudalism and subsistence farming. It sucks. More people today enjoy a higher standard of living than even the wealthiest could have dreamt of in the time period discussed in this article. Your life does not hinge on a good growing season or getting mysteriously sick with no cure. You don't have to know how to hunt, forage, clean a carcass, construct shelter or clothing, on and on and on. It's remarkable that people today can survive without knowing _anything_ about where the means for the survival came from.
Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
People didn't move into the factories from the fields for the higher standard, they moved there because they never owned the fields, and the industrial revolution pushed them out with increased automation, so they moved to the only place that would employ them even though it was a step backwards in standard of living.
> Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
Can you show where this is? All I can find is that by some estimates, some people spent less time doing certain things than they do today. That is not a "higher standard of living" unless you want a completely shallow and de-contextualized feel-good talking point.
Objectively improved standards of living over the 500+ year period in question: child mortality, caloric availability, adult literacy, crime, sanitation, understanding what _germs_ are... the list really goes on and on and on.
It's not a conspiracy. People voted with their feet on this one.
I'm curious where you are getting this alt-history. Do you have any academic or popular primary references? Who do you read for economic history that supports these conclusions?
The article in the thread does not discuss the mechanism by which populations migrated to factories!
Or are you reading a different article? Where are you getting these ideas that peasants were forced to move into the factory towns against their will, or that they considered themselves worse off for doing so?
I will give you some actual facts here (because you appear to be genuinely interested, I can only speak about England which industrialized first).
Urbanisation happened over a long period of time and was very far advanced in the UK (and in places like Belgium). Europe always used a far higher stock of capital (inc. animals) than in Asia but it was only when land began to be enclosed that you saw productivity really improve (it wasn't until the 1700s that European agricultural productivity really equalled places like China), and urbanization accelerate. It is also important to remember that the Industrial Revolution did not happen overnight, there was a period of proto-industrialization when work was "put out" by merchants, this was often in textiles and sometimes with capital/machines that workers owned in their own homes.
It was really in the late 18th/early 19th century that you saw levels of protest begin to rise, as factories started to grow, as workers began to get displaced into factories, and then as workers got displaced by children working in factories. This was a huge "thing" in politics throughout this period, although during the Napoleonic Wars laws were passed which clamped down on protest significantly (Chartism, the Luddites...this was probably the first example of cohesive "working class" political movement anywhere). Importantly though, the only cohesive example (that I know) of protest against agricultural improvement was the Swing Riots in the 1830s, which were localised.
To be clear, this is not because there were no protests but because the protests had happened two centuries earlier with enclosure. That was the main process that really led to agricultural productivity improving (combined with the mortality from the Civil War and migration to the Colonies decreasing the pressure on population). Mechanisation in agriculture wasn't really a factor until much, much later (there was very little need, labour was basically free and ample...the poor laws of the early 19th century were a huge wage subsidy for land owners).
The other stuff the guy you replied to said is way, way off...as I have said elsewhere, this is just feudal romanticism by people who don't understand the past but have their views about the present so just see what they want to see. The standard of living then was significantly below the level existing in every developing nation today. It is fair to say that the industrial revolution treated them no better (the riots I mention above bear that out, it wasn't automation but mechanisation and the introduction of child labour which mechanisation facilitated), but that ignores the massive political changes that occurred soon after (if you look at the UK, the stuff occurring in factories was a huge scandal...a lot of the "political economists" of the day who are famous today unf did not help, but it did get solved and living standards improved).
I am really interested in economic history, so I was aware of the enclosure period, but don't know much about it -- can you recommend some reading material to this and also the Swing Riots? (I know I can google, but books are better)
I can't provide any recommendations on enclosure. I studied it at university, and can't recall what books were recommended.
But if you search for stuff about agricultural productivity, you will find lots. I believe Gregory Clark and Robert Allen have written quite a bit about this.
No idea about the Swing Riots either. I have just read about it in other books. I think Luddism is more interesting. Afaik, there was no real persistent movement like it in agriculture.
I’m no expert but my understanding is that the drive to industry in Britain, aided by the enclosures, significantly increased working hours, and worsened working conditions.
I can speak to Irish history. Long considered one of the most poor and wretched places for common folk, the rural poor had numerous issues in Ireland. While they had dance and a lovely folk music, they also had starvation, disease, lack of political representation, and a lack of basic economic ladders. They did have plentiful turf to warm themselves, in contrast to many other poor folk in other areas of Europe. They also had the gulf stream, like Iceland and the UK, which kept their climate relatively warm for it's northerly location.
There's no better demonstration of the decimation of the rural Irish than the potato famine of the 1840s. It wasn't just one year, multiple years, their monocrop of the Irish Lumper potato, which had led the widespread growth in population, failed them due to fungal blight. It's estimate 5% or even 10% died of starvation in some rural areas. Moreover, millions more left in droves for the UK and USA, recognizing the crushing poverty and lack of food vastly outweighed their love of the land and culture.
In my estimation, the rural Irish had leisure time for the arts despite their poverty and destitution. The abundance of time didn't help, they were too poor to own many games and objects. Yet, through music and dance and writing, they kept their spirits alive and, by some cheer, were able to Banish Misfortune.
Good recounting, but I feel like any talk of the potato famine has to mention the role the English played:
> Charles E. Trevelyan, who served under both Peel and Russell at the Treasury, and had prime responsibility for famine relief in Ireland, was clear about God's role: "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated".
It was the economic system that was imposed upon the Irish that forced them into relying on a monoculture, too, and forced them to starve.
The Irish working class were forced into smaller and smaller subdivisions by English landlords[1], to the point that they could only rely on a potato monoculture[2] to sustain themselves. During the famine, those landlords evicted over half of a million poor and starving Irish people[3].
Those same Irish tenant farmers harvested crops during the famine that were then shipped and sold on the English market[4], while those that harvested them starved.
Farming today is a seven day, every day work week. There is no day off with livestock, no matter what century, and what season. If the sun sets, or the weather is bad outside, there are plenty of work to be done indoors.
I would presume it was even harder without all the automation and technology in the Middle Ages. Maybe they did not labour for the employer all the time, but all the 'free time' was spent labouring for sustenance, and other life's maintenance.
If I recall correctly, the 8 hour day, 40 hour week, and five day work-week are all 19th century trends.
My wife's 85 year old grandma lives on a small dairy farm (less than 20 animals) and farms it pretty much the same way it was done a century ago. Actually today it's more of a "homestead" than what you'd thing of as a "farm", but this is what "farms" used to be.
During summer there is always a lot to do, as they need to tend to the fields to grow feed and food for themselves, and they are often working from sunrise to sunset. But during the winter it's just looking after the animals - they stay in the barn as it's too cold in our climate to be outdoors - so it's mainly feeding and cleaning which doesn't take too much time.
The idea of such seasonable work seems somewhat appealing to me, as you work hard to get things done for one part of the year, then go into maintenance mode for another. It seems like it is a good chance to recharge and reflect on things, instead of just picking up the next Jira card and forgetting about what you've just done. I imagine places that have holiday code freezes must feel a bit like that, but this is a longer period.
> If I recall correctly, the 8 hour day, 40 hour week, and five day work-week are all 19th century trends
If it is, hunter gatherers often worked even less, as Marshall Sahlins noted in "The Original Affluent Society" and other books. Even modern hunter gatherers often work less, although there are less in existence now than there were a few decades ago.
I'm sure the plots they were farming were much smaller and there were more hands per plot. Also, I believe most families wouldn't have been able to afford more than a couple of smaller animals, and if they were lucky/slightly better off a cow/goat.
Plus, if you look at the lowest figure in the article is mentions 1440 hours annually which works out to a bit under 30 hours a week, so not hugely less time.
On the flip side everything had to be build by hand from scratch so domestic labor probably accounted for at least an equal amount of time.
I'd guess that between work and home the average was probably 60 hours a week. Not too far off nowadays, just distributed differently.
Farming is an excellent example. But the farming we know today has been subject to relentless pressures of capitalism, and it has been industrialized to support economies of scale. Mom and pop farms are vestiges of the past.
So I'm not sure your comparison holds, maybe a better analogy would be a hobby farm? Usually those involve people who have primary jobs and choose this as a lifestyle. My guess would the the farming hours in that context cannot be too many; it would interfere with their day jobs.
Just an anecdote, but I remember my aunt and uncle farm. No economies of scale at all. My uncle would leave to work, and I remember my aunt's day. Prepare breakfast for kids. Let chickens out. Go to shop (on foot, they had no car) bring necessities. Go tend the vegetables garden. Cook dinner. Take care for elderly mom. Uncle back from work, it's 3pm, she was already busy for 9 hours. I think at this point she allowed herself to watch TV.
I know it's from 1990s, but it feels weird to claim that 15th century work was less, when you would not be able to buy a shovel in a store...
I would take a 10 hour day in almost any job in the 21st century over an 8-16 hour workday for a 14th century farm laborer mowing hay with a scythe or plowing behind a team of oxen. I get meal and rest breaks too, and even though they may get more days off than I do, what are they doing on those days off? Chopping wood? Thatching their roof? Hauling water from a well? The amount of labor done in a day by peasants in the European middle ages dwarfs everything but the extreme outliers of today.
The article is about how we work more today than people did before the industrial revolution, both in terms of average hours per day over a year, and days worked in a year.
My point is that you can't compare the life of an ordinary worker today to the life of an ordinary worker in the distant past, because the kind of work being done is so different. Working more hours and days today is easier than working fewer hours and days in the past.
"An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two "days-works." "
Presumably because in the other half of the day, they'd be working to harvest and grow their own food. I'm not sure what the difference is between working 8 hours, and getting enough money to buy food, and working 4 hours and then another 4 hours to make your own food.
First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day. Neither can most draft animals. Second, the mid day meal was the big one, and there was usually a nap as well. People had to walk to work, and it would be hard to get everyone back at the same time.
Third, the Lord's inventory of tools was limited, so better to have two shifts of reasonably rested people than one double shift of exhausted people.
>> First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day
Not sure if this is true. I worked at a building site labourer and I've seen people digging trenches all day. I'm also pretty sure in the poorer parts of the 3rd world people are toiling for 8 hours a day in manual/ox-assisted agricultural work.
Leisure is the both the opposite of and an essential component to work. An anarchist group in the UK last century had their motto as "neither work nor leisure" which I found interesting.
Recreation is different than leisure. It's about re-creation and renewal, more like play.
Working in a building site under sun and rain is not fun. And it is dangerous.
My father had a blast in a farm, because he is the boss and the manual work he has done is symbolic.
Swinging a machete (blade) under rain and sun for days on end is not fun, I can tell you from experience.
I only hear the opinion manual labor is "better" from some people who have never known any alternative, politicians who won't have to do any, or desk workers who can afford doing some manual "work" when feeling like it.
Any work you don't like will be tagged as bad, but I personally took the desk bad alternative over the manual labor alternative.
Manual labor is so bad that you have to import immigrants to do it. You could truly argue the wages are lower. I will elaborate realistic higher wages aren't enticing enough to get more nationals to embrace that work. That is happening in England right now, by the way.
A number of people I work with have official part time schedules, ranging from 50%-80%. Their expectations and compensation are adjusted correspondingly.
I wonder if you are running into this reaction because you are in a position (or applying for a position) where the expectations and compensation are calibrated to "full time" (~2000 hrs/year). Have you tried discussing a part time arrangement which might work better for you?
It's all in the name of efficiency. While efficiency is good to some degree, it comes at a cost of robustness. If you are working at 100% capacity, if anything goes wrong you are screwed!
For context: The article is an excerpt from the book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor, published in 1991 (though maybe there are later editions). Here's a review:
What if work is leisure? Jack Welch used to mention that he couldn't wait to get back to office in weekends. I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure: researching new algorithms, building POCs, writing whitepapers and narratives, having brainstorming meetings, and etc. I don't think I can get such meaningful activities outside of work, either. That's because the work gives real use cases that demand scale and efficiency, which drives my projects. To me, an activity is leisure if I want to do it and I have freedom to decide how to spend time.
Ownership of agenda is what underlines leisure, i.e. you're not doing something because you have to. Like sure, you may need to persist through an amateur chess tournament but it's something you were willing to expose yourself to.
With jobs there's really not that much leeway. You do things to make your boss and/or clients happy and ultimately your way of living depends on it. Sure it's possible to allocate time for fun activities at employer dime. However if they are too fun for everyone they are often referred as 'perks', highlighting that it's really a soft packaged form of compensation.
> I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure
You're (we're) in a privileged position. Most jobs are drudgery: data entry specialists, cashiers, warehouse workers, assembly line workers, shop assistants. To them, every day at work is the same, and something different happening is a sign of things going wrong.
Very true. Working in tech industry is an incredible privilege that I cherish and am amazed at. It's also why it pains me to see the K12 education system in the US has failed so many students who could have learned enough and been inspired enough to get into STEM fields.
"Our jobs are called upon to provide the exhilaration of romance and the depths of love. It’s as though we believed that there is a Job Charming out there—like the Prince Charming in fairy tales—that will fill our needs and inspire us to greatness. We’ve come to believe that, through this job, we would somehow have it all: status, meaning, adventure, travel, luxury, respect, power, tough challenges, and fantastic rewards."
people also worked for themselves, which is intrinsically more rewarding. i use to order meat and baked goods from the butcher and baker, respectively. now it's the minimum wage employee that they hired to run the cashiers and the minimum wage employee they trained to work the machines.
Ask yourself, if it was so rewarding, why did we see urbanization associated with industrialization? People chose to leave those rewarding lives and move to cities and work in factories. People today choose to leave less stressful rural lives and move to cities to work professional jobs. It's so commonplace that its a cultural trope that rural people leave if they can.
The submitted title ("Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure") broke the site guidelines. Please don't do that. The rule is:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Hi dang, I have a question about this. A while back I posted "Code Checking Automation [video]", but I couldn't help but feel the original title was quite vague. The video itself is about QuickCheck and more specifically, property-based testing.
Would it have been kosher to add, maybe, "(QuickCheck)" or "(property-based testing)" to the end of the title to disambiguate, or did the original video authors screw themselves over with their vague original title?
It's ok if you do things like that for clarity. We might (or might not) edit it out if the post makes the front page - that's a judgment-call area*. But we wouldn't post a scolding for it. We only do that when the guideline was broken in an obvious or baity way.
For example, the OP was clearly editorialized when it didn't need to be—and in a baity way, which ended up lowering the quality of the thread. I'm sure that was unintentional, but the guidelines are intended to guard against that so we want people to be aware of them.
The title guideline is necessarily worded in a generic way. In practice there are lots of nuances, details, etc.
* One informal practice that works fairly well is that we often leave edited titles (assuming they aren't egregious) in place until/unless the submission makes the front page. At that point it is guaranteed a certain amount of attention, so the downside of reverting to the original title is lower, and we'll often do it then.
Sure they had a “shorter workweek” but it also took women a full workday to wash the family’s clothes, hours of walking to get water for the day, and if you wanted something from the town over that was a 3 day trip.
So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days.
I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked and technology/communications imposing a maximum throughput. You couldn’t work faster even if you wanted to and so you leisured. “Hurry up and wait” as some like to say
PS: there’s also stories of medieval peasants in France basicalky hibernating over winter because if you didn’t sleep for 16 hours every day, you’d burn too much calories and starve[1]. I’m sure that was a very fun reason to have short workweeks
Yeah I’d be curious to see how much of that short workday was because just staying alive was so much harder than today that you simply didn’t have time for more work.
Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
What dinner takes 3 hours....? if we're talking about the poor, realistically soup was a mainstay...here in Romania we have all kinds and then there's marmaliga, basically polenta, add salt and if you're hungry delicious... it does seem like rent, insurance, transport , investment for the future takes up a lot of "work" needs in the present, besides we've become incredibly vain, where the packaging is often worth more than the content...
We went to 10 to 12 hour days of back breaking labor, six days a week with no off season during the industrial revolution, so I don't think it's a physical limit that was being hit.
Not only was it incredibly labor intensive to process grain by hand, it was also caused the flour to be full of tiny rocks that would wear away one's teeth.
article basically ignores quality of life in exchange for "leisure". I could build a crude shelter and be homeless and basically achieve the same thing, turns out most people don't want that.
Fact is most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better, if you want something close to what the article talks about you can pretty easily move to an Amish community or try creating your own commune and try to convince people to join
Adam Smith points out too that most people only had one or two hand woven garments during their entire lives before the industrial revolution. Thus clothes were a far bigger deal back then than they are today. For example, in the Bible, if a person was incredibly upset, they would tear their clothes, and this was considered a huge deal.
Isn't that what a majority of us do when we reach adulthood? and though the answer is subjective, yes it's easy, fun, interesting...also if you are interested in freeloading I'd recommend it, sleeping rough, squatting, food gathering, skipping(from dumpsters) or just generally sharing resources is a lot of fun... my wake up came while squatting and transforming unused buildings...met a bunch of lovely people and learnt a lot from them..
> most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better
I think this takes a good point too far. The society around you is not opt-in, it's a very difficult opt-out. People generally follow the religion of their parents, the career path of their neighborhood, etc. Opting out of the current economy would be a major, radical sacrifice (of status, friends, family, resources, opportunity) that would require enormous vision and courage. And then what do you do for health care, for example? How do you raise kids?
Peasants in the industrial revolution faced starvation, IIRC, if they didn't move to the cities. Much of their opportunity for their former lives had been taken away.
Isn’t that their point? You can opt-out and give up the healthcare, education, ease of raising kids, grocery stores, etc, living life similarly to people of the past before all of those modern inventions. It would just be a horrible life, so nobody does it.
My understanding: They say people are making a rational, economic, opt-in choice. I'm saying people are making an almost inescapable choice not to opt-out, having nothing to do with the economics.
You can't because if you don't organise production to maximise profits you'll be beaten by the competition that does. If you set up a commune and put aside time for democratic meetings and communal recreation, and make work easier and more pleasurable to do, then you'll produce less per hour worked. Companies that don't do those things will get the contracts. Also, you'll be selling into a market whose demand is dominated by the rich and the imperatives of capitalism.
The biggest increases in quality of life comes from public health measure such as access to clean water, food and air. The next is protection from the elements with access to adequate clothing, shelter and fuel. After that I would argue that trust in the integrity of public institutions (rule of law) and security from the threat of violence and extortion. Then it would be access to education, basic health care to prolong life and reduce suffering.
Beyond that we have basic needs to feel that we are part of a family and community where we are loved and valued (belong) and where we can contribute (purpose).
While capitalism has excelled at improving productivity it doesn’t dictate that the gains in productivity necessarily will increase overall quality of life. I could, for example increase the productivity of food production in ways that may decrease overall public health. In that scenario capitalism would directly decrease quality of life.
I think the arguments on hacker news have mostly been due to a (US) system that has become extremely rigid in that there is less personal choice in how productivity gains may be spent by forcing people into very narrow specialties to maximize income.
In many cases that may result in overall lower quality of life if it impacts long term health or being part of a community.
I'm curious about this argument. It was mentioned in some TED talk about the benefits of simple machines.
I might just be a change of pace, also a change of dependencies. Walking long is fine (people need daydream and wandering time, some dose of boredom). Washing your family clothes may be work but it's still better than doing what your boss doesn't want to do. Emotionally your a lot less invested in the latter yet you have to do it.
Hans Rosling argues that washing machines are magic because clothes go in and books come out. Women education, literacy rates, workplace participation etc directly correlates with automation in the home. The less time it takes to keep a family running, the more empowered women get in a society.
I feel like lots of things about the way life used to be (and still is for many) is based on women not having agency (financial independence) and being physically weaker than men.
We are only beginning to find out what happens when women have full independence and children are not a necessary byproduct of sex, and it seems like cratering birthrates are at least one result.
A lot of the costs of birthing and raising children were paid solely by women, but benefited the whole tribe. Now that those costs can be made explicit, I wonder how tribes will chose to compensate women such that they are sufficiently incentivized to have at least replacement level of kids.
These are all cute words, but on my daily routine I see nothing of that sort. People are not especially empowered, power which I believe comes as much from emotional and human experience rather than words.
I can't imagine your daily routine. Education, literacy, and political empowerment constantly play a role in my life, the life of people around me, my society, my economy, etc.
One might say that education and literacy play a role in what we're doing right this moment ...
most people I ran at work into were not specially educated, nor empowered, they coast along trying to fit in their work waiting for a bit more money to spend on not super important stuff.
A tiny example about power, woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
now, to be fair, my experience is only that, if so I wish I could live in yours :)
> most people I ran at work into were not specially educated
We're talking about an historic timescale. If they are literate and have high school degrees, they are very well educated compared to pre-industrial people.
> woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
Those situations are stomach-turning to me. Books do teach people about that kind of power, how to get it and use it (unfortunately), and how to respond to it. Also, literacy and education led to that attorney's power (unfortunately).
I tend to think that higher education is not as interesting as it's said to be. And people who used to work hands on (woodwork, metal smith) had a lot of deep knowledge too, it just wasn't seen as evolved.
Frankly I don't think one book will ever prepare you to live the situations above. This is the kind of thick skin only real life can imprint in you. That girl probably knew everything she could have said, but biology took over, she made a large grin and let it slip. Social status for you. The same old song that has been played for ages. And mind you, that chief wasn't an angel, she unleashed on me a few times during my work. That's why I say people are not better today. All I see is tribal reflexes and fitting in the social tissue.
Now to be fair, I'm not the happiest dude on earth right now, so maybe I amplify the negativity of those situation. Still I'm not sold on the benefits of doing less thanks to modern technology.
> I tend to think that higher education is not as interesting as it's said to be. And people who used to work hands on (woodwork, metal smith) had a lot of deep knowledge too, it just wasn't seen as evolved.
It's not necessarily your fault, but I hear this trendy claim often, but nobody can support it. No one book can teach you everything and not every problem can be solved with knowledge, of course, and there are things we learn from experience, but the track record of learning from books is pretty unimpeachable - including, learning from other people's experiences. (And higher ed is much more than learning from books.) It's hard to imagine humanity without literacy.
Anyway, I'm not adding a heck of a lot at this point ...
I don't know, I learned about physics in HS and college, but nothing made me understand it better than actually interacting with materials (and it wasn't at school). Being faced with reality changes your depth of understanding IMO.
All in all I think our model of society is slightly fooling itself about a lot of things. It adds but it subtracts too.
I think you are right about this. Life may have had less of what we think of as "work" now.
The part that I think is interesting is, as we progressed technologically, where did that time non-conventional working time go? It used to take hours to clean your home, prepare food, etc. We have modern technology which made it easier. How are people spending that new "free" time?
I think the answer seems to be that technology has essentially freed more time for people to work for someone else. The "advancement" means you spend less time washing clothes, but more time flipping burgers or delivering food.
I think this points to something interesting about how much the lowest earners in a society get paid. While it is true that they get paid what the market will bear, the minimum value is always just enough to survive on. "Time saving" technology has effectively devalued their wages. The cost of staying alive is less than it was before. They must work more for the same outcome.
I'm someone who likes to think automation and technology can make people's lives better in the abstract, but... maybe technology alone cannot accomplish this
We have automatic dishwashers now. During WW1, a relative of mine was sent from the city to help on a farm.
After dinner, the family lined up all the platters and plates and put them outside, where a herd of hungry cats would lick them clean. Presumably they were rinsed afterwards, but nobody ever told me.
There are qualitative differences in results independent of time savings...
There are confounding factors in figuring supposed historic misery: Fewer clothes, washed less frequently, for example. Average life expectancy being pulled down by high infant and maternal mortality. That's obviously not good, but it also means that survivors lived longer than averages suggest.
The problem with child mortality is that birthing 8 kids is a lot more taxing on women’s lives than birthing 2. Maybe that doesn’t fall under work but it’s not quite leisure either.
> I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked
All evidence point to that being very high.
e.g. famine was regular and routine, before the capitalism and before the industrial revolution.
Humanity basically spent majority of the time before the capitalism and the modern agriculture fearing running out of food.
And, examples like de-collectivization of agriculture in China during their economic reform, or what happened in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine make it very clear "capitalism" played an important role in reducing / eliminating the famine.
So, articles like this is really misleading - it implies somehow life was better like this paragraph from the article:
> The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking.
The "feasting, drinking and merrymaking" was regularly followed by long periods of malnutrition and massive death.
When it comes to creative/mental jobs, the most productive form of work I've found is start when you're ready and work until you lose focus (forcing it is where diminishing returns kick in). Expect that to mean days where you work for 3 hours straight and days where you work for 14 straight (or days where you do 2 in the morning, stop for 3 hours, then do 3 in the evening) but don't throw a tantrum when that flexes.
Employers would be blown away by how much better the output and quality of work would be if they just left people the hell alone (fire your managers). People would also focus less on petty BS because they'd be happy instead of acting like children clawing at an ideal that only exists in their head.
Assume people are lazy idiots and you'll get a bunch of lazy idiots. Assume they're smart and generally well-intentioned: put your sunglasses on. You'll get the occasional clown (who you fire) but most will respect you for not treating them like cattle.
The problem is that the more we automate, the supply exceeds demand in the labor market. That in turn allows employers to easily suck up the excess potential workers at low wages, and also makes further automation or even repairing the machines we got uneconomical.
Stagnant weak demands screws over big things like nuclear power plants and subways.
We need things like a UBI and further shrinking of the workweek (perhaps as an "automatic stabilizer" based on pop vs total working hours vs popuation!) in order to not stagnate technology and get back our free time.
I think we just have to rethink what being a good person is. Workers have way wayyy more power than people think, they just need unity and the ability to say 'Fuck you' to the systems and people that harm more than help.
And keep in mind; of course those systems and their people tell you that they help more than harm. UBI is totally not necessary. The market works with minimal intervention if people are able to live fearlessly.
> Workers have way wayyy more power than people think
Explain? Individual workers are quite weak. A lack of large scale workplaces in the service sector make organization hard. Overall weak demand and lack of competition makes "capital strikes" in response to worker unrest especially easy to pull off.
We are seeing more strikes now precisely to do stimulus checks making 2020 a better year on average for bottom quintile workers, and increased demand further making labor markets somewhat tight for the first time in 20 years.
Unions are a good start, so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation. Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption. Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.
I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
> so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation.
That is definitely true.
> Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption.
It's good to be in nature, but it's important to distinguish between nature the soother of souls, and nature the means of sustinence. We can build trains to ferry people to and from great parks, but we are too numerous for people to all resist through subsistance agriculture or foraging.
> Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.
Of course not, but we need a "starter motor" to get the labor market tightness to give people the leverage to rebuild those bonds. unionize, and shrink the workweek enough (by norms and laws, that's a safer sort of labor law than NLRB-type appeasement) to keep the labor market tight.
> I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
Unionizations and organizing more broadly are nothing if not societies within society. We can critique the whole, but if take up a primitivism which is against all advanced human structures we offer ourselves no hope and way out, and commit ourselves to a path towards the dystopias we can merely cynically take pride in predicting.
I want to believe that we have the technology available to make subsistence farming, water treatment and power generation available to huge numbers of people. The key factor to this is keeping the benefits of the internet, while moving away from the main body of society. I have hope that starlink or another technology will make this possible within my lifetime.
I'm sorry but I think that would be very dangerous to attempt until after the population declines (naturally, per current modeling).
I am all for trying to maximize technology advancement / alienating division of labor. (This is why I spend so much time on https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/ to untangle our great open source commons and make even in it's totality it graspable!), but "everyone gets to be a farmer too" is like the hardest-to-achieve form of that, and a failed attempt could easily wipe out what nature remains.
I would much prefer to abolish all non-highly-intense agriculture and try to return as much and to parkland as possible. IMO it's no coincidence California, Korea, and Japan are all prosperous. Mountains containing developing to smaller areas greatly improve things. We need the political will to do same thing in the flat areas by fiat.
In all the progress we made economically, it's disappointing how both economic security and shorter work weeks have stagnated.
It's truly odd for example when women joined the work force, this massive influx of labor didn't move work hours by an inch. Likewise for all the automation that happened.
We seem to be able to dramatically improve on everything in record time except for work conditions. It's a work for work sake situation, where some 50% of our economy basically consists of keeping each other busy.
Keeping each other busy is made possible by mandatory consumption. Marketing, social status, inflation, planned obsolesce all create a strong incentive to consume.
So, that's the system. Work, regardless of purpose. Consume, regardless of purpose. Just do lots of both. Keeping velocity at proper levels requires constant stimulation, which tells us its unnatural.
Isn't it odd that our species sees consuming lots of resources as a good thing? Isn't it odd that we glorify labor even if that labor does nothing to advance mankind? Isn't it cruel how some 80% of people hate their work, yet we force them into a humiliating 50 year rate race anyway, consuming their life energy?
Is it all worth it? Are we sure we can't do better?
For a deeper dive, James Suzman the anthropologist wrote 'Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots'. Published in 2021. It's worth a read if anyone wants understand how the industrial revolution changed work patterns and (perhaps more importantly) how the agricultural revolution changed how people spend their time and how much leisure time people have had throughout human history
Not quite: the workweek described still sounds like at least 40 hours.
What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during the early/middle years of the industrial revolution. Modern day capitalism, while significantly flawed, seems to have moved on from that early horror: I have ancestors from ~100 years ago that died of black lung after spending decades of 60-70 hours/week in coal mines.
The author also ignores the time outside of "work" necessary to keep a household going. Time spent outside of the fields wasn't just idle time: everything from cooking to home maintenance was added labor that would eat away at those off hours more so than similar tasks today.
And sure, today some people still have no choice but to work long hours, and some people choose to do so, but I imagine that was the case in the supposedly more idyllic workers' environment described by the author as well.
We also shouldn't forget the conditions of work & life for the average person. Peasantry was certainly a big step above out & out slavery but freedom was still significantly curtailed. There was not for example universal freedom of movement. Absent approval by the local lord, a person was bound to the land they were born on. The quality of low/middle justice for what rights people did have was highly variable & subject to capricious whims at times. (Which isn't to say that's a completely solved problem today though)
All of which is to say that workday hours, even granting the author's central thesis (which I don't), are not the yardstick to use when measuring quality of life. At best it's just one data point in the constellation of factors involved.
This isn't the first time I've seen this sentiment displayed here on HN with regard to historic European civilization. What I haven't seen is a comparison to other ones. I'm particularly interested in Asian civilization.
I'd be interested in other places too, but I expect a wide variance by locality, trade, etc. I wouldn't expect, especially back then, England and Wales to be the same, or possibly not different regions of those countries. Groupings as large as 'Europe' and 'Asia' might not be meaningful.
this reminds me of a part of Sapiens where they discuss how agriculture actually ended up taking up more time then foraging for early settlers. They also mentioned how their nutrition and teeth suffered initially as well.
Considering famines were common, 1/10 women died during child birth, infant mortality was absurdly high and most people stayed in the same town until they died, I prefer now.
A zillion consumer goods and things, so many we'll be here all day to name them all. Decent toothbrushes. Electricity. Umbrellas. Flashlights. Batteries. Pens and pencils. Deodorant. Postal shipping. GPS. Near instant global news. Inexpensive razors and razor blades. Scissors. Asprin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen. Grocery stores. Air conditioning, central heating. Mass, quality clothing options. Nearly every possible type of shoe. Automobiles, mass-transit, airplanes, motor powered boats. Well constructed homes. Extraordinary entertainment options, from lowbrow to highbrow. The global travel system. Dishwashers. Washers & dryers for clothing. Lawnmowers. Power tools, and relatively inexpensive mass manufactured tools in general. Safe, inexpensive tap water. Thousands of different kinds of tape, paint, paper. Cardboard. Inexpensive, quality glass and mirrors for nearly any purpose. Insert 4,572,927 other things here.
This article is a joke. Everything was much harder back then, everything was much worse back then.
I feel like you've wasted 153 words while completely missing the point of the article, which isn't to advocate for a return to a pre-industrial era, but to ask why we have less free time today than we had then.
We'll see if people adapt (or not) to deal better with social media in terms of altering how they consume / interact with it, given the experiences of the past decade. I think a huge percentage of people have pulled back from eg Facebook and commonly broadcasting their views there, or engaging in low value social conflicts via social media. The average person is not Tweeting their thoughts on a daily basis and is not going to.
I think it could take perhaps a few decades (~2010-2030) for a full cycle to take place of people - across multiple generations - experiencing social media across their lives over many years, to inform the next generations of social media's nature. There is still a lot yet to learn about how social media impacts us, shapes us, influences us, contorts us. That's all still being judged, regulated, pondered, debated, studied. Television and radio took decades to play out in terms of what manner they fit into society, how society would use / consume those things, what society would accept from those things, and how they would be regulated.
Reminds me of Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) by Keynes Definitely worth a read. I also finished Trekonomics by Manu Saadia which was a good attempt at trying to explain the economics behind star trek, essentially a society where the economic problem (scarcity of resources) had been solved and people live to pursue personal goals rather than income.
I didn't see it mentioned...why? What happened in the mid 19th century that labor lost the upper hand to "management"? If the tradition (of less work hours) dates so far back, what triggered its disappearance so quickly? And going forward, as if it never existed?
labor has actually gained strength, we have dramatically easier ways to become financially independent today than we had in the 19th century. in europe peasants used to be basically slaves under the "law". i think the only thing that got worse is propaganda, which is the fake culture of the elites. once you turn your head the other way things get better
I'm also very curious about job organization, and teaching.
You can work hard but in a beneficial environment (efforts are well chunked and rewarding physically and/or mentally) or you can work somehow less but in toxic settings (adversarial relationships, bad tooling, etc).
Ugh, alright so if you have a farm with animals it’s a 7 day a week job. I’m having trouble believing they had a shorter work week generally. Now, if we’re talking just laborers.. maybe, but the majority of people owned farms and animals in the pre-industrial world.
Read The Undefeated by George Paloczi-Horvath. He's a 20th century writer who lived through the tail end of the feudal system in Hungary. The lives of the peasants were not great. They were mal-nourished and lived at the whims of their lords.
> The lives of the peasants were not great. They were mal-nourished and lived at the whims of their lords.
Replace "peasants" with "working class" and "lords" with "employers and landlords" and you could apply the exact same statement to 38 million people in the US alone[0].
A very different situation in degree. The nobility in Hungary considered the peasants to be sub-human. This was partly because they were physically distinct from the upper classes. This, in turn, was because they didn't have enough to eat, though the nobles didn't recognize that.
Also, the high-born were free to rape and kill peasants with no repercussions.
> The nobility in Hungary considered the peasants to be sub-human.
Honestly even this statement would probably apply to our society as well if you'd replace nobility with the "ruling class", but I get your point.
Obviously there are big differences between then and today and I don't want to minimize those, although I feel even though the "implementation details" have changed a lot (no more free raping and killing thankfully - but only if you exclude submerged stories like the Epstein case), structurally our society still works similarly.
Capitalism was also people working in the fields and trading their produce, after paying their tax to their lord, not unlike to our income tax.
There are definitely many trends that led us to work more and more. There are increasingly more and more people in the few places people with ambitions want to live in. That's more competition which gradually drives the cost down. If the wage is already low enough that it's unreasonable for someone to live on it, the working hours will go up.
The real modern culprit in my opinion is the mandatory education system which indoctrinate kids to become employees for life instead of helping them find a place in society and in the market by providing value as a small business.
With less employees around wages would go up, with more small businesses the capital would be spread more and not concentrated in the hands of a few.
It's not hard to understand who is benefitting from this system: whoever owns capital and need workers.
I'm sure there is plenty of overlap with people controlling the media and telling people what to think and want - and people in the government approving laws.
I mean, I've been working 60-70 hour weeks and am working before the sun comes up and after it goes down so it makes some sense. They didn't have electric light, we do.
I saw an article years ago where the bones of colonial Americans were analysed. They found a lot of markers of major stress put on them. They also didn't live long.
Why is everyone so defensive? The author never says we'd be better off living in the pre-industrial era. It just points out one of the many lies we've been pushed on by the modern propaganda.
This kind of emotional reaction shows a level of insecurity that usually only comes out when we are attacked on something personal we feel fragile about. I don't understand how a discussion about the merits of capitalism can trigger the same response in people. You don't react like this when you're confident and certain that you're doing the right thing.
The point of the discussion isn't if we should go back to the pre-industrial era. The trillion dollar question is sadly left unanswered and, worst of all, undebated: If productivity has constantly risen since the first industrial revolution, why do we have less free time than ever? Where have most of the productivity gains gone?
Before I get answers about how we have less housework to do in our free time today, for most people working full time that is simply untrue. You commute ~1 hour daily, work 8 hours, when you get back home you've got to buy groceries, shower, cook, wash your dishes, etc. There's barely 1/2 hours of leisure left, and we usually feel too tired already by that time.
Small time farmers in capitalist nations who did not serve a lord should have even more comfortable lives than peasants. According to this anti-capitalist narrative, it would be absolutely absurd for these people to abandon their their small farms and family to work in a crowded factory for longer hours and more dangerous conditions. And yet it happened anyways, suggesting that the life a a peasant wasn't as idyllic as the author seems to think it was.
I remember enjoying E.P. Thompson's take on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in college. He has a lot of interesting commentary about how technology in the form of accurate timepieces played a role in our concept of labor. The article is here behind a paywall (https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749). Anyone with access to a search engine can likely find a free copy ;).
I am reading Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. It is a fascinating first hand account of English royalty and wars in the 14th century. I think people should also consider the higher classes in those times because they seem to have worked continuously at killing each other. It’s work none the less.
They also didn't have access to computers, credit cards, and often were exploited via Corvee labor because they had no money. I'd trade working more for a convenient life as opposed to a relaxed but difficult one. People died of disease, famine, and war often. I mean why would you work hard knowing those major things are constantly knocking on your doorstep?
Who cares? Pre-industrial life was brutal. You can experience it today by moving to an isolated pre-industrial village in places like the Amazon or the jungles of Myanmar.
half of them have supercomputers sitting around in their tents, so i'm tempted to agree with you. but they are treated like shit by their fellow humans. we literally produce enough food, even just in the usa, for 2/3 times our population. most of it gets wasted because of crazy socialist agricultural policies, to feed animals that will be incinerated instead of eaten, and so on. same goes for housing, and all other necessities. i think the homeless people are saner than the others, but they i don't think they're happy
Physical work actually energized me, I mean this is all confirmed today as well, we know all the benefits exercise brings on well being.
There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking and literally mentally draining in a way where when the day ends, it's as if you suffer from temporary depression. Even getting motivated to do things you want to do is hard, resorting to the laziest activity is often what happens, phone, social media, television. Sometimes I can't even get myself to play a video game and I love video games.
And when the night comes, you'd think sleep is what you need, but that same day of desk job actually gives you insomnia, falling asleep is hard, and while you sleep it's as if all of that mental activity is still happening in your head from the work day.
If physical labor work paid me as well and provided the same benefits, I'd probably switch back to it honestly.