💾 Archived View for beyondneolithic.life › posts › re_throughts_on_work.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:19:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Wholesomedonut had an excellent post on work and why it's ridiculous to work as hard as we do. And praising work that helps the world be healthy. You should check it out here:
But I did want to respond with something I thought they'd find interesting. Here's a quote:
It makes plenty of sense to work multiple days a week, throughout the whole day, if you're a farmer who has to respect the life cycles of his work animals, and doesn't have giant spotlights with which to light up his whole field as he tills. It means he has to get up early, work hard, and then do it all over again with decidedly inefficient tools.
Actually, this is a sort of common misconception about how difficult things were in the past, and how much harder people must have worked in the past. It's not really true, though. In fact, even the most low and oppressed people worked far, far less than we do now, for the most part. Nowhere close to a 40-hour week averaged over the year. Anthropologist David Graeber points this out in "Bullshit Jobs":
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters — their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five — the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
So the situation for us in 2022 is actually much more ridiculous that Wholesomedonut argues. Not only are we working harder than we should given our industrial and technological capacity, we're working way, way harder than people did when that technology didn't even exist.
This holds true even for pre-agricultural societies. Farming is much harder than hunting and gathering. Marshal Sahlins pointed out way back in the '60s that even modern-day hunter-gatherers living on the worst and harshest land in the world still only work three to five hours a day. Which means ancient hunter-gatherers living on the really good land would have worked even less.
Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society"
Basically, farming is hard now because it it geared toward "efficiency," which means the highest possible yield with the fewest number of workers, regardless of the human or environmental costs.
In general, we are forced to work much harder than we actually need to only because society is organized around maximum profits and maximum accumulation (at the top), which requires maximum productivity, and thus maximum working hours, regardless of the available technology or any conceivable alternative.
Which is not to say I'm advocating some sort of primitivism. Definitely not. Just pointing out that there is an extremely common tendency to assume that things must have been much harder in the past, and that "progress" has made our lives easier. It has in some ways, to be sure. But in many of the most important ways, like working hours, leisure time, and all the things that go along with it (family, creativity), we're actually far worse off than even the lowly serf.