It starts off with:
> Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?
Uh, well, for starters, 15 hours is apparently what it took to survive and live a comparatively successful lifestyle back then, a lifestyle that really only involved SURVIVING to see the next day.
Dial that up to what it takes to live a comparatively successful lifestyle now and you know the reasons, article done.
The whole "15 hours" thing is misleading considering that in the modern world where we're not all on the same playing field anymore (for a lot of disturbing underlying reasons) and just fighting for survival is no longer the common experience or goal, and again, lots of easy reasons.
I did not read this whole thing but the premise and title seems to ignore so many obvious reasons out of the gate that it didn't seem worth it. Maybe they got down stating some obvious reasons, but I may never know... starting off with a click-bait title and intro lost my interest asap.
If you want to comment "but hey, you never said what those easy reasons are!! provide links!!" then you are probably part of the problem.
Yeah, this drivel of a narrative must be extinguished. The world as it is now is completely different from the world in the 90s that I grew up in. To an extent that someone teleported from 90s to now will take a month or so just to make sense of it all. And this narrative is comparing the worlds that are thousand of years apart.
And what is the basis for that 15hr number? Did a group of people try to live the life of a hunter-gatherer for a decade or two? Or is it all based on back-of-the-envelop calculation, that goes "I need 2-3hr/day to gather food and eat"? If they did, then they have completely missed the ordeal (also under the category of work) our ancestors had to put up with just to survive the unforgiving nature.
Next time we hear something like this we should challenge them to actually live the life of a hunter-gatherer and then come back. At the very least live with and observe similar societies and gather data.
The rest of the day I read bit, type on a keyboard and talk to people occasionally. For me the rest of the day is work but honestly it's only a bit stressful and has an element of fun to it. If I didn't need the money I'd probably be doing something that's equivalent to the same thing.
But in the hunter gatherer days - people learned skills to make this much easier to survive than it would be for some random person to do today.
But I think there was more to life, even in hunter gatherer days, than surviving. Surely, they also put some effort into not being miserable.
I'm not convinced that 15 hours of unskilled labor per week is enough to be not-miserable in most places where people actually live in the US.
It's not like homeless people have the skills to go forage in the forests and enjoy the natural beauty of life. We don't learn those skills anymore. And even if we did, you'd have a hard time convincing anyone to leave civilization and join you - and we all have social needs...
I think I'd much rather camp in the peace and quiet in a tight knit community in a decent shelter with fresh food than on the streets or in a crappy old car basically only able to afford to eat processed variations of corn - which is what you'd be doing on 15 hours per week.
Stop typing. Stop now.
For me that just sounds like a lack, a wound that won't heal no matter how many extrinsic things are thrown at it.
If you can get away with it then try working a little less and see what happens.
My life is so much better now that I work an intensely focused 4-hour day. When I am working, I turn on a timer. When the timer is on, I try very hard to not get distracted. When I do get distracted, I turn the timer off. When that timer reaches 4 hours, I'm done for the day.
I don't count meetings in the 4 hours, but I am blessed to not have very many of them. I also work from home, so no one knows what hours I'm actually on.
I've picked up new hobbies, I'm more devoted to my family, I cook more and my career continues flourishing.
I wish everyone could work like this. Maybe I'm taking advantage, but I seem to be providing at least as much product as I was before plus avoiding burnout and taking pride in the fact that my real salary is nearly twice what it is on paper.
For many of us, working provides our lives with structure, and a purpose that we're able to pursue.
I don't know what I'd do with all the additional spare time I have without my job. My kids wouldn't be at home because they're at school. I already have enough time for my hobbies on weekends and when my kids go to sleep.
It's because just like the rest of us - it's what we do. We don't know how not to work without feeling like we should be doing something 'productive'. It's more cultural than anything else.
These people who made themselves stars or billionaires achieved that much because they love the process. If they wanted to just pleasantly slack out, they won't need to go that far in securing their income, they would stop much, much earlier, maybe even at the welfare level.
As a species we don’t want to do nothing.
There is a recent EconTalk podcast on the concept on “freedom” which may be very interesting to people who have read this far in my comment. It touches on how we got to this point in human evolution https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?i...
Nothing can be said about heirs of large inheritances; some may care much enough to achieve something, but most would likely not, like most people.
Don't think they're just working for kicks and laughs. In fact, for them to unwind all of that is probably more financially treacherous than you just up and quitting your paycheck-to-paycheck job.
You are in bubble if you think people are working harder just to feel more productive.
> Just like the rest of us
? who exactly do you only include in your sense of "us"?
I don't understand the "despite" in the above sentence. The more they would work to meet their material needs, the less impoverished they would become, no?
Clearly they do not feel impoverished, and, dare I say it, do not feel that "modern standards" are worth working for.
While some standards are obviously good, like medicine, water, sanitation - some others like 2 cars, or a dishwasher may be less inspirational.
Then as people settled down and became farmers they also gained the opportunity to improve their lives by working hard, and at that point they started working way more hours. It makes sense.
I think working hard only makes sense if you're adequately compensated and have prospects of career growth. Otherwise doing the bare minimum is the rational thing to do.
> as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.
> You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.
But that's baloney. A 3BR average home in my city is now 6x median income, and that's with average households being 2 full-time workers instead of 1. And this isn't some 3k sq ft McMansion - another common strawman - it's the same dumpy house that a single earner easily afforded at 3x salary 40 years ago.
All the other big-ticket items that I spend 80% of my salary on have increased at similar rates.
A lot of Americans do overspend and are obsessed with keeping up with the Jones. You realize that when you go to the grocery store and 1/2 the cars in the parking lot are $50k SUVs and gigantic pickups.
But even if you're a modest person making $50k a year in a medium COL city, the cost of the new Iphone or flat screen TV you bought is inconsequential to the expenses you can't avoid - housing, health care, education, transportation, etc. All of these have almost doubled in price relative to the income of a single full time worker in the last four decades.
Do people really believe this language is accurate or likely to be helpful? What are we going to do, locate the designer and thwart their evil plan? Or attempt to locate the blueprint?
It seems to me that this kind of wording gives way too much credit to human consciousness.
Machines require maintenance. And at this point the machine is so big we can barely keep it going at 40 hours a week. Automation may save us, but it seems like we automate just enough to open up new capability that itself requires maintenance.
So many other people are jumping to discuss the topic in terms of other people like themselves or better off.
The "machine" is very much way more than superficial stuff.
Some gears in the machine are being set aside as non-functional, but the machine is so large that it still keeps "working" without those gears, and ignores the potential net-win if we cared enough to get them back in play.
It is like paying down technical debt. Sure, you can run your system as-is and pay the bills, but ideally you'd optimize for memory and CPU and pay less in the long-run. It is a hard problem to take on as we all know given other priorities and the perceived low cost of doing nothing about it right now.
Those gears are not RAM or CPU though, they are your fellow humans, and we need to act as such. I am sickened by by some of the comments here boiling this all down to an out-of-touch algorithmic and/or privileged viewpoint.
When you finally stop, you are about to admit maybe painstakingly your own exsistence.
We work too much because our imaginations have been stunted by capitalist media. The 40 hour work week should have been shortened years ago. Especially as more and more households have become dual income.
Part of my job there was to add tests into ansible to make sure that the devs' installer could do what it was designed to do. But.. every time I tried to push anything, I would be given absolutely nonsense reasons for why my code wasn't acceptable. The worst instance was an ansible config getting rejected by a dev because I used bash in the ansible deploy code and that "not all clients' hosts will have bash" (in spite of a contractual requirement for bash to be installed). He insisted that I call /usr/bin/python instead. It was infuriating. I ended up writing my own automation that would install on an arbitrary set of hosts using the company's existing automation infrastructure just so that I wouldn't have to manually ssh into hosts or deal with the devs' nonsense. It worked well!
Anywho, the point. With the devs being asininely critical of my code, my boss eventually had a talk with me, saying that my performance wasn't great and that I wasn't pushing any code. I disagreed, but gave up, said fuck it, wrote four lines of "passable" ansible configs, then watched youtube for the rest of the week. At the end of the week, my boss told me that my performance was much, much better and that I should keep it up. So until I quit, I did as little work as I could.
Seriously.. sometimes it just really doesn't make sense to go above and beyond.
(Soon after, a major client complained that our packages weren't running on any of their hosts, right before a major event of theirs. The devs' automation just didn't work for AWS hosts, despite a large percent of our clients using it. So I wrote my own automation that just used selenium, which worked well enough to get things installed before the event. Afterwards, I was told that I had too much access, and that if I ever went to the press about the issues we had, that all of my coworkers would be fired once the client sued. Good times.)
Morpheus:
What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
I think it's quite a bit more complicated than "because we want stuff"--I'd say it's because we're serfs for the ultra wealthy.
most jobs I've had only cover 50% of the healthcare premiums so big whoop... I'm saving $150/mo by getting health care through my job... the money isn't worth needing a job.
this may not be the experience for people not in tech/high salaries, with medical conditions, or families but I sometimes get tired of the blanket statement that you need a job to get healthcare in the states.
All the middle class folks I know work crazy hours because they want a new car, or to buy a bigger house or save for their kids private education. Not needs, wants.
They could take a job that pay a bit less, has health insurance and gives them back 20 hrs a week, but they aren’t willing to make that trade off.
