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.
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.
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.
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.
It's far from the biggest tragedy in modern society, but I have learned something valuable when looking for future work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's really tough on your body to do physical labor day-in, day-out over the course of a lifetime.
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.
It was hard. I got paid terribly. It motivated the hell out of me to get out.
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.
Shift 10 pallets of stock, or plough a field? You know how much you have left of the task at a glance.
Work through a pile of Jira tickets? That could be a morning or a day of headaches.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that most of office workers. If you are in a role that gives you some fulfilment then you should consider yourself lucky.
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
this may be the key. When I was younger, I don't remember getting tired much no matter what I was doing, programming, studying, gardening.
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.
Anyway that’s my theory.
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.
Which ones?
Not really. It's called communism, and it's been tried many times.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>No literature, sure, because they were illiterate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature
(I know you mentioned storytelling in passing, but that rather downplays it. Oral literature was a big deal.)
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.
Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
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 think we might consider them dull because we're not living their lives but maybe these were denser and fuller times than what we do today.
It's also possible that having harsher conditions half a year, made simple games and gatherings deeply satisfying.
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.
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.
When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.
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.
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.
Otherwise, I recommend the "Tales of Green Valley" historical farm series and sequels for a well-informed English version. Here is the sequel "Tudor Monastery Farm" on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0Zh...
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"...
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.
Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.
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).
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:
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
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.
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.)
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).
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.
My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither did my mother.
You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?
"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."
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.
Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.
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
Indeed, prepping food was no cake walk. Grinding grains by hand is pretty hellish, and making edible flour from high-tanin acorns takes weeks.
Sane with spinning yarn.
Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
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
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.
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 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.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...
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.
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
There are qualitative differences in results independent of time savings...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine
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.
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.
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.
So replace computers with agriculture and this xkcd really is timeless.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
They were reactions to the extended working hours employed in the industrial revolution to maximize capital utilization in factories.
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.
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...
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.
> 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".
Source (but you can find stuff like this everywhere) https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/historical-...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Potato_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Evictio...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_ex...
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.
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.
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.
People would say I'm lazy, because I'm come to work at 11am or wanted to work from home.
Many even got angry and said I'm insolent for wanting to work like this, while the rest of the world simply does as they're asked.
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?
Only work 10h a week.
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.
Running water is also nice .
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.
Previously, didn't they work for aristocratic land owners? Did they ever have the upper hand?
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.
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.
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.
Being part of the merchant class in feudal times was a very high class outcome
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
Recreation is different than leisure. It's about re-creation and renewal, more like play.
Leisure - rest/recovery. Restorative but not necessarily enriching
Recreation - fun, play, stimulating and enriching activities.
The implication that a life of work+leisure is basically just work and recharging so you can work more.
Yes?
As discussed in Stone Age Economics by Sahlins:
https://archive.org/details/StoneAgeEconomics_201611
https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-domingu...
The biblical expulsion from the Eden of gathering fruit to the toil of agriculture also makes that point.
This resonates a lot with me and I'm sure others
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.
A great manager is at the service of their team, and so makes sure you don't have to deal with a lot of bullshit.
But a "boss" manager is indeed a negative.
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.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/business/9...
I wonder what later research adds.
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?
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.
Other aspects of these claims of a more leisurely life are refuted here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulati...
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.
World population was 1/10 of today, so there wouldn't have been food for most of us.
Of course, our ancestors living then didn't have that comparison, and were possibly much happier than we are.
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).
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.
This statement is only true if you don't count slaves as people
