11 ms·

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric?

• jgrahamc 10y ago
  Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".
  • kevincennis 10y ago
    "Forced" doesn't seem like exactly the right word.
    • Doxin 10y ago
      It seems pretty fitting to me. Work or don't eat. Technically you could decide to starve of course, but it's at the very least coercive.
    • goalieca 10y ago
      I wouldn't go to work if I didn't have to. It can feel like prison some days. Forced is the right word.
      • mantas 10y ago
        You can bum around and live off welfare. Quite a few people have pulled that off and seem to enjoy it.
        • jackhack 10y ago
          Enough so that in Hawaii, for instance, they are providing airline tickets to those who will volunteer to leave the island (and its welfare system) and go be a burden on the mainland, instead.
      • recursive 10y ago
        Why can't everything just be free? Life is so unfair.
      • pc86 10y ago
        Even the US has plenty of support programs that you can survive without a job.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    And every weekend. And evenings and mornings. And the kids are at school anyway. This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.
    • tsunamifury 10y ago
      Many of us work 14 hours a day, plus occasional weekends, don't yet have kids or a house, and are at the top of our field. You can call it whatever you want, but its not adding up to a "better life."
  • jerf 10y ago
    "Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"." As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this time period their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough. Not to mention many of these hunting trips often spanned multiple days from what I gather. I suppose militaries had a lot of cohesion, as long as you don't mind defining "loved ones" as "my squadmates". Family farms still generally would end up with the family cut in half between the women and men, assuming the men even stayed together. Etc. I can't off the top of my head think of a time period where there wasn't a large portion of the population separated from at least half their family for long periods of time. The current situation isn't perfect, but let's be precise about what we're comparing it to, and when exactly it supposedly existed and was widespread.
    • scarmig 10y ago
      1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies. 2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it. Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies. The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.
      • nindalf 10y ago
        That is an extraordinary claim you're making, that people had to be forced to remain within agricultural societies. Of the scholarship in this area that I'm familiar with, nothing supports this. If you're aware of research that suggests otherwise, please share it. I often see this nostalgia about how much better things used to be, compared to how bad it is now, whether that time period is 5, 25, 100 or in your case, 10000 years ago. This usually glosses over the very real downsides of living in any of those time periods. In the case of hunter gatherer societies here are some problems that we no longer have to deal with once we moved to agricultural societies with central authority. In no particular order 1. Vagaries of food. You had to constantly find food, because storage wasn't easy. You could have a few months where you had plenty of food but a difficult week could see some friends and family die of starvation. This was a very real danger. Compare that with what a difficult week looks like today. This led to 2. Constantly moving. You could never stay in one place too long. You really like the area you're currently at? Too bad, move on before food sources dry up here. What if the new place is not as good and food is difficult to find? Too bad, keep moving. This led to 3. Leaving behind people. If a person could not walk at the pace of the group, they would be left behind to die. There was no quiet corner they could retire to, they had to walk or die. Not just old people. If a person broke their leg, and couldn't walk for a couple of months, they would be left behind to die. 4. Safety. If you lived in a large group with strong fighters this wasn't a problem. But if you didn't, or encountered a larger or more skilled group of fighters, you could see everyone in your group killed except for younger women. That's less of a problem in societies where a central entity has a monopoly on violence. There is absolutely no doubt that all of these factors led to a high mortality rate. Once people moved to agricultural societies that were relatively safer and had relatively stable sources of food, the population exploded. The choice that people made was not forced upon them. Indeed it would have been difficult to do at a time when society had just started to change and central authority was still weak. Rather it was just people choosing the safe, stable option rather than the interesting one. The interestingness of being a hunter gatherer is what modern societies find attractive - eating different things everyday, moving to a new place every couple of weeks, almost like a constant vacation. But it ignores the constant spectre of death that hangs over every such society. My understanding of this topic is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I highly recommend it.
  • gdulli 10y ago
    Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die. And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today. So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.
• Declanomous 10y ago
  I think his ego gets in the way of his argument. I was thinking about how melodramatic he sounded about all of this, and then I got to the picture of him standing cruciform under a spotlight, and all I could do was roll my eyes.
  • Fricken 10y ago
    I doubt he chose the photo. While a great writer, Coupland is a bit shy & awkward as a speaker.
    • Declanomous 10y ago
      I understand that he didn't choose the photo, but the body language strikes me strange, what with the arms outstretched. I'm probably being a bit harsh, because it's not his event, and he didn't set up the stage, or the lighting. Regardless, I view speakers who make gestures like that with skepticism, since I associate the posture with grandiose self-interest.
      • geoka9 10y ago
        I've no idea about the guy, but photos from live events can be very out-of-context, so I wouldn't put too much weight in this.
        • Declanomous 10y ago
          That's fair, but the context I'm using is the rest of the article, which is rather grandiose itself.
• fsloth 10y ago
  Chained to a desk from 9-5 is inhuman if the work is not intrinsically motivating. From quality of life perspective I'm not sure if it's much better than generic hunter gathering. The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept. The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better. Sadly, it's the status quo. Yes, calling it barbaric is hyperbolic - but the end is not to find out the specific philosophic understanding of the condition but to create propaganda and motivation to find something better.
  • krapp 10y ago
    Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line. To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done. Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains. UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.
    • pc86 10y ago
      Most of HS class did not go to college. They knew with alarming certainty that whatever they did for work was not going to be enjoyable, was not going to pay enough, and for some of them would even be physically dangerous. It was just a fact of life. Work was something shitty that you did so you could put a roof over your head and food on the table, and what you did outside of work was your life. The privileged few on HN (myself included 100%) who find their work rewarding, fulfilling, and extremely lucrative, are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what "work" is like in the real world.
• yawz 10y ago
  > the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords. We should have never left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. :)
  • jackhack 10y ago
    Because nothing beats dying at the ripe old age 30 with a toothless mouth, body failing of undernourishment and disease (especially parasites), common death in childbirth, the slightest infection becoming a death sentence, and so on.
    • yawz 10y ago
      Well... These things are not inherent characteristics of hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They were the same until very recently :).
• purplethinking 10y ago
  Early agriculture was indeed the worst. But look further back, to a time before agriculture. Hunter gatherers spent significanly less time actually hunting and gathering that we do working today. And while off work we have a hard time mentally letting go of it, hunter gatherers instead had pure free time. I'm not saying life was perfect back then, but in terms of work we can clearly strive further. Agriculture has been fairly brief time in the history of our species, so perhaps we shouldn't be using it as a base line.
• ellius 10y ago
  I think he made the mistake of ignoring half the connotation of the word. "Barbaric" really implies a combination of two underlying ideas. He's right insofar as the 9-5 is backwards and unsympathetic to human beings, which I think is his point. He's wrong in that it isn't physically brutal. The problem is he picked a word with a complex connotation when he needed a simpler one.
  • hectorr 10y ago
    That's true, but language is constantly evolving. I actually think we need a cultural shift in how we perceive work. The high intrinsic and extrinsic value we place on it served a lot of communities really well for millennia, but things really are changing these days with robotics and narrow AI. Language is one of the main tools we have to work with.
• lj3 10y ago
  > Really, barbaric? Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say, > It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-against-9-to-5-jobs.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag... edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0]. [0]: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/ http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...
  • gdulli 10y ago
    > > Really, barbaric? > Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem. But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make. > awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.
• return0 10y ago
  > It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era