4 ms·

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 t

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.

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.