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This is actually false. The average American worker today works more hours per year than a 14th century peasant (http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/2

This is actually false. The average American worker today works more hours per year than a 14th century peasant (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...). Hunter-gatherers only worked 2-3 hours per day. Despite technology allowing us to work less, we work more. Yes we should be grateful of technological advancement, but too many people are unnecessarily depressed and suicidal, and it doesn't have to be this way.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TomMckenny 9y ago
Indeed, the typical American now spends more hours just to pay for land to sleep on than hunter-gatherers did to live.
- slphil 9y ago
  This isn't true. Hunter gatherer life is nearly universally harsh and violent. I posted an article on this in the same comment thread. Modern humans are miserable, for sure, but older forms of life were not better.
drewcon 9y ago
So more “vacation”, but dead at 40. Sounds like a great trade.
slphil 9y ago
To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us. Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/ http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...
- FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
  While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually study then is through archeological records from before the birth of cities, which are unfortunately limited in what they can say.
  - pharke 9y ago
    I wouldn't say it's the only way. You could certainly gather data from experimental archaeology. True, you couldn't duplicate the lives of early hunter gatherer's precisely since you would have to take certain precautions to protect the well being of the researchers and you would be limited in your choice of locations but you could certainly perform experiments that would tell you how much time was necessary for gathering food, hunting, preparing food, making clothing and tools, building and repairing shelters, etc.
  - slphil 9y ago
    Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.) Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).
- gambiting 9y ago
  Women particularly spent almost all spare time making clothing - because a pair of pants could take a month to make. Sure it wasn't backbreaking work in the fields, but it wasn't spare leisure time either.
JanezStupar 9y ago
This is a persistent myth. I have found the original source of "15 hour work week" study and it turns out that the methodology is completely bunk. The researcher only categorized "work" as "time spent outside of camp". They did not categorize any of food preparation, shelter maintenance/building and making/mending clothes as "work". In reality hunter gatherers spend close to 40 hours a week just on food preparation. Considering the metric, I myself only work a day a month. Because that is how much it takes for me to make money to purchase groceries.
terryf 9y ago
I work my ass off. Lot more hours than would be technically necessary. High tech as well. I've also gone hiking in the mountains in California. Been on the beach in Italy. Walked around in the center of Munich. As a 14th century peasant I probably never even knew those places existed. I can also get pain medication if I have a headache. I can go to a doctor to fix my broken bones if I happen to get one. Oh, and the likelihood of dying of a random infection or chicken pox is exceedingly low. Is is worth spending more time in a nice, warm, comfortable office to be able to do all of those things? Hell yes. Is it all shits and giggles all the time? Of course not.
- andrepd 9y ago
  But that is a false dichotomy. Your working long hours in an office in no way helps or correlates with the ability of being able to travel, or to have headache medication.
  - letsgetphysITal 9y ago
    Work long hours to make money to pay for nice things like travel and medication because those things take time and effort to create and time spent creating should be rewarded and we reward people spending time working long hours creating things with money. So yes, it does correlate.
    - terryf 9y ago
      ooh. much better put than my longer rant in sibling comment.
  - terryf 9y ago
    Technically, you're probably right. Realistically I also like to live in a nice house, do have to (well, by choice obviously) take care of three kids and like to enjoy a luxury here and there. That takes money. I have tried multiple times to build my own companies, but sadly haven't been successful in that. So that's for the travel argument. As for the headache medication argument - I have that only because thousands of people have spent a lot of time in offices and labs developing those drugs and treatments. Personally, my work mostly revolves around making wind turbines more efficient at producing energy by helping with data analysis. I also like to think that's my small way of offsetting the environmental damage I do by travelling. It's probably not enough, but still. something. So yeah, I'd say spending time at the office correlates quite nicely.
retube 9y ago
> Hunter-gatherers only worked 2-3 hours per day. They were also dead by 35.
- dwater 9y ago
  That is misleading. Infant mortality was high, but for those who lived past childhood average lifespan was not that far off from what it is today. https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
  - retube 9y ago
    OK. they only had a 50% chance of making it to 5 years old. That's much better!
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    What you said is also misleading. Hunter gatherers could live as long as people live today, but they frequently did not. Murder rates among hunter gatherers are insanely high. And there are all manner of disease that are no longer fatal, but once were. Heck, I've had several infections in my own life that would have been catastrophic 100 years ago.
toasterlovin 9y ago
Just an FYI: hunter gatherers haven't been a significant portion of the overall human population for thousands of years. Like it or not, humans uncovered an ecological niche in the form of agriculture that was vastly more successful than hunting and foraging. The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day. And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.
- xyzzyz 9y ago
  > The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day. That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day. Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years. This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow. If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TomMckenny 9y ago

Indeed, the typical American now spends more hours just to pay for land to sleep on than hunter-gatherers did to live.

slphil 9y ago
This isn't true. Hunter gatherer life is nearly universally harsh and violent. I posted an article on this in the same comment thread. Modern humans are miserable, for sure, but older forms of life were not better.

drewcon 9y ago

So more “vacation”, but dead at 40. Sounds like a great trade.

slphil 9y ago

To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us. Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/ http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...

FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually study then is through archeological records from before the birth of cities, which are unfortunately limited in what they can say.
- pharke 9y ago
  I wouldn't say it's the only way. You could certainly gather data from experimental archaeology. True, you couldn't duplicate the lives of early hunter gatherer's precisely since you would have to take certain precautions to protect the well being of the researchers and you would be limited in your choice of locations but you could certainly perform experiments that would tell you how much time was necessary for gathering food, hunting, preparing food, making clothing and tools, building and repairing shelters, etc.
- slphil 9y ago
  Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.) Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).
gambiting 9y ago
Women particularly spent almost all spare time making clothing - because a pair of pants could take a month to make. Sure it wasn't backbreaking work in the fields, but it wasn't spare leisure time either.

JanezStupar 9y ago

This is a persistent myth. I have found the original source of "15 hour work week" study and it turns out that the methodology is completely bunk. The researcher only categorized "work" as "time spent outside of camp". They did not categorize any of food preparation, shelter maintenance/building and making/mending clothes as "work". In reality hunter gatherers spend close to 40 hours a week just on food preparation. Considering the metric, I myself only work a day a month. Because that is how much it takes for me to make money to purchase groceries.

terryf 9y ago

I work my ass off. Lot more hours than would be technically necessary. High tech as well. I've also gone hiking in the mountains in California. Been on the beach in Italy. Walked around in the center of Munich. As a 14th century peasant I probably never even knew those places existed. I can also get pain medication if I have a headache. I can go to a doctor to fix my broken bones if I happen to get one. Oh, and the likelihood of dying of a random infection or chicken pox is exceedingly low. Is is worth spending more time in a nice, warm, comfortable office to be able to do all of those things? Hell yes. Is it all shits and giggles all the time? Of course not.

andrepd 9y ago
But that is a false dichotomy. Your working long hours in an office in no way helps or correlates with the ability of being able to travel, or to have headache medication.
- letsgetphysITal 9y ago
  Work long hours to make money to pay for nice things like travel and medication because those things take time and effort to create and time spent creating should be rewarded and we reward people spending time working long hours creating things with money. So yes, it does correlate.
  - terryf 9y ago
    ooh. much better put than my longer rant in sibling comment.
- terryf 9y ago
  Technically, you're probably right. Realistically I also like to live in a nice house, do have to (well, by choice obviously) take care of three kids and like to enjoy a luxury here and there. That takes money. I have tried multiple times to build my own companies, but sadly haven't been successful in that. So that's for the travel argument. As for the headache medication argument - I have that only because thousands of people have spent a lot of time in offices and labs developing those drugs and treatments. Personally, my work mostly revolves around making wind turbines more efficient at producing energy by helping with data analysis. I also like to think that's my small way of offsetting the environmental damage I do by travelling. It's probably not enough, but still. something. So yeah, I'd say spending time at the office correlates quite nicely.

retube 9y ago

> Hunter-gatherers only worked 2-3 hours per day. They were also dead by 35.

dwater 9y ago
That is misleading. Infant mortality was high, but for those who lived past childhood average lifespan was not that far off from what it is today. https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
- retube 9y ago
  OK. they only had a 50% chance of making it to 5 years old. That's much better!
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  What you said is also misleading. Hunter gatherers could live as long as people live today, but they frequently did not. Murder rates among hunter gatherers are insanely high. And there are all manner of disease that are no longer fatal, but once were. Heck, I've had several infections in my own life that would have been catastrophic 100 years ago.

toasterlovin 9y ago

Just an FYI: hunter gatherers haven't been a significant portion of the overall human population for thousands of years. Like it or not, humans uncovered an ecological niche in the form of agriculture that was vastly more successful than hunting and foraging. The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day. And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.

xyzzyz 9y ago
> The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day. That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day. Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years. This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow. If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.