5 ms·

Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay.

by mbell 7y ago

Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.

devoply 7y ago
French farmers did nothing 1/3 of the year now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives.
- croisillon 7y ago
  it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives. Not just France, suicide rates are up among farmers the world around A couple of examples: The U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer... India https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides-of-nearly-60000-indian-farmers-linked-to-climate-change-study-claims https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides...
Spooky23 7y ago
Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals. Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.
flatline 7y ago
We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.
- hnzix 7y ago
  An isolated homesteader's lifestyle would be vastly different to a medieval village community.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  They were literal pioneers. It was considered an incredibly difficult lifestyle by everyone else back then too.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.
  - libraryatnight 7y ago
    I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin
    - Zanni 7y ago
      That's a great quote. I've often said that fulfilling work is one of the great joys in life, but leave it to Ursula LeGuin to say it better.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
milquetoastaf 7y ago
Aside from hunting and clothing (which a not-insignificant portion of families still partake in) these are still modern concerns? Homeownership isn't exactly a life of leisure. It's a a plain fact that there are far more feast days and ecclesiastical holidays than federal holiday. In America, you're lucky to get a guaranteed 10 days off.
quietthrow 7y ago
May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.
JamesBarney 7y ago
Working on a side project to scratch your own itch feels very emotionally different than working for someone else. And in the same way washing clothes or making dinner doesn't feel stressful in the way working for someone else does.
- wwn_se 7y ago
  That is not universally true. I would much rather work (at my employer) than do household stuff. I like to cook but I still by the pre-planned bags with recipes since I don't like the planning part. But I pay someone else to clean my home since i rather work.
pandapower2 7y ago
I'm not sure that is true. Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not. >You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer. >You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc. It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof. Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
- kortilla 7y ago
  You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)
coldtea 7y ago
No, they really worked less hours including those things, and it has been studied a lot. In fact, a lot of the work was those things precisely. (Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner"). You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy). Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.
- icebraining 7y ago
  What kind of french farmers? The land owners with their subsidized businesses, or the hired hands?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    No, small farm owners (domestic professional production of e.g. wine, cheese, etc, but not in any large quantity). And with no use of "hired hands" in the sense of large "factory-like" farms.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  French farmers and farmers in the EU have a lot of support from the CAP (subsidy). Having said that there are a lot of pressures suicides etc farming Is not some dream job.

by mbell 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

French farmers did nothing 1/3 of the year now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives.

croisillon 7y ago
it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around
ryanmercer 7y ago
>now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives. Not just France, suicide rates are up among farmers the world around A couple of examples: The U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer... India https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides-of-nearly-60000-indian-farmers-linked-to-climate-change-study-claims https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides...

Spooky23 7y ago

Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals. Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.

flatline 7y ago

We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.

hnzix 7y ago
An isolated homesteader's lifestyle would be vastly different to a medieval village community.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
They were literal pioneers. It was considered an incredibly difficult lifestyle by everyone else back then too.
ericmcer 7y ago
The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.
- libraryatnight 7y ago
  I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin
  - Zanni 7y ago
    That's a great quote. I've often said that fulfilling work is one of the great joys in life, but leave it to Ursula LeGuin to say it better.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago

milquetoastaf 7y ago

Aside from hunting and clothing (which a not-insignificant portion of families still partake in) these are still modern concerns? Homeownership isn't exactly a life of leisure. It's a a plain fact that there are far more feast days and ecclesiastical holidays than federal holiday. In America, you're lucky to get a guaranteed 10 days off.

quietthrow 7y ago

May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.

dcolkitt 7y ago
To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.

JamesBarney 7y ago

Working on a side project to scratch your own itch feels very emotionally different than working for someone else. And in the same way washing clothes or making dinner doesn't feel stressful in the way working for someone else does.

wwn_se 7y ago
That is not universally true. I would much rather work (at my employer) than do household stuff. I like to cook but I still by the pre-planned bags with recipes since I don't like the planning part. But I pay someone else to clean my home since i rather work.

pandapower2 7y ago

I'm not sure that is true. Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not. >You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer. >You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc. It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof. Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

kortilla 7y ago
You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)

coldtea 7y ago

No, they really worked less hours including those things, and it has been studied a lot. In fact, a lot of the work was those things precisely. (Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner"). You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy). Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.

icebraining 7y ago
What kind of french farmers? The land owners with their subsidized businesses, or the hired hands?
- coldtea 7y ago
  No, small farm owners (domestic professional production of e.g. wine, cheese, etc, but not in any large quantity). And with no use of "hired hands" in the sense of large "factory-like" farms.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
French farmers and farmers in the EU have a lot of support from the CAP (subsidy). Having said that there are a lot of pressures suicides etc farming Is not some dream job.