7 ms·

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.

danieltillett 7y ago
Exactly. Hard physical work is real work - sitting at a desk tapping on a keyboard is a dream.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  This seems like gatekeeping work.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  it's a different job. it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    While many athletes do work hard, it is one thing to work hard when you are well fed and another when you are starving. I have done both hard physical and keyboard tapping jobs in my life and I have no wish to go back to doing hard labor.
    - Fricken 7y ago
      I enjoy hard labour, just not for 40 hours or more a week, every week. People doing traditional agriculture have to bust their ass during planting and harvest, but the rest of the time they aren't working that hard. Same with sitting at a computer, doing it all the time drives me insane. I've got various hobbies and interests I'm passionate about, just not so passionate that I want to do them full time for the rest of my life.
    - lostjohnny 7y ago
      My family comes from poverty and hard work, my grandmother died last November at the age of 96, she worked, mainly as a farmer, her entire life up until 3/4 years ago. I've never seen her tired, she never looked like she was not gonna finish what she started because it was too much. Truth is physical work is hard only if you're not used to it. Your body adapts to the amount of energy you give to it. The harder the job, the more it takes to adapt, but it happens. Well, unless we're talking about extreme malnutrition, but I've honestly never seen it in the west, not even in the deep country of central Italy, where my family comes from. After a while working the fields is a lot less hard than climbing a dozen steps twice a day after you sat all day eating snacks, drinking sodas and basically not exercising at all. Hard work today, IMHO, is working at Amazon's storage facilities, where stress adds up to what's basically legalized slavery and the workers cannot even work at their own pace because they have to work at the machines speed.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
Sure we might not work as 'hard' but at what cost? Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. It's not unfounded nor is it even surprising that people are complaining and comparing their lives to the past.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  That's OK and expected, but it's hard to compare two very different situations and life styles by looking just at time spent on the activity. Also 10 hours in office is not the same as 10 hours of working, no one works all the time. So I'm just saying that we need to compare things properly, taking all the angles into the account, rather than just cherry-picking some metrics and use it to attack "modern day capitalism"
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  > Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. Physically too. Watch people when they get their first office job, a lot will start packing on the weight because they are sitting and grazing on junk food all day, walk considerably less, more stress "just got an email, argh my phone is ringing, ugh what does my team lead one that is instant messaging me, ugh I'm not meeting production, do I have time to go pee before the half hour meeting?" etc.
Draiken 7y ago
I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor. You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards. On the other hand with mental work, mostly you can't stop thinking about work unless you distract yourself. Many times you don't see the outcome of what you did and it's pretty easy to think you haven't actually "done" anything. Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns. Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  > You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. Found a guy who haven't done any hard physical labor before. You are confusing a 8-hourd hardcore shift/12 hours hard work under the boiling sun in the field with a 1-2 hour workout in a gym. > Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards. Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.
  - HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
    I did this for 3 years. Things you didn't mention- Breaks exist, and are encouraged. I have to take breaks in my office setting and bosses act like it's not okay. You get good at the Physical activity. The first month sucks, after that it's fine. The Physical activity isn't as hard as it appears. There are often tools to aid. I found my 2 Physical jobs was more mental than Physical.
  - luc4sdreyer 7y ago
exDM69 7y ago
In modern farming, the hard part is not sitting in the tractor working on the fields. The struggle comes from running a business, taking care of financials and keeping the tractors running and cash flow positive in a very competitive, globalized environment which pays very badly. I have done farm hand work the modern way with tractors and the old timey way with horses. If it paid as well and was as stable as computer work in the office, I'd trade my job for either. Farm work with tractors is sweaty, dirty, solitary job but it's not particularly physically taxing. You don't need much strength most of the time, but there are times when you need to lift heavy things etc. But at the end of the day you see the field is plowed and you get to work with big machines (fun!). Farm work with horses is sweatier and dirtier but it's a community effort with typically a minimum of two people and one horse. In the olden days it would have been a whole family group working together to put food on the table. This kind of work is very tough physically but is very rewarding and relaxing mentally. And sitting on my ass all day in the office is also quite physically demanding in the sense that I must hit the gym regularly after work or my health will suffer. You mention textile work, for example. Spinning yarn was an activity almost everyone took a part in. People back then carried a spool of yarn and a bunch of fibers in their pockets and spun it in their idle time, e.g. while sitting together with their family at night. It's not too dissimilar to playing with a yo-yo, or doing knitting or other activities people enjoy even today. Pre-industrial life was not as tough as modern people think. There were many positive sides to a simpler lifestyle back then. These days we're well fed and have good health care but we work ourselves to death for no obvious reason.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  I was talking more about the amount of work, than how hard it is (and it's hard, especially in summer). On the farm you start very early in the morning and there's always something that needs to be taken care of, practically until you go to bed. Now, it probably depends also on the size of the farm, number of people, type of crops and how good the land is, what animals do you keep, machines, etc. My experience is that there was very little free time of just doing nothing. Pace is slower, so you have a lot of small time-outs in between the chores, but very rarely you're like: "OK, we did everything for today, I'm off to binge watch Netflix for the rest of the day" (except in winters when days are shorter, then you get some tv time). That was my experience, at least.
msluyter 7y ago
Almost certainly in the sense of physical hardship -- but perhaps not in terms of total working hours. Here's another more sprightly essay on the topic: https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-more https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-m... "Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks." Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.
- deeg 7y ago
  This contradicts my understanding of meal times. "Three meals a day" didn't really start until the industrial revolution [0]. In medieval times you ate when you got food. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692
jaclaz 7y ago
I would add that cows (or whatever other animals in the farm) don't have any idea about saturdays, sundays or hoilidays, they want to be fed (and in the case of cows need to be milked) every day, sun, rain or snow. And it is not so ancient (medieval) as it may seem, it depends a lot on the country and the actual area. I am told that the family (a very large one, composed of some thirty-forty people) of my great-grandfather (born in 1860 or 1861) lived in a farm (near but not so near to a village) in a remote area of the Apennines and they made one trip each year (with a horse carriage) to a village some 60 km away, on the seaside, to buy salt. Besides that, all they actually bought "outside" were matches and some kerosene (or lamp oil), some steel/iron tools and glass and clay tableware, all the rest, including furniture, soap and candles was created/manufactured in the farm, including shoes[1] and clothes (they had wool, linen/canvas, leather) . An older brother of my great-grandfather was semingly the first one to buy (circa 1865 or so) a rifle to go hunting, so you can add to the list gun powder. [1] what was used largely at the time in farms were wooden clogs (or barefoot) , shoes were reserved for special occasions only

danieltillett 7y ago

Exactly. Hard physical work is real work - sitting at a desk tapping on a keyboard is a dream.

WilliamEdward 7y ago
This seems like gatekeeping work.
lostjohnny 7y ago
it's a different job. it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  While many athletes do work hard, it is one thing to work hard when you are well fed and another when you are starving. I have done both hard physical and keyboard tapping jobs in my life and I have no wish to go back to doing hard labor.
  - Fricken 7y ago
    I enjoy hard labour, just not for 40 hours or more a week, every week. People doing traditional agriculture have to bust their ass during planting and harvest, but the rest of the time they aren't working that hard. Same with sitting at a computer, doing it all the time drives me insane. I've got various hobbies and interests I'm passionate about, just not so passionate that I want to do them full time for the rest of my life.
  - lostjohnny 7y ago
    My family comes from poverty and hard work, my grandmother died last November at the age of 96, she worked, mainly as a farmer, her entire life up until 3/4 years ago. I've never seen her tired, she never looked like she was not gonna finish what she started because it was too much. Truth is physical work is hard only if you're not used to it. Your body adapts to the amount of energy you give to it. The harder the job, the more it takes to adapt, but it happens. Well, unless we're talking about extreme malnutrition, but I've honestly never seen it in the west, not even in the deep country of central Italy, where my family comes from. After a while working the fields is a lot less hard than climbing a dozen steps twice a day after you sat all day eating snacks, drinking sodas and basically not exercising at all. Hard work today, IMHO, is working at Amazon's storage facilities, where stress adds up to what's basically legalized slavery and the workers cannot even work at their own pace because they have to work at the machines speed.

WilliamEdward 7y ago

Sure we might not work as 'hard' but at what cost? Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. It's not unfounded nor is it even surprising that people are complaining and comparing their lives to the past.

ivanhoe 7y ago
That's OK and expected, but it's hard to compare two very different situations and life styles by looking just at time spent on the activity. Also 10 hours in office is not the same as 10 hours of working, no one works all the time. So I'm just saying that we need to compare things properly, taking all the angles into the account, rather than just cherry-picking some metrics and use it to attack "modern day capitalism"
ryanmercer 7y ago
> Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. Physically too. Watch people when they get their first office job, a lot will start packing on the weight because they are sitting and grazing on junk food all day, walk considerably less, more stress "just got an email, argh my phone is ringing, ugh what does my team lead one that is instant messaging me, ugh I'm not meeting production, do I have time to go pee before the half hour meeting?" etc.

Draiken 7y ago

I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor. You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards. On the other hand with mental work, mostly you can't stop thinking about work unless you distract yourself. Many times you don't see the outcome of what you did and it's pretty easy to think you haven't actually "done" anything. Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns. Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.

ernst_klim 7y ago
> You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. Found a guy who haven't done any hard physical labor before. You are confusing a 8-hourd hardcore shift/12 hours hard work under the boiling sun in the field with a 1-2 hour workout in a gym. > Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards. Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.
- HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
  I did this for 3 years. Things you didn't mention- Breaks exist, and are encouraged. I have to take breaks in my office setting and bosses act like it's not okay. You get good at the Physical activity. The first month sucks, after that it's fine. The Physical activity isn't as hard as it appears. There are often tools to aid. I found my 2 Physical jobs was more mental than Physical.
- luc4sdreyer 7y ago

exDM69 7y ago

In modern farming, the hard part is not sitting in the tractor working on the fields. The struggle comes from running a business, taking care of financials and keeping the tractors running and cash flow positive in a very competitive, globalized environment which pays very badly. I have done farm hand work the modern way with tractors and the old timey way with horses. If it paid as well and was as stable as computer work in the office, I'd trade my job for either. Farm work with tractors is sweaty, dirty, solitary job but it's not particularly physically taxing. You don't need much strength most of the time, but there are times when you need to lift heavy things etc. But at the end of the day you see the field is plowed and you get to work with big machines (fun!). Farm work with horses is sweatier and dirtier but it's a community effort with typically a minimum of two people and one horse. In the olden days it would have been a whole family group working together to put food on the table. This kind of work is very tough physically but is very rewarding and relaxing mentally. And sitting on my ass all day in the office is also quite physically demanding in the sense that I must hit the gym regularly after work or my health will suffer. You mention textile work, for example. Spinning yarn was an activity almost everyone took a part in. People back then carried a spool of yarn and a bunch of fibers in their pockets and spun it in their idle time, e.g. while sitting together with their family at night. It's not too dissimilar to playing with a yo-yo, or doing knitting or other activities people enjoy even today. Pre-industrial life was not as tough as modern people think. There were many positive sides to a simpler lifestyle back then. These days we're well fed and have good health care but we work ourselves to death for no obvious reason.

ivanhoe 7y ago
I was talking more about the amount of work, than how hard it is (and it's hard, especially in summer). On the farm you start very early in the morning and there's always something that needs to be taken care of, practically until you go to bed. Now, it probably depends also on the size of the farm, number of people, type of crops and how good the land is, what animals do you keep, machines, etc. My experience is that there was very little free time of just doing nothing. Pace is slower, so you have a lot of small time-outs in between the chores, but very rarely you're like: "OK, we did everything for today, I'm off to binge watch Netflix for the rest of the day" (except in winters when days are shorter, then you get some tv time). That was my experience, at least.

msluyter 7y ago

Almost certainly in the sense of physical hardship -- but perhaps not in terms of total working hours. Here's another more sprightly essay on the topic: https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-more https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-m... "Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks." Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.

deeg 7y ago
This contradicts my understanding of meal times. "Three meals a day" didn't really start until the industrial revolution [0]. In medieval times you ate when you got food. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692

jaclaz 7y ago

I would add that cows (or whatever other animals in the farm) don't have any idea about saturdays, sundays or hoilidays, they want to be fed (and in the case of cows need to be milked) every day, sun, rain or snow. And it is not so ancient (medieval) as it may seem, it depends a lot on the country and the actual area. I am told that the family (a very large one, composed of some thirty-forty people) of my great-grandfather (born in 1860 or 1861) lived in a farm (near but not so near to a village) in a remote area of the Apennines and they made one trip each year (with a horse carriage) to a village some 60 km away, on the seaside, to buy salt. Besides that, all they actually bought "outside" were matches and some kerosene (or lamp oil), some steel/iron tools and glass and clay tableware, all the rest, including furniture, soap and candles was created/manufactured in the farm, including shoes[1] and clothes (they had wool, linen/canvas, leather) . An older brother of my great-grandfather was semingly the first one to buy (circa 1865 or so) a rifle to go hunting, so you can add to the list gun powder. [1] what was used largely at the time in farms were wooden clogs (or barefoot) , shoes were reserved for special occasions only