27 ms·

Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

• getbricked 5y ago
  For a deeper dive, James Suzman the anthropologist wrote 'Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots'. Published in 2021. It's worth a read if anyone wants understand how the industrial revolution changed work patterns and (perhaps more importantly) how the agricultural revolution changed how people spend their time and how much leisure time people have had throughout human history
• 999900000999 5y ago
  Um. Considering famines were common, 1/10 women died during child birth, infant mortality was absurdly high and most people stayed in the same town until they died, I prefer now. Running water is also nice .
  • adventured 5y ago
    Dental care. Antibiotics. Access to healthcare. Low risk surgery. Blood tests. Vision care. A zillion consumer goods and things, so many we'll be here all day to name them all. Decent toothbrushes. Electricity. Umbrellas. Flashlights. Batteries. Pens and pencils. Deodorant. Postal shipping. GPS. Near instant global news. Inexpensive razors and razor blades. Scissors. Asprin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen. Grocery stores. Air conditioning, central heating. Mass, quality clothing options. Nearly every possible type of shoe. Automobiles, mass-transit, airplanes, motor powered boats. Well constructed homes. Extraordinary entertainment options, from lowbrow to highbrow. The global travel system. Dishwashers. Washers & dryers for clothing. Lawnmowers. Power tools, and relatively inexpensive mass manufactured tools in general. Safe, inexpensive tap water. Thousands of different kinds of tape, paint, paper. Cardboard. Inexpensive, quality glass and mirrors for nearly any purpose. Insert 4,572,927 other things here. This article is a joke. Everything was much harder back then, everything was much worse back then.
    • 999900000999 5y ago
      I'll argue peak humanity was 2009 before social media become mainstream.
      • adventured 5y ago
        We'll see if people adapt (or not) to deal better with social media in terms of altering how they consume / interact with it, given the experiences of the past decade. I think a huge percentage of people have pulled back from eg Facebook and commonly broadcasting their views there, or engaging in low value social conflicts via social media. The average person is not Tweeting their thoughts on a daily basis and is not going to. I think it could take perhaps a few decades (~2010-2030) for a full cycle to take place of people - across multiple generations - experiencing social media across their lives over many years, to inform the next generations of social media's nature. There is still a lot yet to learn about how social media impacts us, shapes us, influences us, contorts us. That's all still being judged, regulated, pondered, debated, studied. Television and radio took decades to play out in terms of what manner they fit into society, how society would use / consume those things, what society would accept from those things, and how they would be regulated.
    • pietrovismara 5y ago
      I feel like you've wasted 153 words while completely missing the point of the article, which isn't to advocate for a return to a pre-industrial era, but to ask why we have less free time today than we had then.
• throw63738 5y ago
  This is just not true. Working fields is back breaking labour. Old feudalism was similar to slavery.
• 1MachineElf 5y ago
  This isn't the first time I've seen this sentiment displayed here on HN with regard to historic European civilization. What I haven't seen is a comparison to other ones. I'm particularly interested in Asian civilization.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    I'd be interested in other places too, but I expect a wide variance by locality, trade, etc. I wouldn't expect, especially back then, England and Wales to be the same, or possibly not different regions of those countries. Groupings as large as 'Europe' and 'Asia' might not be meaningful.
• Swizec 5y ago
  Sure they had a “shorter workweek” but it also took women a full workday to wash the family’s clothes, hours of walking to get water for the day, and if you wanted something from the town over that was a 3 day trip. So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days. I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked and technology/communications imposing a maximum throughput. You couldn’t work faster even if you wanted to and so you leisured. “Hurry up and wait” as some like to say PS: there’s also stories of medieval peasants in France basicalky hibernating over winter because if you didn’t sleep for 16 hours every day, you’d burn too much calories and starve[1]. I’m sure that was a very fun reason to have short workweeks [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
  • ren_engineer 5y ago
    article basically ignores quality of life in exchange for "leisure". I could build a crude shelter and be homeless and basically achieve the same thing, turns out most people don't want that. Fact is most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better, if you want something close to what the article talks about you can pretty easily move to an Amish community or try creating your own commune and try to convince people to join
    • karpierz 5y ago
      Is it that easy to leave your community and way of life to live a very different life amidst strangers?
      • ratsforhorses 5y ago
        Isn't that what a majority of us do when we reach adulthood? and though the answer is subjective, yes it's easy, fun, interesting...also if you are interested in freeloading I'd recommend it, sleeping rough, squatting, food gathering, skipping(from dumpsters) or just generally sharing resources is a lot of fun... my wake up came while squatting and transforming unused buildings...met a bunch of lovely people and learnt a lot from them..
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm also very curious about job organization, and teaching. You can work hard but in a beneficial environment (efforts are well chunked and rewarding physically and/or mentally) or you can work somehow less but in toxic settings (adversarial relationships, bad tooling, etc).
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). This goes against everything I've been taught, that the plebian class basically toiled endlessly, from Feudal Times to Industrial Revolution before labor laws to today's "multiple low-wage-jobs to survive". EDIT: Also odd that the author doesn't point out that ~2040 hours is the yearly hours in a modern 40-hour workweek in the US, give or take a few holidays.
  • dragonelite 5y ago
    Yeah even these days the friends I have that are active in the agricultural sector. Pretty much still work those hours where it peaks in the summer time and there is pretty much no activity latter half of fall and winter. Maybe except preparation for the next season and some maintenance on machines.
  • karpierz 5y ago
    It's generally suspect when someone preaches that "this is what life is like in Feudal times", considering that spans 500 years and a whole continent. Likewise for the Industrial Revolution.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Very true. Also: the last time I studied feudal times was in the US 10th grade... in the early 1980's.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Before there were artificial lights and other things there really wasn’t much you could do when it was cold and dark. Factory workers at the end of the 19th century definitely had a horrible life. They had to fight for 6day weeks and often had to work away hours a day under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions.
    • 5y ago
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  Leisure is the both the opposite of and an essential component to work. An anarchist group in the UK last century had their motto as "neither work nor leisure" which I found interesting. Recreation is different than leisure. It's about re-creation and renewal, more like play.
  • kortex 5y ago
    Making sure I'm understanding the semantic difference you are making: Leisure - rest/recovery. Restorative but not necessarily enriching Recreation - fun, play, stimulating and enriching activities. The implication that a life of work+leisure is basically just work and recharging so you can work more. Yes?
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I disagree it's because of capitalism. Capitalism was also people working in the fields and trading their produce, after paying their tax to their lord, not unlike to our income tax. There are definitely many trends that led us to work more and more. There are increasingly more and more people in the few places people with ambitions want to live in. That's more competition which gradually drives the cost down. If the wage is already low enough that it's unreasonable for someone to live on it, the working hours will go up. The real modern culprit in my opinion is the mandatory education system which indoctrinate kids to become employees for life instead of helping them find a place in society and in the market by providing value as a small business. With less employees around wages would go up, with more small businesses the capital would be spread more and not concentrated in the hands of a few. It's not hard to understand who is benefitting from this system: whoever owns capital and need workers. I'm sure there is plenty of overlap with people controlling the media and telling people what to think and want - and people in the government approving laws.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    Capitalism isn't synonymous with trade.
  • enzino 5y ago
    100%. good thing is the tide is changing, the main way they control society is through fiat money, and its going down
• k__ 5y ago
  This is especially interesting when I think about all the discussions I had about bosses and recruiters. People would say I'm lazy, because I'm come to work at 11am or wanted to work from home. Many even got angry and said I'm insolent for wanting to work like this, while the rest of the world simply does as they're asked.
  • roland35 5y ago
    It's all in the name of efficiency. While efficiency is good to some degree, it comes at a cost of robustness. If you are working at 100% capacity, if anything goes wrong you are screwed!
  • cyb_ 5y ago
    A number of people I work with have official part time schedules, ranging from 50%-80%. Their expectations and compensation are adjusted correspondingly. I wonder if you are running into this reaction because you are in a position (or applying for a position) where the expectations and compensation are calibrated to "full time" (~2000 hrs/year). Have you tried discussing a part time arrangement which might work better for you?
    • k__ 5y ago
      I'm freelancing now. Only work 10h a week.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  I didn't see it mentioned...why? What happened in the mid 19th century that labor lost the upper hand to "management"? If the tradition (of less work hours) dates so far back, what triggered its disappearance so quickly? And going forward, as if it never existed?
  • 1121redblackgo 5y ago
    The Industrial revolution and who owns the means of production. My machines, my tools, my rules. etc etc.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    > What happened in the mid 19th century that labor lost the upper hand to "management"? Previously, didn't they work for aristocratic land owners? Did they ever have the upper hand?
  • enzino 5y ago
    labor has actually gained strength, we have dramatically easier ways to become financially independent today than we had in the 19th century. in europe peasants used to be basically slaves under the "law". i think the only thing that got worse is propaganda, which is the fake culture of the elites. once you turn your head the other way things get better
• wolverine876 5y ago
  For context: The article is an excerpt from the book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor, published in 1991 (though maybe there are later editions). Here's a review: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/business/9806schor-overworked.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/business/9... I wonder what later research adds.
• gadders 5y ago
  "An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two "days-works." " Presumably because in the other half of the day, they'd be working to harvest and grow their own food. I'm not sure what the difference is between working 8 hours, and getting enough money to buy food, and working 4 hours and then another 4 hours to make your own food.
  • gbronner 5y ago
    First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day. Neither can most draft animals. Second, the mid day meal was the big one, and there was usually a nap as well. People had to walk to work, and it would be hard to get everyone back at the same time. Third, the Lord's inventory of tools was limited, so better to have two shifts of reasonably rested people than one double shift of exhausted people.
    • gadders 5y ago
      >> First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day Not sure if this is true. I worked at a building site labourer and I've seen people digging trenches all day. I'm also pretty sure in the poorer parts of the 3rd world people are toiling for 8 hours a day in manual/ox-assisted agricultural work.
• legitster 5y ago
  This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull). And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)! Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances. Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.
  • yibg 5y ago
    I’ve spent a bit of time in the rural areas of a developing country when I was younger visiting extended family. These were farmers that were fairly poor. In the summer months, lots of work, from dawn until dusk. But after the harvest until the next planting season there was no “work” to do. It was not fun. People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.
    • legitster 5y ago
• zeptocosm 5y ago
  > but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. Sounds like a typical day at a big tech company...
• waynesonfire 5y ago
  people also worked for themselves, which is intrinsically more rewarding. i use to order meat and baked goods from the butcher and baker, respectively. now it's the minimum wage employee that they hired to run the cashiers and the minimum wage employee they trained to work the machines.
  • Remnant44 5y ago
    I mean, you know, except for the peasants.. Being part of the merchant class in feudal times was a very high class outcome
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    Ask yourself, if it was so rewarding, why did we see urbanization associated with industrialization? People chose to leave those rewarding lives and move to cities and work in factories. People today choose to leave less stressful rural lives and move to cities to work professional jobs. It's so commonplace that its a cultural trope that rural people leave if they can.
• zaidf 5y ago
  >Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all This statement is only true if you don't count slaves as people
• hintymad 5y ago
  What if work is leisure? Jack Welch used to mention that he couldn't wait to get back to office in weekends. I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure: researching new algorithms, building POCs, writing whitepapers and narratives, having brainstorming meetings, and etc. I don't think I can get such meaningful activities outside of work, either. That's because the work gives real use cases that demand scale and efficiency, which drives my projects. To me, an activity is leisure if I want to do it and I have freedom to decide how to spend time.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    If work were leisure, you'd have to pay to do it, you wouldn't get paid to do it.
  • emodendroket 5y ago
    Even granting your point, many people work jobs which are tedious and/or physically tiring.
  • varjag 5y ago
    Ownership of agenda is what underlines leisure, i.e. you're not doing something because you have to. Like sure, you may need to persist through an amateur chess tournament but it's something you were willing to expose yourself to. With jobs there's really not that much leeway. You do things to make your boss and/or clients happy and ultimately your way of living depends on it. Sure it's possible to allocate time for fun activities at employer dime. However if they are too fun for everyone they are often referred as 'perks', highlighting that it's really a soft packaged form of compensation.
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    > I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure You're (we're) in a privileged position. Most jobs are drudgery: data entry specialists, cashiers, warehouse workers, assembly line workers, shop assistants. To them, every day at work is the same, and something different happening is a sign of things going wrong.
    • 5y ago
• GaryTang 5y ago
  Homeless people are dramatically better off than our ancestors
  • dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • enzino 5y ago
    half of them have supercomputers sitting around in their tents, so i'm tempted to agree with you. but they are treated like shit by their fellow humans. we literally produce enough food, even just in the usa, for 2/3 times our population. most of it gets wasted because of crazy socialist agricultural policies, to feed animals that will be incinerated instead of eaten, and so on. same goes for housing, and all other necessities. i think the homeless people are saner than the others, but they i don't think they're happy
• monkeydust 5y ago
  Reminds me of Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) by Keynes Definitely worth a read. I also finished Trekonomics by Manu Saadia which was a good attempt at trying to explain the economics behind star trek, essentially a society where the economic problem (scarcity of resources) had been solved and people live to pursue personal goals rather than income.
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  I can speak to Irish history. Long considered one of the most poor and wretched places for common folk, the rural poor had numerous issues in Ireland. While they had dance and a lovely folk music, they also had starvation, disease, lack of political representation, and a lack of basic economic ladders. They did have plentiful turf to warm themselves, in contrast to many other poor folk in other areas of Europe. They also had the gulf stream, like Iceland and the UK, which kept their climate relatively warm for it's northerly location. There's no better demonstration of the decimation of the rural Irish than the potato famine of the 1840s. It wasn't just one year, multiple years, their monocrop of the Irish Lumper potato, which had led the widespread growth in population, failed them due to fungal blight. It's estimate 5% or even 10% died of starvation in some rural areas. Moreover, millions more left in droves for the UK and USA, recognizing the crushing poverty and lack of food vastly outweighed their love of the land and culture. In my estimation, the rural Irish had leisure time for the arts despite their poverty and destitution. The abundance of time didn't help, they were too poor to own many games and objects. Yet, through music and dance and writing, they kept their spirits alive and, by some cheer, were able to Banish Misfortune.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    If it weren't for English colonization they wouldn't have been forced into such risky monocrop behavior.
    • pfortuny 5y ago
      Note that it was the very Irish who asked the English to come help them in one of their multiple internal wars…
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      It was the economic system that was imposed upon the Irish that forced them into relying on a monoculture, too, and forced them to starve. The Irish working class were forced into smaller and smaller subdivisions by English landlords[1], to the point that they could only rely on a potato monoculture[2] to sustain themselves. During the famine, those landlords evicted over half of a million poor and starving Irish people[3]. Those same Irish tenant farmers harvested crops during the famine that were then shipped and sold on the English market[4], while those that harvested them starved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants_and_subdivisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Potato_dependency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Potato_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Eviction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Evictio... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_exports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_ex...
• dang 5y ago
  The submitted title ("Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure") broke the site guidelines. Please don't do that. The rule is: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Rendello 5y ago
    Hi dang, I have a question about this. A while back I posted "Code Checking Automation [video]", but I couldn't help but feel the original title was quite vague. The video itself is about QuickCheck and more specifically, property-based testing. Would it have been kosher to add, maybe, "(QuickCheck)" or "(property-based testing)" to the end of the title to disambiguate, or did the original video authors screw themselves over with their vague original title?
    • dang 5y ago
      It's ok if you do things like that for clarity. We might (or might not) edit it out if the post makes the front page - that's a judgment-call area*. But we wouldn't post a scolding for it. We only do that when the guideline was broken in an obvious or baity way. For example, the OP was clearly editorialized when it didn't need to be—and in a baity way, which ended up lowering the quality of the thread. I'm sure that was unintentional, but the guidelines are intended to guard against that so we want people to be aware of them. The title guideline is necessarily worded in a generic way. In practice there are lots of nuances, details, etc. * One informal practice that works fairly well is that we often leave edited titles (assuming they aren't egregious) in place until/unless the submission makes the front page. At that point it is guaranteed a certain amount of attention, so the downside of reverting to the original title is lower, and we'll often do it then.
      • Rendello 5y ago
        Thanks, that disambiguates things nicely.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I would take a 10 hour day in almost any job in the 21st century over an 8-16 hour workday for a 14th century farm laborer mowing hay with a scythe or plowing behind a team of oxen. I get meal and rest breaks too, and even though they may get more days off than I do, what are they doing on those days off? Chopping wood? Thatching their roof? Hauling water from a well? The amount of labor done in a day by peasants in the European middle ages dwarfs everything but the extreme outliers of today.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • j56no 5y ago
    we could have more spare time and use that to improve society, instead we’re kept busy printing money
    • nlitened 5y ago
      Any effort to improve society looks like work.
  • firstplacelast 5y ago
    I'd take a 0 hour day in the 21st century over a 10 hour day in the 21st century...I genuinely don't get the point of your comment.
    • karaterobot 5y ago
      The article is about how we work more today than people did before the industrial revolution, both in terms of average hours per day over a year, and days worked in a year. My point is that you can't compare the life of an ordinary worker today to the life of an ordinary worker in the distant past, because the kind of work being done is so different. Working more hours and days today is easier than working fewer hours and days in the past.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Not quite: the workweek described still sounds like at least 40 hours. What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during the early/middle years of the industrial revolution. Modern day capitalism, while significantly flawed, seems to have moved on from that early horror: I have ancestors from ~100 years ago that died of black lung after spending decades of 60-70 hours/week in coal mines. The author also ignores the time outside of "work" necessary to keep a household going. Time spent outside of the fields wasn't just idle time: everything from cooking to home maintenance was added labor that would eat away at those off hours more so than similar tasks today. And sure, today some people still have no choice but to work long hours, and some people choose to do so, but I imagine that was the case in the supposedly more idyllic workers' environment described by the author as well. Other aspects of these claims of a more leisurely life are refuted here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-peasants-really-did-not-work-only-150-days-a-year%3fformat=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulati... We also shouldn't forget the conditions of work & life for the average person. Peasantry was certainly a big step above out & out slavery but freedom was still significantly curtailed. There was not for example universal freedom of movement. Absent approval by the local lord, a person was bound to the land they were born on. The quality of low/middle justice for what rights people did have was highly variable & subject to capricious whims at times. (Which isn't to say that's a completely solved problem today though) All of which is to say that workday hours, even granting the author's central thesis (which I don't), are not the yardstick to use when measuring quality of life. At best it's just one data point in the constellation of factors involved.
• Aunche 5y ago
  Small time farmers in capitalist nations who did not serve a lord should have even more comfortable lives than peasants. According to this anti-capitalist narrative, it would be absolutely absurd for these people to abandon their their small farms and family to work in a crowded factory for longer hours and more dangerous conditions. And yet it happened anyways, suggesting that the life a a peasant wasn't as idyllic as the author seems to think it was.
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  The problem is that the more we automate, the supply exceeds demand in the labor market. That in turn allows employers to easily suck up the excess potential workers at low wages, and also makes further automation or even repairing the machines we got uneconomical. Stagnant weak demands screws over big things like nuclear power plants and subways. We need things like a UBI and further shrinking of the workweek (perhaps as an "automatic stabilizer" based on pop vs total working hours vs popuation!) in order to not stagnate technology and get back our free time.
  • WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    I think we just have to rethink what being a good person is. Workers have way wayyy more power than people think, they just need unity and the ability to say 'Fuck you' to the systems and people that harm more than help. And keep in mind; of course those systems and their people tell you that they help more than harm. UBI is totally not necessary. The market works with minimal intervention if people are able to live fearlessly.
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      > Workers have way wayyy more power than people think Explain? Individual workers are quite weak. A lack of large scale workplaces in the service sector make organization hard. Overall weak demand and lack of competition makes "capital strikes" in response to worker unrest especially easy to pull off. We are seeing more strikes now precisely to do stimulus checks making 2020 a better year on average for bottom quintile workers, and increased demand further making labor markets somewhat tight for the first time in 20 years.
      • WhisperingShiba 5y ago
        Unions are a good start, so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation. Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption. Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation. I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
• penjelly 5y ago
  this reminds me of a part of Sapiens where they discuss how agriculture actually ended up taking up more time then foraging for early settlers. They also mentioned how their nutrition and teeth suffered initially as well.
• supperburg 5y ago
  I am reading Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. It is a fascinating first hand account of English royalty and wars in the 14th century. I think people should also consider the higher classes in those times because they seem to have worked continuously at killing each other. It’s work none the less.
• cwwc 5y ago
  I wonder if there are good comparative studies on the amount of middle management these days compared to the past
• didibus 5y ago
  Tangentially, the physical labor jobs I had when younger never really tired me out the way that the mental/bureaucratic/political job I have now does. Physical work actually energized me, I mean this is all confirmed today as well, we know all the benefits exercise brings on well being. There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking and literally mentally draining in a way where when the day ends, it's as if you suffer from temporary depression. Even getting motivated to do things you want to do is hard, resorting to the laziest activity is often what happens, phone, social media, television. Sometimes I can't even get myself to play a video game and I love video games. And when the night comes, you'd think sleep is what you need, but that same day of desk job actually gives you insomnia, falling asleep is hard, and while you sleep it's as if all of that mental activity is still happening in your head from the work day. If physical labor work paid me as well and provided the same benefits, I'd probably switch back to it honestly.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    Couldn’t that just be because you were young and now you’re less so? A long career of physical labor definitely takes a toll on the body. Young people can just take a lot before it catches up.
    • didibus 5y ago
      That's possible and hard for me to know unless I were to try one of those jobs again at my age. It's true that physical labor can cause injury that can hunt you later in life. But also: > Sedentary lifestyles increase all causes of mortality, double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and anxiety. So I'm not sure desk jobs are any better. They just create less obvious problems, where a shoulder pain from an old shoulder injury is easy to trace back to the cause, desk job injury caused from sedentary life style are hard to trace back but could be worse. Also, I'm talking about a bit of a different problem, which is not how it leaves you later in life, but how it makes you feel when the day is over. Feeling physically tired can almost be nice, you take a bath and it feels so good. And when you go to sleep you have this nice deep restorative sleep from the physical exhaustion. Your brain isn't tied up with work. And all that.
• kiloDalton 5y ago
  I remember enjoying E.P. Thompson's take on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in college. He has a lot of interesting commentary about how technology in the form of accurate timepieces played a role in our concept of labor. The article is here behind a paywall (https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749 https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749). Anyone with access to a search engine can likely find a free copy ;).
• zz865 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure getting married at 18 and looking after 12 children will keep you busy enough.
• rglover 5y ago
  When it comes to creative/mental jobs, the most productive form of work I've found is start when you're ready and work until you lose focus (forcing it is where diminishing returns kick in). Expect that to mean days where you work for 3 hours straight and days where you work for 14 straight (or days where you do 2 in the morning, stop for 3 hours, then do 3 in the evening) but don't throw a tantrum when that flexes. Employers would be blown away by how much better the output and quality of work would be if they just left people the hell alone (fire your managers). People would also focus less on petty BS because they'd be happy instead of acting like children clawing at an ideal that only exists in their head. Assume people are lazy idiots and you'll get a bunch of lazy idiots. Assume they're smart and generally well-intentioned: put your sunglasses on. You'll get the occasional clown (who you fire) but most will respect you for not treating them like cattle.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    > if they just left people the hell alone (fire your managers) A great manager is at the service of their team, and so makes sure you don't have to deal with a lot of bullshit. But a "boss" manager is indeed a negative.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I saw an article years ago where the bones of colonial Americans were analysed. They found a lot of markers of major stress put on them. They also didn't live long.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  They also didn't have access to computers, credit cards, and often were exploited via Corvee labor because they had no money. I'd trade working more for a convenient life as opposed to a relaxed but difficult one. People died of disease, famine, and war often. I mean why would you work hard knowing those major things are constantly knocking on your doorstep?
• chromaton 5y ago
  Read The Undefeated by George Paloczi-Horvath. He's a 20th century writer who lived through the tail end of the feudal system in Hungary. The lives of the peasants were not great. They were mal-nourished and lived at the whims of their lords.
  • pietrovismara 5y ago
    > The lives of the peasants were not great. They were mal-nourished and lived at the whims of their lords. Replace "peasants" with "working class" and "lords" with "employers and landlords" and you could apply the exact same statement to 38 million people in the US alone[0]. - [0]: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
    • chromaton 5y ago
      A very different situation in degree. The nobility in Hungary considered the peasants to be sub-human. This was partly because they were physically distinct from the upper classes. This, in turn, was because they didn't have enough to eat, though the nobles didn't recognize that. Also, the high-born were free to rape and kill peasants with no repercussions. Like I say, read the book.
      • pietrovismara 5y ago
        > The nobility in Hungary considered the peasants to be sub-human. Honestly even this statement would probably apply to our society as well if you'd replace nobility with the "ruling class", but I get your point. Obviously there are big differences between then and today and I don't want to minimize those, although I feel even though the "implementation details" have changed a lot (no more free raping and killing thankfully - but only if you exclude submerged stories like the Epstein case), structurally our society still works similarly.
  • mappu 5y ago
    I would also recommend Peasants (1897) by Chekov, a very stark depiction of agricultural poverty. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Witch_and_Other_Stories/Peasants https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Witch_and_Other_Stories/P...
• lettergram 5y ago
  Ugh, alright so if you have a farm with animals it’s a 7 day a week job. I’m having trouble believing they had a shorter work week generally. Now, if we’re talking just laborers.. maybe, but the majority of people owned farms and animals in the pre-industrial world.
• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  This feels off. Farming today is a seven day, every day work week. There is no day off with livestock, no matter what century, and what season. If the sun sets, or the weather is bad outside, there are plenty of work to be done indoors. I would presume it was even harder without all the automation and technology in the Middle Ages. Maybe they did not labour for the employer all the time, but all the 'free time' was spent labouring for sustenance, and other life's maintenance. If I recall correctly, the 8 hour day, 40 hour week, and five day work-week are all 19th century trends.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If I recall correctly, the 8 hour day, 40 hour week, and five day work-week are all 19th century trends. They were reactions to the extended working hours employed in the industrial revolution to maximize capital utilization in factories.
    • tcmart14 5y ago
      Yup. Can't forget. The 8 hour work day was because unions fought for it, not because companies willing gave it.
  • solarmist 5y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. I'm sure the plots they were farming were much smaller and there were more hands per plot. Also, I believe most families wouldn't have been able to afford more than a couple of smaller animals, and if they were lucky/slightly better off a cow/goat. Plus, if you look at the lowest figure in the article is mentions 1440 hours annually which works out to a bit under 30 hours a week, so not hugely less time. On the flip side everything had to be build by hand from scratch so domestic labor probably accounted for at least an equal amount of time. I'd guess that between work and home the average was probably 60 hours a week. Not too far off nowadays, just distributed differently.
  • btbuildem 5y ago
    Farming is an excellent example. But the farming we know today has been subject to relentless pressures of capitalism, and it has been industrialized to support economies of scale. Mom and pop farms are vestiges of the past. So I'm not sure your comparison holds, maybe a better analogy would be a hobby farm? Usually those involve people who have primary jobs and choose this as a lifestyle. My guess would the the farming hours in that context cannot be too many; it would interfere with their day jobs.
• pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  Why is everyone so defensive? The author never says we'd be better off living in the pre-industrial era. It just points out one of the many lies we've been pushed on by the modern propaganda. This kind of emotional reaction shows a level of insecurity that usually only comes out when we are attacked on something personal we feel fragile about. I don't understand how a discussion about the merits of capitalism can trigger the same response in people. You don't react like this when you're confident and certain that you're doing the right thing. The point of the discussion isn't if we should go back to the pre-industrial era. The trillion dollar question is sadly left unanswered and, worst of all, undebated: If productivity has constantly risen since the first industrial revolution, why do we have less free time than ever? Where have most of the productivity gains gone? Before I get answers about how we have less housework to do in our free time today, for most people working full time that is simply untrue. You commute ~1 hour daily, work 8 hours, when you get back home you've got to buy groceries, shower, cook, wash your dishes, etc. There's barely 1/2 hours of leisure left, and we usually feel too tired already by that time.
• fleddr 5y ago
  In all the progress we made economically, it's disappointing how both economic security and shorter work weeks have stagnated. It's truly odd for example when women joined the work force, this massive influx of labor didn't move work hours by an inch. Likewise for all the automation that happened. We seem to be able to dramatically improve on everything in record time except for work conditions. It's a work for work sake situation, where some 50% of our economy basically consists of keeping each other busy. Keeping each other busy is made possible by mandatory consumption. Marketing, social status, inflation, planned obsolesce all create a strong incentive to consume. So, that's the system. Work, regardless of purpose. Consume, regardless of purpose. Just do lots of both. Keeping velocity at proper levels requires constant stimulation, which tells us its unnatural. Isn't it odd that our species sees consuming lots of resources as a good thing? Isn't it odd that we glorify labor even if that labor does nothing to advance mankind? Isn't it cruel how some 80% of people hate their work, yet we force them into a humiliating 50 year rate race anyway, consuming their life energy? Is it all worth it? Are we sure we can't do better?
• BurningFrog 5y ago
  Life in the preindustrial world was incredibly poor and dangerous by our standards. World population was 1/10 of today, so there wouldn't have been food for most of us. Of course, our ancestors living then didn't have that comparison, and were possibly much happier than we are.
• rladd 5y ago
  Hunter-gatherers actually worked even less: about 1 1/2 to 3 hours a day As discussed in Stone Age Economics by Sahlins: https://archive.org/details/StoneAgeEconomics_201611 https://archive.org/details/StoneAgeEconomics_201611 https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-dominguez-your-money-or-your-life/ https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-domingu... The biblical expulsion from the Eden of gathering fruit to the toil of agriculture also makes that point.
  • exdsq 5y ago
    "Our jobs are called upon to provide the exhilaration of romance and the depths of love. It’s as though we believed that there is a Job Charming out there—like the Prince Charming in fairy tales—that will fill our needs and inspire us to greatness. We’ve come to believe that, through this job, we would somehow have it all: status, meaning, adventure, travel, luxury, respect, power, tough challenges, and fantastic rewards." This resonates a lot with me and I'm sure others
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Who cares? Pre-industrial life was brutal. You can experience it today by moving to an isolated pre-industrial village in places like the Amazon or the jungles of Myanmar.
• catlikesshrimp 5y ago
  Working in a building site under sun and rain is not fun. And it is dangerous. My father had a blast in a farm, because he is the boss and the manual work he has done is symbolic. Swinging a machete (blade) under rain and sun for days on end is not fun, I can tell you from experience. I only hear the opinion manual labor is "better" from some people who have never known any alternative, politicians who won't have to do any, or desk workers who can afford doing some manual "work" when feeling like it. Any work you don't like will be tagged as bad, but I personally took the desk bad alternative over the manual labor alternative. Manual labor is so bad that you have to import immigrants to do it. You could truly argue the wages are lower. I will elaborate realistic higher wages aren't enticing enough to get more nationals to embrace that work. That is happening in England right now, by the way.
• Grustaf 5y ago
  And hunter gatherers worked even shorter hours. Agriculture is a trap!
• ryanmercer 5y ago
  I mean, I've been working 60-70 hour weeks and am working before the sun comes up and after it goes down so it makes some sense. They didn't have electric light, we do.