5 ms·

I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features

by ip26 2mo ago

I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.

kaonwarb 2mo ago
Not in winter, for geographies that have serious winters.
- jack_pp 2mo ago
  still need to feed the livestock multiple times a day, chop wood, fix stuff around the house
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo ago
    I think the difference is they're completable jobs. You work until it's done. At least for the day.
  - mlrtime 2mo ago
    You aren't chopping wood everyday. Hopefully that's been prepared. Feeding yes.
sph 2mo ago
There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work. And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.
- egocodedinsol 2mo ago
  Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.
  - Schiendelman 2mo ago
    I recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.
    - wbadart 2mo ago
      My favorite recent read on the topic was from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
      - fwipsy 2mo ago
        I thought of the same series, but that's not the tl;dr I would have chosen at all. I would have gone to part 4e where I found this quote near the end: > We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers. It's nice to think that our ancestors didn't have to work as hard, because it justifies our own desire for more leisure time. IMO that desire is justified anyways; but premodern subsistence farming/any sort of self-supported lifestyle is incredibly labor-intensive compared to modern agriculture, regardless of whether you're a serf or a freeholder.
- 2mo ago
InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
I've worked on a traditional farm, and it's definitely hard work, and lots of it, but it is finite. Sure, there are some things you could always do, but usually there are a fixed number of tasks you plan for a day, and many of them have to be done at specific points in time. This naturally creates breaks between work.
throwaway290 2mo ago
In summer it's non stop work, in winter you do fuck all.
DrewADesign 2mo ago
I’m not sure where this idea came from that shit in old books is inherently rational or they would have any frame of reference to compare it to the modern world. Everybody’s conception of the worst is based on their own experience. I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars. I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.
- nradov 2mo ago
  We should all listen to guys like your boss. Circumstances have changed a bit but their beliefs are generally directionally correct and they have some great lessons to teach.
  - DrewADesign 2mo ago
    I’m directly between his age and the age of the people he criticizes. He has absolutely no understanding of what challenges young people face. His path to stability has vanished. There’s no apprenticeship program in that union anymore and in the ones that are, the percentage of your living expenses to your income is incomparably higher. The younger people work more hours than he did at their age and have a hell of a lot less to show for it because it buys a hell of a lot less. Since wealth compounds, this is not merely a temporary setback — it’s a completely different arc of progress. Many have replaced pensions with riskier and less stable 401ks. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His formula for success in life basically starts with “begin an industrial career just before the peak of the golden age of US manufacturing in a heavily industrialized area in the golden age of organized labor.”
graemep 2mo ago
That is not the claim being made though. The difference is between work done (and payment due) being defined by time spent, vs work done being defined by tasks completed. A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still. Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.
augment_me 2mo ago
As some other commenters pointed out, the comment (and the book) are not making claims about work hours. Seeing it from the perspective of "dawk to dusk" with our, now time-based perspective is the wrong interpretation of it because it imposes our view of work and time on a task-based life. You would work dawn til dusk, but you would: milk the cows at 06 AM, have a walk/chat/game with friends, bring the animals out, have breakfast, have a nap, refill water for animals, do some weeding, go have lunch with the other workers, etc. Then in the evening you bring the animals back in. So while you had a "15 hour workday" on the clock, your day is not consisting of actions and improvements without an end that can be done indefinitely, but by tasks that arise gradually at certain moments. All the time between the tasks is "time off" in the modern interpretation, and then you have a completely different view of work, because there is no pressure to produce at any point.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  That's a very romanticized view of it. The pressure to produce is if you don't plant the seeds, there won't be crops later in the year. If you don't harvest the crops, they'll rot in the fields, and you'll go hungry. If you don't fix the fence, then a fox will get into the chicken coop and the sheep will get out.

by ip26 2mo ago

kaonwarb 2mo ago

Not in winter, for geographies that have serious winters.

jack_pp 2mo ago
still need to feed the livestock multiple times a day, chop wood, fix stuff around the house
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo ago
  I think the difference is they're completable jobs. You work until it's done. At least for the day.
- mlrtime 2mo ago
  You aren't chopping wood everyday. Hopefully that's been prepared. Feeding yes.

sph 2mo ago

There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work. And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.

egocodedinsol 2mo ago
Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.
- Schiendelman 2mo ago
  I recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.
  - wbadart 2mo ago
    My favorite recent read on the topic was from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
    - fwipsy 2mo ago
      I thought of the same series, but that's not the tl;dr I would have chosen at all. I would have gone to part 4e where I found this quote near the end: > We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers. It's nice to think that our ancestors didn't have to work as hard, because it justifies our own desire for more leisure time. IMO that desire is justified anyways; but premodern subsistence farming/any sort of self-supported lifestyle is incredibly labor-intensive compared to modern agriculture, regardless of whether you're a serf or a freeholder.
2mo ago

InsideOutSanta 2mo ago

I've worked on a traditional farm, and it's definitely hard work, and lots of it, but it is finite. Sure, there are some things you could always do, but usually there are a fixed number of tasks you plan for a day, and many of them have to be done at specific points in time. This naturally creates breaks between work.

throwaway290 2mo ago

In summer it's non stop work, in winter you do fuck all.

DrewADesign 2mo ago

I’m not sure where this idea came from that shit in old books is inherently rational or they would have any frame of reference to compare it to the modern world. Everybody’s conception of the worst is based on their own experience. I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars. I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.

nradov 2mo ago
We should all listen to guys like your boss. Circumstances have changed a bit but their beliefs are generally directionally correct and they have some great lessons to teach.
- DrewADesign 2mo ago
  I’m directly between his age and the age of the people he criticizes. He has absolutely no understanding of what challenges young people face. His path to stability has vanished. There’s no apprenticeship program in that union anymore and in the ones that are, the percentage of your living expenses to your income is incomparably higher. The younger people work more hours than he did at their age and have a hell of a lot less to show for it because it buys a hell of a lot less. Since wealth compounds, this is not merely a temporary setback — it’s a completely different arc of progress. Many have replaced pensions with riskier and less stable 401ks. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His formula for success in life basically starts with “begin an industrial career just before the peak of the golden age of US manufacturing in a heavily industrialized area in the golden age of organized labor.”

graemep 2mo ago

That is not the claim being made though. The difference is between work done (and payment due) being defined by time spent, vs work done being defined by tasks completed. A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still. Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.

augment_me 2mo ago

As some other commenters pointed out, the comment (and the book) are not making claims about work hours. Seeing it from the perspective of "dawk to dusk" with our, now time-based perspective is the wrong interpretation of it because it imposes our view of work and time on a task-based life. You would work dawn til dusk, but you would: milk the cows at 06 AM, have a walk/chat/game with friends, bring the animals out, have breakfast, have a nap, refill water for animals, do some weeding, go have lunch with the other workers, etc. Then in the evening you bring the animals back in. So while you had a "15 hour workday" on the clock, your day is not consisting of actions and improvements without an end that can be done indefinitely, but by tasks that arise gradually at certain moments. All the time between the tasks is "time off" in the modern interpretation, and then you have a completely different view of work, because there is no pressure to produce at any point.

fragmede 2mo ago
That's a very romanticized view of it. The pressure to produce is if you don't plant the seeds, there won't be crops later in the year. If you don't harvest the crops, they'll rot in the fields, and you'll go hungry. If you don't fix the fence, then a fox will get into the chicken coop and the sheep will get out.