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Comment by __natty__ | Hacker News Reader

> For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete.

I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.

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Where are you getting the 60-80 figure from? In more recent past we have indeed worked more (at least in developed countries), e.g. the Industrial Revolution, but just a little earlier, like the Middle Ages, we were working far less. People like to joke about peasant life, but they were mostly not working much during winter and fall, or after noon in the warmer months

"far less" is not well supported. As much as people try to claim that today's norm of 2000 hours per year is akin to slavery, the reality is that average human working hours have fluctuated between 1500-3000 across most places and time periods for which we have data.

1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.

If 500 hours less work isn't "far less", I don't know what is. If we impose that change on the current work schedule, it would amount to a more than 2 hour decrease on every work day, or a day off the work week. Also, do these numbers account for the hour long commute of today versus working your own land? I bet that would shave off some solid hours too.

Amen

It isn't a completely new category that could reasonably be called "work-free utopia" or where one could reasonably call "normal" where the added 500 hours get called "slavery".

Also, the long commutes of today aren't very far from the norm or the last couple of centuries and add up to 200 or 300 hours on average. Some people do have it much worse, but some people also have it much better.

That said, the difference between the 1500 and 3000 extremes is huge. And we should be working towards the smallest one being the norm. But all of the upthread observations are perfectly on point.

>like the Middle Ages, we were working far less.

I wish I knew more about what scholarship people are relying on to come to this conclusion. Can someone point me to a definitive source?

Subsistence farming is not an easy job.

The middle ages comparison makes no sense. Some hate their jobs so much that they'll put it in balance with a 30yo life expectancy and a (short) life of hard backbreaking manual labour riddled with health hazards. There is really no point in comparing the number of working hours then and now.

I remember reading an article based on a paper that tried to replicate small-scale hunter-gatherer "week". It turned out that "work" was less than 20h per week.

As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).

That's anyways what I remember.

> it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_

It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?

For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.

Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.

But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.

There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.

> But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.

Do you think it bothered them the same way as if you suddenly couldn't anymore too?

They most likely saw it as the norm, not as a huge side effect of not having washing machine

>As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days.

When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.

Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.

Very good point. I would also add and I believe that is why we have insurance for almost any and everything nowadays as well. Society/industry/capitalism (all these larger systems than ourselves) are mostly all really just a safety net with long term survival and procreation in mind.

Missing context unfortunately, sorry!

This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.

So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.

And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.

And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...

That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.

The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.

I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.

> Today we work about 40-50h per week

In the US. In Norway an årsverk (year's work) is 1695 hours on average, 37.5 hours per work week. The actual average hours worked per week is about ten percent lower.

I suspect you mental model of the past is maybe overindexed on Industrial Revolution stories where industry was utterly off-the-rails

The millionaire mustache guy retired young. He still did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, but only on his time. It lasted for about a decade. Then his (now ex) wife realized she liked the things money can buy and the fallout from that forced him back into a job. (I'm not sure where he is now)

Is that how you read it? It seemed more to me that he was making bank from his website.

Is he? I never really got into reading his website, but it didn't seem like a money maker. I read a few articles here and there, and I admit I don't know his current status. It wouldn't surprise me if he has now turned it into a money maker (given life has forced a need to generate more money on him it would even be expected)

The point where I bounced on the site was when I realized this "retired" guy was making things work by having three jobs and the health & prior work history to quickly get re-hired doing something at an ordinary company if his family needed good health insurance again.

And that one of those jobs was his blog. He was tricking me into reading it by exaggerating things, so I'd maybe click some of his affiliate links and make him money.

What's funny is he wasn't even really coy about what he was doing, it was all right there, yet he had (and I think still kind of has?) tons of loyal fans.

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