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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

That's trivially false. Ancient people were always working, and we can see this in people who maintain primative lifestyles.

Take bread.

You start the oven at 4am. By 5am it is hot enough for your meats. By 7am extinguish, by 8am start your bread and go until 6-7pm. Now you get to start your dough for tomorrow, typically working until 11pm.

Historically bakers were known to sleep in flour hoppers as they were spared some of the heat of the ovens.

Ancient people _always_ worked. There was no leisure weekends, no afternoons off.

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To me it sounds like you already partially contradicted yourself. Bakers sleeping while at work? That would never fly today even if you had literally nothing to do except wait for bread to rise.

Their hours away from home may be similar in many cases, but that doesn't mean they had as high of a workload or had to work as fast as the modern equivalent. Most of them were working for themselves, and set their own pace and rules. And working for yourself is a HUGE perk and often many people's dream scenario. Want to drink beer all day while you chop wood? Sure. Want to sing baudy ballads while you patch your roof? Go ahead. Hurt your wrist while pulling weeds or managing your copice? Go take an immediate break or maybe just come back the next day. And because 90% of the population did that, those expectations carried over into many other jobs because anyone could walk away and find some farm they could work on instead if they really wanted.

> To me it sounds like you already partially contradicted yourself. Bakers sleeping while at work? That would never fly today even if you had literally nothing to do except wait for bread to rise.

You're telling me, in a SF-based startup community, nobody has ever slept over-night at the office?

This is easily proven incorrect.

Ancient Rome worked on an 8 day workweek, and traditionally the 8th day was a rest day.

Ancient Greeks didn't have weekly days off... but they had up to 120 festivals a year where shops and businesses would be shut down.

Nundinae was only for the ruling class to go shopping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

So sorry, you still get to bake bread all day.

And Greek festival days involved.. lots of food, baths had to be hot, etc. So someone has to run the event. It wasn't the common people getting a day off.

What do you think the Hebrew Sabbath is, exactly?

But 90% of the common people were farmers and were not bakers or bath tenders or vendors or the like so would be enjoying the day off. Although farmers didn't really need dedicated days off because their only schedule conflictions would be the main planting and harvest months, the festivals would just be a good way to bring all the farmers together at similar times to party and spend money or trade.

To tag on iirc Hawaiians used to take multiple month breaks from working hard when they were done harvesting

Someone has to do all the unpleasant work. In antiquity, that was generally the slaves. Today, it's everyone who isn't independently wealthy and wants more out of life than living out of a shopping cart.

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