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.
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.
TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
> 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.
This reads like, "My job is very complicated, yours is very simple."
> modafinil
Militaries once issued coca, while opium was sold at markets as recently as the 1930s (over-the-counter).
Across the board it seems like things were rougher and cruder “back then” whenever ever back then was.
They had more freedom in other ways.
And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.
Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.
… what?
No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.
I understand that you're saying:
> [slavery] is not representative of farming as labor
But I disagree, since it clearly has been. Military, prison, servitude, employment, even the tyranny of "the man of the house" - all these hierarchical authoritarian social structures (whether or not they were ever noble or righteous, or useful) have improved ethically over time in the lives of those subjected to the violence of these systems - the conditions used to be a lot worse, across the board.
Labor is not solved in terms of ethics, but it's a lot better now.
What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?
I’ll take now
I’m just suggesting a world where jails and prisons are literally replaced with batteries and datacenters. It’s a medieval institution at best.
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.
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.
There are still jobs like that, but living standards have increased so much that they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones, to the point that it's considered like a "boomerism" to suggest doing jobs that people in other countries are happy to take to live at a 1970's standard of living.
Even in the US there are seasonal blue collar jobs like that. Youth generally last until 25 or so now though, and that's partly just a skill issue/matter of mindset, because it didn't sound weird for a 20 year old to work in a factory or on a boat back then like it does now.
IMO the giant difference between now and then is the massive gap in income/wealth between people just starting out or working 1970's style jobs, and jobs with global reach and high leverage (ie the most capable produce 2-100+ times the value, but the average person produces nothing of value or negative value). There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's. I think that's what causes most of the angst tbh, that there is so much more opportunity cost and variance in outcomes now because of global trade/technology, if you just want to work to live you're not going to the same results as people who live to work, or people living places where they literally have to "work to live".
To be honest I don't think the boomer mindset of just working to live and play with your expensive toys was ever a very good one, because it led to the consumerism that makes people think they need $10M to retire or seek $200k jobs right out of college without actually wanting to do those things enough to achieve them (and not needing them anyway)
This is not a new problem and does not lay at the feet of job seekers. Manufacturing trades are a few decades ahead of software development in this respect. Before off-shoring, being a tool and die maker was one of the most consistent paths to getting a really well-paying job. It took a long time to get into it: often a decade or more of on-the-job experience and only the best machinists qualified. But they’re crucial to most manufacturing, so most companies, even small ones, had a path to progressively bring new, inexperienced people into the trade, build their skills, and turn them into the people that companies needed. Then, off-shoring meant that they didn’t need as many tool and die guys as they used to have, so they mostly stopped taking apprentices. As time progressed, they had a seeming never-ending stream of experienced people to fill those dwindling roles, but now, there’s a problem: almost all of the people from the original system are retiring, and almost nobody’s been training apprentices, so the entire industry is at risk of losing that crucial manufacturing skill. Meanwhile, China has tens of thousands because 80s executives sent all of our knowledge over there in the 80s and 90s and they just kept progressing. As an aside, anybody who says “there will be new jobs,” as a response to the possibility of AI-driven job loss should visit the rust belt. There were new jobs— we as a society just didn’t care enough about the people we discarded to help them see the benefits of that.
Companies in the US right now, tech notwithstanding, largely see no commitment to helping maintain a labor pool, or help individual workers progress into more useful workers. They think it’s immoral to spend a dime on anything that isn’t going to contribute directly to this quarter’s bottom line.
> there are jobs like that
Yes I understand this. I’m a tradesman and I encounter all levels of blue collar workers far more frequently than just about anyone around here.
> they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones
People don’t hold out on those jobs. I see people doing them all the time. They’re no different from uber or DoorDash. You just don’t see people doing those jobs as a career because they can’t provide you, let alone your family, with basic necessities.
Firstly, those jobs aren’t stable enough to bet your housing on, let alone with kids or whatever. Secondly, they never offer health insurance, which is an absolute must in the United States where your kid breaking their arm could put a low-wage family in the red for literally years. Let alone getting cancer or something.
> living standards have increased so much
Standards of living have not universally increased- the cost of convenience goods, electronics, entertainment, clothing, and other things have decreased. The cost of many necessities, such as housing, health care, and education, have all increased much more quickly. Go look for some visualizations that juxtapose the basic cost of living with wage growth since the 1970s— life, in general, was SO much cheaper then. It was SO MUCH EASIER for young people to get their adult lives started. Then look for a visualization that shows, for each year, what the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of the federal minimum wage was since the 70s. Blue Collar wage growth peaked in 1981.
> There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's.
To whom, how many jobs are there vs the population size, and how long does one basically need to be floated to get into it surely enough to make it a career? One of the biggest correlating factors among people who successfully founded businesses was having enough family support (money, connections) to float them through multiple failures and get a foothold. Even if there are more people for whom that’s true, that does not mean it’s a generally viable path. It requires starting on second base.
The amount of wealth concentrating in the higher echelons and the widening chasm between them and everyone else show how little those opportunities avail themselves to most people.
Life has gotten much better for the wealthy. Everyone else is hurting and cheap flat screen TVs don’t change that.
Hard pass, I'd rather talk to his union rep.
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.
Feeding yes.