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Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.

Ignoring art with patrons which is a tiny percent of all art made, people just did things at home quietly. They painted, drew, told stories, knit, crocheted, etc. Even patron-led artists just made what their patrons wanted, namely all the famous religious art, which I imagine felt like unfulfilling work anyway.

What we like, that is to say gets things like our dopamine flowing, tends to tie in well with the idea of not being compelled to do it. Someone writing copy at work to further enrich the capital owning class and to pay their bills is very different than someone writing short stories in the evening after work.

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I would say that past “jobs” had more of a sense of accomplishment and agency. Personally I have never felt the same level of accomplishment from building things that directly improved the quality of my house, hunting with my father when it was required to help maintain ecological balance (too many deer or elk can actually be bad for an ecosystem), or directly contribute to my family/community in some way.

Now my days largely consist of navigating a “game of thrones” political landscape where work means less than it ever has. The sense of agency I once coveted now feels like a distant memory in some ways.

But to be fair this is probably something that people experienced in many different ages of humanity.

> I have never felt the same level of accomplishment from building things that directly improved the quality of my house, hunting with my father when it was required to help maintain ecological balance (too many deer or elk can actually be bad for an ecosystem), or directly contribute to my family/community in some way.

This is because you were already meeting the base of your pyramid of needs. If you were building shelter because you had none, or hunting for subsistence, it’s considerably less enjoyable. Success means you live another day, failure means suffering. Self actualization is not a concern in those scenarios.

You don't think spending the days with your family, hunting/growing food to feed that family would be fulfilling?

Obviously I don't know the answers, and there were obviously tons of day-to-day stressors that sucked, but I'm not so sure it's a given that people of the past did not find life fulfilling/meaningful.

>You don't think spending the days with your family, hunting/growing food to feed that family would be fulfilling?

You think it'd be fulfilling when your children had around a 25% chance to die before the age of five?

It may sound harsh, but I think when such circumstances are reality, then people value their children and whatever else they have all the more while they have them/it.

>> It's kind of strange that our existence has come down to working in an often unfulfilling job almost all of our waking time, and only finding fulfillment when you're out of a job.

> Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.

No. I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable. As technology has progressed, many jobs have gotten farther and farther from what we were meant to do.

And AI isn't going to help. The best case scenario is it replaces work with purposeless entertainments and ennui. The more likely case it that it removes fulfilling work from human hands, leaving more space for unfulfilling work and poverty (because capitalist logic CANNOT be questioned, or you're a heretic who should be burned at the stake).

People look at Athens and Rome as some ideal. Labor there was mostly slaves. I don't think we fully appreciate how burdensome labor is and how that's the main motivation for people to offload it to the working class and make themselves the capital owning class. The American dream is being the boss or independently wealthy investor, not the best math teacher in your town.

Owning capital means off-loading my labor to capital investments i.e. machines. I don’t see how that is any less noble than seeking to be a math teacher. In fact, once I’ve accrued enough capital (save enough in my 401k and retire), I have some plans to go into teaching, just as my 7th grade science teacher did after he retired as a chemical engineer.

> I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable

Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?

> Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?

If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.

And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).

This life is still available in the least civilized parts of the world. And unfortunately it comes with all the other problems of that time: your children will die, other tribes will occasionally kill you, and you need to stay on the move to escape enemies as well as seek food.

For my part, there is a huge price I’m willing to pay to be able to drink water out of my tap. I didn’t have this always and I really value it.

Maybe we could create a society with the best of both worlds?

Nah, couldn't be. You can't have running water without also having Elon Musk ruin Twitter, that's just a crazy fantasy.

I actually think that piped potable water at home is incompatible with a hunter-gatherer society. The infrastructure required to maintain this requires civilization with a stable non-mobile population centre.

But we can't have that without landlords raising the rent every six months, right? It's physically impossible.

We can have piped potable water simultaneously with landlords that raise rent less frequently than 6 months. I live in SF and have both, which shows it’s not physically impossible.

What about without landlords?

As in I need to either purchase a home or receive a state-allocated one? I don't think it will stop water from being piped but my experience is that state-allocations have inferior quality and result in a parallel black market where the allocators take the surplus. Overall, I am quite happy with being able to pay a landlord for a service because I find navigating black markets hard.

> A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.

Yeah. Things people do as hobbies tend to be things they enjoy.

There are a lot of people out there right now spending their free time prompting LLMs to write more code, because they find it fun.

Maybe the jobs themselves were not enjoyable physically but the satisfaction of a day’s work was.

Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.

Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.

I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.

Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.

> but the satisfaction of a day’s work was.

Rose colored glasses. “We won’t starve today” is not spiritually fulfilling. It’s survival.

People romanticize the past. Modern life is more comfortable specifically because everyone isn’t struggling to survive. (Obviously some still are.)

> Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured.

That’s a real big “if”. You can go get a construction job right now. It will get you more fit. But it will probably also get you injured, especially over the long term.

Not to mention basic things like most of the population spending all of their free time having to craft and maintain their own clothes and furniture. Even many well-off, 'pampered' noble ladies in the Middle Ages spent every free moment spinning thread just to have enough to maintain household clothing.

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