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Comment by jryle70 | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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