Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? :\
I really don't see why people affix any sort of value to the amount of work they take when they should be concentrating on their results and how work aligns to their life.
I work less than 20 hours a week to finish my studies and generally speaking I do what I want, which includes reading technical literature (out of a personal desire to do so), cooking, and taking a 3 or 4-day weekend off every month to visit people and travel. I leave the stress to the difficult stuff (the studying bit) and live within my means, and the lack of anxiety or rush means my work is actually solid without spending excessive time to concentrate or get results.
I consider this my ideal lifestyle, not because I work little, but because I have a choice on how I live my life and how much effort I get to focus towards the things that I want.
No, it wouldn't.
Work x Leverage = Achievement
Yes, we could stop where we are, decide things are good enough, and operate the world at subsistence levels. But who's to say we aren't twenty years from doubling the efficiency of agriculture?
A hundred years ago we could have said, trains are pretty awesome, let's stop here. But then we never would have had flight.
Five hundred years ago we could have said, horse and buggy is so much better than walking, how can I get any better than this, let's stop here. But then we wouldn't have had trains.
Technological advancement has a long track record of being very good for quality of life for everyone, and it certainly hasn't stopped, so why should we stop?
Work != technological advancement.
More to the point, while good things come out of work, so do a lot of bad things. The more selective we can be about how we work, the more capable we are of filtering out the bad effects while retaining the good ones.
A set of priorities that is humanist in nature and puts quality of life before advancement would lead to greater output on both sides of the coin. We know in the case of open source and experimental hacking, for example, that a driven and intelligent person's productive capacity is enhanced by additional free time, not decreased.
Put humans first. The technology will follow, and it will be better and more sustainable technology.
Yes, two centuries ago, but only very briefly. In human history, overall we work today far more than most humans that ever lived used to work. Farmers and hunter-gatherers for example had and have far more leisure time than "modern" people do (see for example "The World Until Yesterday").
I very much prefer working 40 to 50 hours/week than the above (though, case in point, I'll likely only start my first ‘real’ job this fall after 22 years of education…).
There are other schooling systems, such as Stiener schools, which focus more on personal development. They form children who want to explore, then allow them to self direct what they explore. (That particular system also has many, many faults).
This is rather like 'work'. Your grandfather had to be in a factory many hours a day. You have to be in an office. Society says so. If you are the sort of person who is bad at knowledge work, you may well wish society told you to do something more physical. But the point is that you lack freedom.
The demographic of this message board is people working on, or thinking about, startups. Essentially, when you do a startup, you choose what you are spending your time doing. You trade in your job security for freedom.
I have known people 'drop out' of society, go on the dole, and work 14 hour days developing computer games that later sold for good money. Less admirably, I've known them to go on the dole, and spend all day playing computer games. They trade their place in society for freedom. This shows that in truth, modern society does give us the freedom. (in my country).
So why do people work? Or more pressingly, why do people work in jobs that do not meet their psychological needs for respect, autonomy, and purpose, and pay badly? Because they do, regardless of what you read in the papers, keep working at those jobs. My local supermarket is full of people who derive little identity from their work - I was one of them as a child and I know how the adult staff there think.
The answer, I think, is fear of what other people would think of them for scrounging. People like the post I am replying to. I think most people think like him.
He should, rationally, hate startup founders consuming someone elses money to mess about on a project that probably won't make a dime. And that contradiction is the problem. Societies attitude to work is not rational, and it forces people to keep doing jobs they don't want to that could be automated, instead of being free. Eventually, economics will destroy those jobs. A new role will be created that didn't exist before, adding even less value than the last (but the labour is there so why not use it). Those workers desperately take the work to avoid seeing themselves as scroungers, as the enemy. And their children will grow up desperate not to be free.
No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. The fact that you choose to do so isn't saying much about you.
Assuming this is talking about Americans, that's sort of an entertaining claim, since most of the modern policy discussions have been about deciding whether or not you are allowed to survive if you don't work enough.
The minimum wage over there is $7.25. Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive?
Maybe we need to take him more literally. Maybe what he means is he owes the mob a lot of money, and if he doesn't pay them $2.5k/month they will kill him?