What if work is leisure? Jack Welch used to mention that he couldn't wait to get back to office in weekends. I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure: researching new algorithms, building POCs, writing whitepapers and narratives, having brainstorming meetings, and etc. I don't think I can get such meaningful activities outside of work, either. That's because the work gives real use cases that de…
Even granting your point, many people work jobs which are tedious and/or physically tiring.
I'm curious about this argument. It was mentioned in some TED talk about the benefits of simple machines. I might just be a change of pace, also a change of dependencies. Walking long is fine (people need daydream and wandering time, some dose of boredom). Washing your family clothes may be work but it's still better than doing what your boss doesn't want to do. Emotionally your a lot less invested in the latter yet…
Here’s a great talk about clothes washing. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac... Hans Rosling argues that washing machines are magic because clothes go in and books come out. Women education, literacy rates, workplace participation etc directly correlates with automation in the home. The less time it takes to keep a family running, the more empowered women get in a society.
I feel like lots of things about the way life used to be (and still is for many) is based on women not having agency (financial independence) and being physically weaker than men.
We are only beginning to find out what happens when women have full independence and children are not a necessary byproduct of sex, and it seems like cratering birthrates are at least one result.
A lot of the costs of birthing and raising children were paid solely by women, but benefited the whole tribe. Now that those costs can be made explicit, I wonder how tribes will chose to compensate women such that they are sufficiently incentivized to have at least replacement level of kids.
I would take a 10 hour day in almost any job in the 21st century over an 8-16 hour workday for a 14th century farm laborer mowing hay with a scythe or plowing behind a team of oxen. I get meal and rest breaks too, and even though they may get more days off than I do, what are they doing on those days off? Chopping wood? Thatching their roof? Hauling water from a well? The amount of labor done in a day by peasants in the European middle ages dwarfs everything but the extreme outliers of today.
What if work is leisure? Jack Welch used to mention that he couldn't wait to get back to office in weekends. I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure: researching new algorithms, building POCs, writing whitepapers and narratives, having brainstorming meetings, and etc. I don't think I can get such meaningful activities outside of work, either. That's because the work gives real use cases that de…
Ownership of agenda is what underlines leisure, i.e. you're not doing something because you have to. Like sure, you may need to persist through an amateur chess tournament but it's something you were willing to expose yourself to.
With jobs there's really not that much leeway. You do things to make your boss and/or clients happy and ultimately your way of living depends on it. Sure it's possible to allocate time for fun activities at employer dime. However if they are too fun for everyone they are often referred as 'perks', highlighting that it's really a soft packaged form of compensation.
> So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days. Indeed, prepping food was no cake walk. Grinding grains by hand is pretty hellish, and making edible flour from high-tanin acorns takes weeks. Sane with spinning yarn.
Yeah I’d be curious to see how much of that short workday was because just staying alive was so much harder than today that you simply didn’t have time for more work. Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
What dinner takes 3 hours....? if we're talking about the poor, realistically soup was a mainstay...here in Romania we have all kinds and then there's marmaliga, basically polenta, add salt and if you're hungry delicious... it does seem like rent, insurance, transport , investment for the future takes up a lot of "work" needs in the present, besides we've become incredibly vain, where the packaging is often worth more than the content...
Considering famines were common, 1/10 women died during child birth, infant mortality was absurdly high and most people stayed in the same town until they died, I prefer now.
Where were you taught that? Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to any…
I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.
Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.
> So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days. Indeed, prepping food was no cake walk. Grinding grains by hand is pretty hellish, and making edible flour from high-tanin acorns takes weeks. Sane with spinning yarn.
Yeah I’d be curious to see how much of that short workday was because just staying alive was so much harder than today that you simply didn’t have time for more work. Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
We went to 10 to 12 hour days of back breaking labor, six days a week with no off season during the industrial revolution, so I don't think it's a physical limit that was being hit.
I can speak to Irish history. Long considered one of the most poor and wretched places for common folk, the rural poor had numerous issues in Ireland. While they had dance and a lovely folk music, they also had starvation, disease, lack of political representation, and a lack of basic economic ladders. They did have plentiful turf to warm themselves, in contrast to many other poor folk in other areas of Europe. They…
If it weren't for English colonization they wouldn't have been forced into such risky monocrop behavior.
Note that it was the very Irish who asked the English to come help them in one of their multiple internal wars…
https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertain... >Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself. The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time. Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas. >Decorative Arts Decorative arts were app…
> Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.