The history of what we call work

So I am partial to the idea of working "to do the minimum amount of work necessary to underwrite a good life." I think our culture is broken in several ways, and this sounds like a good approach.

BUT, the romantisized ahistorical model of the Ju/’hoansi people (also known as !Kung San, "bushmen") the argument detailed here is based on... had it's high point in 1966 indeed, and is no longer considered reliable by anthropology.

It's based on too many romantisized assumptions feeding into what Western anthropologists wanted to see.

1. That the Ju/’hoansi people had, just until the Western anthropologists showed up, been exclusively "foraging" and "isolated" without contact with their neighbors or "civilization". In fact, when Richard Lee showed up they were already in economic and cultural contact with their neighbors, but he left this out of his account, assuming it happened just before he got there and was "uninteresting".

2. That the Ju/’hoansi culture was unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus represneted how humasn lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. All people have history. Even to the extent they were "foragers", it doesn't mean their ancestors had been foragers for hundreds of thousands of years, had an unchanged culture for hundreds of thousands of years, or lived "just like" humans of hundreds of thousands of years ago.

3. That the Ju/’hoansi lived that way entirely by choice -- or entirely as determined by their "environment" and not as part of larger human regional multi-ethnic society. Edwin Wilmsen made an argument backed by evidence that can't be quickly dismissed that they actually functioned as a regional underclass in relation to other ethnic groups in the area, that perhaps they would rather have had more than "the minimum amount necessary" [or a different level of 'good life'] but didn't have access to the means of production to do so.

All of these counter-claims are also simplifications and debatable. But the original picture of "foragers who have been living this way for thousands of years with no contact with anyone else and thus show how humans lived in pre-history" is clearly also an over-simplification, and is not really how anthropology sees things anymore.

That people are still repeating it as gospel in 2021 I guess shows how attractive it is to some of us in our culture in 2021, as much as it says anything about prehistory or the Ju/’hoansi.

And to be sure, the Ju/’hoansi in the last half of the 20th century, show a different way to live, sure. As do all sorts of people around the globe. I think it is accurate and beneficial to let anthropology remind us of the incredible diversity of ways humans have found to live, that things we think are invariant or necessary for "healthy" culture almost never are, that there are far more paths available than we might assume.

There's another dimension to this. All duties aren't the same. Hunting is a duty.. but it's not the same as redoing 200x print copies for your petty boss. The former is 100% beneficial to you (a bit selfish but hey), massages your senses, strengthen your body, sharpen your skills. It's play time, somehow very freeing. The latter is dull and unless you gamify it, grinds you for no good reason.

“Humankind,” Suzman writes, is apparently “not yet ready to claim its collective pension.” So why haven’t we traded rising incomes for more free time? Good question. This is part of the reason I'm in process of switching to a part-time schedule as a software engineer and parent of 3 young children.

"...economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth." While not a cure-all, I do remember reading that the primary reason why most of China has escaped extreme poverty in the last 100 years has been economic growth. I'm curious for the counter-perspective there.

Every sunday. You want some pictures ?

People in the wild don't hunt elephants to survive. They survived pretty well for ages, they climb for honey, find smaller animals. It's not easy but it seems most humans are capable of it. I'm pretty sure the deal is worth it. The amount of satisfaction in apt usage of your senses and body is quite immense. I suffer daily due to insufficient stimulation (to the point I volunteered my time for truck unloading) both physical and intellectual. And if you look at half the population, you can probably read that on their face too.

> The chemical analysis of bones has demonstrated conclusively that early humans were not constantly teetering on the brink of starvation. On the contrary, they ate well despite having at their disposal only a few stone and wooden implements.

> These findings support a surprising thesis, one that reverses everything we used to believe about the deep history of humanity. It was not the hunter-gatherers who “suffered from systematic dietary deficiencies,” working themselves to the point of exhaustion yet attaining no lasting security.

I want to know what the expected lifespan was for these foragers. What was their childbirth success rate?

Without good dental hygiene adults can expect to lose their teeth by age 40, at which point (in a foraging society with primitive tools) that adult is going to be more than slightly malnutritioned.