I sometimes do enjoy taking my tent out and roughing it for a weekend - then I want to get back to all the expensive comforts that my modern life gives me.
I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don't want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work.
People have this romantic notion of history thinking that nobody had to work, it was just play all the time, but that is almost entirely false. Worse in the few cases where somebody didn't have to work we quickly discover that it was because they had many slaves doing all the work for them. In reality your typical person today is working much less than at any previous time in history. If it seems otherwise it is because you are not counting all the work - hunter gathers may have only spend a few hours a week hunting/gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting/gathering was done preparing the results of that work. Those mud huts they live in - a lot of effort to build and keep up. Those blankets they sleep on to keep warm - a lot of work to make them (and they don't last forever).
I am a member of the local food co-op. While not a perfect model for society, I think it's a good example to provide some alternative to the system of work we all take for granted.
I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts.
In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run.
This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords.
It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.
Co-ops are great, but they don't really work for any business that requires a large capital investment. Like farming might seem simple, but if you want to make it cost effective then you need a lot of expensive equipment like a $800K combine harvester. Where does that capital come from? It's tough to find members who can contribute that much money to join.
Great example, thanks. There must be realistic limits to scaling such models? Administrative, land to crop to member ratios, etc.? Exploitation/arbitrage must find its way in at some point where it becomes an economy... (Not trying to argue definitions, just thinking about practical governance to extend the model to practical human scales.)
> This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships
Maybe, but it also can be much worse. Any of your owners can exploit the situation via fraud and if they hide it well you won't know until the whole fails and you lose whatever your investment was. Co-op is still a good model for some things, but beware it isn't clearly any better and can be much worse.
In some cases co-op is more exploitive because they use the "you are a member" line and get you to believe it and so you don't even realize how bad it is.
When a co-op is good it is good. However don't fool yourself, it isn't always good. So long as you are not fooled they can work very well.
> For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete.
I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.
Where are you getting the 60-80 figure from? In more recent past we have indeed worked more (at least in developed countries), e.g. the Industrial Revolution, but just a little earlier, like the Middle Ages, we were working far less. People like to joke about peasant life, but they were mostly not working much during winter and fall, or after noon in the warmer months
"far less" is not well supported. As much as people try to claim that today's norm of 2000 hours per year is akin to slavery, the reality is that average human working hours have fluctuated between 1500-3000 across most places and time periods for which we have data.
1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.
I remember reading an article based on a paper that tried to replicate small-scale hunter-gatherer "week". It turned out that "work" was less than 20h per week.
As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).
>As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days.
When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.
Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.
That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.
The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.
I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.
This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.
So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.
And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.
And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...
> it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_
It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?
For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.
Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.
But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.
There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.
In the US. In Norway an årsverk (year's work) is 1695 hours on average, 37.5 hours per work week. The actual average hours worked per week is about ten percent lower.
The millionaire mustache guy retired young. He still did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, but only on his time. It lasted for about a decade. Then his (now ex) wife realized she liked the things money can buy and the fallout from that forced him back into a job. (I'm not sure where he is now)
“Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?”
As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones
Interesting and novel take. Do you think making that would enable you to also make a better distributed note taking system, or do you think you need the distributed note taking system first?
Granted, there are vast amounts of wasted work hours these days, be it farmers producing food when 30% of it goes straight to trash or those poor souls stuck in bullshit office jobs. But this:
> Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work.
Many researchers (labour historians, anthropologists, sociologists etc.) draw a distinction between labour and work, as well as the different kinds of work [0].
No one said anything about "no work", but that's an attractive straw man. Most people don't mind working hard, but they don't want to be exploited which is the point of the essay. Exploitation is rewarded under capitalism which must perpetuate the myths the author calls out to make it easier to exploit people.
This site is a cess pool of libertarian axioms and nit picks by people that believe they are the next Mark Zuckerberg. Anything remotely critical of capitalism is piled on. It's their culture.
The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.)
Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.
No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.
There is a lot said about exploitation in the book and in the comments here on HN. I would like to start a kindergarten (a day care for toddlers and pre-school kids) in Switzerland, where such service is very scarce and expensive because the state does not subsidize preschool childcare. What HN community recommends me on the form of legal entity that I should use to start this venture? Options available are corporation, non-profit association or co-operative. What would be the most ethical and non-exploitative option which would work business-wise at the same time?
In 2025 and beyond it is my sincere hope that we stop lauding articles that merely present problems without providing any substantive thoughts on how to solve them.
I'm not going to say if this author is successful or not, but isn't the first step to addressing a problem identify there is one? Step 0 of stop, drop, and roll is to say to yourself "You know what, I think I'm on fire."
The first step is being honest about if the problem is even solvable, and second if it is solvable would people really want what the solution means.
This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.
Hey I must miss something certainly as I don’t see what is the substantive thoughts shared in this comment that would mitigate this issue of unmerited laud for mere careful exposition of a perspective. Surely it’s just me missing the point.
The reality is that people LOVE reading articles like this. They love sharing articles like this. Anthony Burgess wrote a wonderful preface to a clockwork orange which I consider inline with this concept in which he wrote:
"Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. We like to have the pants scared off us by visions of cosmic destruction. To sit down in a dull room and compose the Missa Solemis or The Anatomy of the Melancholy does not make headlines or news flashes."
All the anti-capitalist doom lit out there has its place, but all of the adults all agree that its intellectually dishonest. This article is just calling out something with no attempt to improve or offer a way forward (thank you to the parent comment for calling this out). Its even ignoring that there are many people who actually enjoy the state of affairs.
Readit News
I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don't want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work.
People have this romantic notion of history thinking that nobody had to work, it was just play all the time, but that is almost entirely false. Worse in the few cases where somebody didn't have to work we quickly discover that it was because they had many slaves doing all the work for them. In reality your typical person today is working much less than at any previous time in history. If it seems otherwise it is because you are not counting all the work - hunter gathers may have only spend a few hours a week hunting/gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting/gathering was done preparing the results of that work. Those mud huts they live in - a lot of effort to build and keep up. Those blankets they sleep on to keep warm - a lot of work to make them (and they don't last forever).
I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts.
In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run.
This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords.
It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.
Maybe, but it also can be much worse. Any of your owners can exploit the situation via fraud and if they hide it well you won't know until the whole fails and you lose whatever your investment was. Co-op is still a good model for some things, but beware it isn't clearly any better and can be much worse.
In some cases co-op is more exploitive because they use the "you are a member" line and get you to believe it and so you don't even realize how bad it is.
When a co-op is good it is good. However don't fool yourself, it isn't always good. So long as you are not fooled they can work very well.
Deleted Comment
I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.
1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.
I wish I knew more about what scholarship people are relying on to come to this conclusion. Can someone point me to a definitive source?
Subsistence farming is not an easy job.
As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).
That's anyways what I remember.
When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.
Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.
The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.
I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.
This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.
So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.
And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.
And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...
It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?
For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.
Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.
But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.
There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.
In the US. In Norway an årsverk (year's work) is 1695 hours on average, 37.5 hours per work week. The actual average hours worked per week is about ten percent lower.
As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones
- find someone to collect my garbage and recycling
- find someone to fix my utilities when broken
- find someone to put out fires - real ones
- make sure there are enough people in those roles
- find ways to make those things seem "fun"
* Great exercise.
* Builds local knowledge.
* Cameraderie with a tight-knit team.
* Driving trucks and planning routes (assuming role rotation).
Perhaps we need to make a diagram to decide.
Granted, there are vast amounts of wasted work hours these days, be it farmers producing food when 30% of it goes straight to trash or those poor souls stuck in bullshit office jobs. But this:
> Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work.
Is a straight-up lie.
[0] https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.p...
What straw man ? It's written in the essay: "everything got done without work". Nope, it never happened.
Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.
No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.
Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House
This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.
Also to stay authentic with our noble mission to only talk about things we have practical actions to move to, I would suggest that we request deletion of some Wikipedia articles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
Deleted Comment
"Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. We like to have the pants scared off us by visions of cosmic destruction. To sit down in a dull room and compose the Missa Solemis or The Anatomy of the Melancholy does not make headlines or news flashes."
All the anti-capitalist doom lit out there has its place, but all of the adults all agree that its intellectually dishonest. This article is just calling out something with no attempt to improve or offer a way forward (thank you to the parent comment for calling this out). Its even ignoring that there are many people who actually enjoy the state of affairs.