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.
Of course, it operates at a different level to the co-op kiliantics describes; you can't have 10 farmers share a $800K machine unless your mean member has $80K cash on hand.
The Arla dairy business in Denmark and Sweden is also a co-op. It is the fifth biggest dairy company in the world.
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.
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.
Also, the long commutes of today aren't very far from the norm or the last couple of centuries and add up to 200 or 300 hours on average. Some people do have it much worse, but some people also have it much better.
That said, the difference between the 1500 and 3000 extremes is huge. And we should be working towards the smallest one being the norm. But all of the upthread observations are perfectly on point.
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.
Do you think it bothered them the same way as if you suddenly couldn't anymore too?
They most likely saw it as the norm, not as a huge side effect of not having washing machine
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.
And that one of those jobs was his blog. He was tricking me into reading it by exaggerating things, so I'd maybe click some of his affiliate links and make him money.
What's funny is he wasn't even really coy about what he was doing, it was all right there, yet he had (and I think still kind of has?) tons of loyal fans.
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.
"Let’s be clear about this—critiquing work doesn’t mean rejecting labor, effort, ambition, or commitment. It doesn’t mean demanding that everything be fun or easy. Fighting against the forces that compel us to work is hard work. Laziness is not the alternative to work, though it might be a byproduct of it."
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.
This is arguing that there is no difference between being a slave and being a free human because both have to prepare food, chop wood, wash dishes.
"I own a house, I will put the bins out because I want my house to be rat-free and smell nice" is fundamentally different from "my master orders me to put the bins out and if I don't I will be punished" and from "my employer orders me to put the bins out and if I don't I will become unemployed, homeless, unable to get food, so I am coerced to do it and have no choice".
You are arguing that the choice is meaningless because labour and work and employment are all the same, and the author is arguing that the choice is everything.
Couldn't agree more... all this work/labor hairsplitting makes no sense.
But in terms of steps, yes the problem of capitalist exploitation is solvable. Of course the 1% don't really want that solution which is why they try so hard to perpetuate the myths the author takes on.
Which is to say I can't quote their definition, but it was clearly leading to the sexist one. (elsewhere people are using a labor vs work distinction which I'm going to contend comes from the same sexism and isn't a useful distinction)
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...
"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.
We need to undo how expensive it is to be poor - this is exploitative capitalism against the poorest. And the essentials should seek to be lowering prices, not go up like luxuries.
The deal then changes to: "you don't have to work, and you won't starve or freeze, but you also won't have any luxuries". And yes, all luxuries get more expensive.
The capitalist incentive remain: A gap in the market can yield you wealth for 10-20 years until you’re bought out. and government only buys the highest performing stuff of the bunch.
Challenge is having a system that is resistant to gaming
It won’t quite be free either, just paid by the government. It’s possible that technology of collecting taxes might also need to improve
If they can't understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can't take their case seriously. If they can't cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can't take their case seriously.
Trade offered! You receive: enough sustenance to live for a day and a roof above your head so you don't have to sleep under a bridge. I receive: your 12 hours of labour of my choosing.
Yes, it is a mutually beneficial transaction, and millions of people historically have accepted it. Yet somehow there is this nagging feeling it might not be "fair"... but that's absurd, isn't it? It's both completely voluntary and mutually beneficial, so it has to be fair. That's what "fair" means, after all, doesn't it?
It would require far less labour to secure these living standards if all the land in the world weren't already claimed and violently defended by a property-owning class. Looking back through history, it's plainly evident that most ownership, especially of land, was acquired through violent means that most would condemn today.
If there were some great reset where we could all agree on a fair system in which no one had any benefits or disadvantages due to some historical events, there is no way the same labour trade "deal" would be maintained.
In real terms: if every renter received equity in what they pay for rent (- maintenance) then housing would be more fair as both rent prices would come down as well as purchase being more affordable as landlords start selling the stock
Edit: note that I guess i’m replying to both you and the original commenter
Pain compensated. Environmental consequences hit the fan. Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment ...
And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way.
I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well.
So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it.
Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?
its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society.
sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby
I think that's a quality observation.
One of the helpful observations of humans I've gained from this site is that people tend to assume that their position in society is some kind of natural given. And typically the folks here are either what some folks might term "labor aristocracy" or literal aristocracy.
Hence the reason why skipping humanities classes has been so harmful- they haven't spent the effort to appreciate the vast width of human experience.
So when they are confronted with ideas about how other folks live, their inclination to see themselves as naturally in a solid position makes it difficult to see why other people make the choices they make.
Fundamentally the folks on this site have a highly chauvinistic picture of their culture and really, at their core, are "anti-democratic" because they don't feel other folks can make rational choices about life.
It's only recently that this has become an "out loud" thing to say, but I have been hearing it quite a lot lately.
This trend has been something I've been paying attention to for a long time- I've had a quicklink to search for "musk" in titles of the site since about the time he bought twitter because I could see where this is going, and I feel unfortunately validated in that feeling.
But if you want to check the pulse on the nihilistic sociopaths who are now in charge of parts of the US Gov, this site is very helpful.
Also good for finding out about running doom on various devices, but that's just a side benefit.
If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.
Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.
You don't have to say something new to a younger generation if that younger generation hasn't understood or even heard the old, the obvious, yet.
Youngsters might have heard some of it but their brains are often high enough on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... and then there are the 'media-sigmas and cool kids' who sing that shit in choirs and canons.
A lot of things go to waste and yet there is tons of useful stuff coming out of recycling and up-cycling and that's just two methods with a very small "margin" and undeveloped.
There are those design and architecture blogs and firms and there is cool shit all the time and wonderful projects everywhere but the pointlessness of the over-engineered financial reasoning behind yearly sursurpluspluses is stacked against that.
You don't catch and bring a culprit to justice if you drop the investigation, which might have to circle long enough for some other brain or pair of eyes to find the final puzzle piece.
And not everyone wishes they were happier.
There's enough to criticize about anarchist, leftist critiques and groups and collectives as well, though, just as much exploitation of youth, gullibility and pain and crisis, and problems, really, but not systemically.
And there's that fallacy, something ad hominem, I think, so we should focus on what is said and written and, if obvious but unsolved, get to the bottom of it instead of saying "I don't care", "nobody cares", "human nature in the 21st post marketing psychology and decades of punched food, drink, drugs, meds and media century"
The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
Stuff like this:
> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.
The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.
A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.
The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.
Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.
It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.
This wasn't that long ago.
We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)
Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.
But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
> If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.
You, with derision:
> Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.
> The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
So... Is it okay to decide to change on a personal level to not work or does that make you a dingus like your brother?
The whole point is that we have achieved insane productivity without the commensurate increase in quality of life and leisure due to the idiotic status quo.
> But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true.
Indeed.
this little dependency sequence is exactly how I, again and again, come to the conclusion about what climate change is driven by and climate change (re-)actions should be.
but in terms of change: others need to change so that change can hold the line.
example: good teachers are scarce. and when there are a few or only one at your school, most of their good impact is offset or entirely negated by their colleagues. and that's not life, that's not what it is, that's not how it goes.
It's because people in the dependency sequence refuse to change and instead serve someone who poses as a devil because the motherfucker gets them high on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'that's not my job', 'I don't care', 'I don't even care about not caring', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ...
AND: at almost every step in that dependency sequence, there are better ways to do things. implementation takes quite a bit of time and so there is no surplus to last years surplus, something that hasn't created any added value to civilization since the beginning of time.
everything is going on and these 'nobody cares' people are f u c k i n g annoying and so are all these 'normalizers' ... instead of adding value, they just serve those who ruin games and playing fields in exactly the ways that others are actively trying to change for the better, which is why there are demands for bottom-up change: your bossies won't tell you to change so you have to get it yourself instead of 'just doing your job', ffs.
you are right, of course, it's a personal matter, fuck whoever; but from a rational, game-theoretical, and super-rational perspective, what you said is nonsense and so is using that dependency sequence as an argument. Especially in the lights of all that shit in storage, or cleaning out storage for new shit that can only be marketed via deception and cross-media priming, and so on ... ...
just provide people with means, opportunity and let them have peace of mind, then you'll see what side they pick, which is where we end up, again, "burning men" with psychedelics and our decades of experience in cool fields and wonderful remote places, 'just doing our jobs' ...
we really ruined too much potential of capitalism. it's sad, but the wall-street rich did to capitalism what communist leadership did to communism; only that communism didn't get to develop that long ...
Title: Portfolio Communists threatening to ruin Capitalism and America from the Inside. ... no, needs work, any ideas?
Hypocrisy is a baseline human aha-moment, btw, you can't use it in or as an argument. There should be a fallacy for that, if anyone has time to formulate one.
