The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).
We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume.
But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.
So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...)
Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable
This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.
Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.
We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.
Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.
This leads to the following conundrum:
If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.
Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.
> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).
This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)
Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth)
That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them.
Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics.
Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.
The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees.
Many of those people fullfil complex
, Critical roles, successfully.
But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable.
The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).
Or, perhaps those people could be rewarded in proportion to the value they deliver compared to others. You could then choose to live simply (but with life's essentials), working less, or alternatively you could work hard to obtain prestige and money.
You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession.
So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.
I am not really sure I understand what you are trying to say. 40 is not a magic number. Just like we once standardised workweek to be 40 hours, we can now (re)standardise it to be 32, or 16. Why not.
I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.
This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.
Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person.
There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.
Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.
This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable
C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.
We are not in a static equilibrium. I don't think anyone believes we have reached an ideal state of technology where we don't need to progress any further. People who are not producing things that are immediately useful can be working to improve processes for building things, inventing new things, doing basic research, and supporting people who do that.
There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary.
It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.
> But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.
Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward.
It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts.
What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?
This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.
If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares!
Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.
Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends.
Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...
> Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.
This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.
> Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...
“The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.”
I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.
Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.
Neat! Gray is the person who first pointed me towards anarchism (back in 1999, wow) as a political philosophy, after reading about his Sudbury Valley School and following a link to the Anarchist FAQ.
In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.
Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.
Less work is harder then it sounds because (in advanced economies) MOST jobs are skilled jobs, even the ones that don't seem that way, and developing skill takes time, skill, and practice. As others have noted, labor isn't nearly fungible as we often pretend, and two workers doing 20 hour schedules generally aren't as productive as one worker doing a 40 schedule. This shows up in the "part time penalty" for workers amongst other things, but should resonate with anyone who's had to onboard others to a team or project.
There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.
Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.
I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.
From TFA:
> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.
It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.
I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater than what it was when I had no job. It really gave me some respect for the willpower required to run your own business.
Sometimes I think that decades of spending all our productive time in a 'work' setting make people feel like they like it, might be a basic psychological adaptation mechanism. In fact, being an able human and having months of time at my disposal is scary :)
[+] [-] neilwilson|6 years ago|reply
We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume.
But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.
So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...)
Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|6 years ago|reply
This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.
Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.
We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.
[+] [-] jandrewrogers|6 years ago|reply
Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.
This leads to the following conundrum:
If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.
Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)
Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)
[+] [-] eevilspock|6 years ago|reply
That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them.
Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics.
Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.
[+] [-] petra|6 years ago|reply
Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully.
But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable.
So why won't this work in the general economy ?
[+] [-] nerdponx|6 years ago|reply
Citation needed?
[+] [-] iamnothere|6 years ago|reply
You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession.
So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.
[+] [-] brighter2morrow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrob|6 years ago|reply
There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.
Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.
This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?
[+] [-] scottlocklin|6 years ago|reply
C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.
[+] [-] imgabe|6 years ago|reply
There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary.
It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.
[+] [-] kadendogthing|6 years ago|reply
That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.
[+] [-] hedvig|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|6 years ago|reply
Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward.
It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts.
Does this simply not work at scale?
[+] [-] hurryskurry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] doboyy|6 years ago|reply
Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamaz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|6 years ago|reply
No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it.
Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are?
This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology.
And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential.
Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.
[+] [-] deadA1ias|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|6 years ago|reply
Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.
Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends.
Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...
[+] [-] badpun|6 years ago|reply
This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
But how?
[+] [-] handedness|6 years ago|reply
--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
[+] [-] cleandreams|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ameliaquining|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astazangasta|6 years ago|reply
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...
[+] [-] nerder92|6 years ago|reply
I can find a lot of similarities with the IT industry, or at least in the early days. This is what other industries misses a lot.
"Work less. Play more" I totally buy this slogan, our life is about us and our loved ones at the end.
[+] [-] Can_Not|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMckenny|6 years ago|reply
Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|6 years ago|reply
It was all taken by the ruling "elite".
[+] [-] _vk_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bantersaurus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|6 years ago|reply
There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40acres|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rini17|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...
[+] [-] Proven|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sproketboy|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mruts|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711
[+] [-] klyrs|6 years ago|reply
I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.
From TFA:
> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.
It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.
[+] [-] tuesdayrain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kachurovskiy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqpb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesBarney|6 years ago|reply