The Mythology of Work (2018)

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.<p>I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don&#x27;t want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work.<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting&#x2F;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&#x27;t last forever).

&gt; 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.<p>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.

“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?”<p>As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones

Ah... and what about the mythology of no work ?<p>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:<p>&gt; Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work.<p>Is a straight-up lie.

The best accounting I&#x27;ve seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: &quot;Frontier House&quot;, &quot;Colonial House&quot;, &quot;Texas Ranch House&quot;, &quot;1900 House&quot;, &quot;The 1940s House&quot;, &quot;The 1900 Island&quot;, &quot;Prairie House&quot;, 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&#x27;t have to grow their own food.)<p>Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long &#x27;experiment&#x27;. 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.<p>No, it&#x27;s just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.<p>Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_1900_House" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_1900_House</a>

The pay increases just enough to make it slightly less uncomfortable to stay at work, than to do something else.

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.

There needs to be a mechanism in capitalism that provides some essential goods for free and incentivizes that behavior. A likely source is to tax it from companies making luxuries (the economic definition), provided companies actually pay the tax fairly, and lawmakers don&#x27;t leave gaping loopholes.<p>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.<p>The deal then changes to: &quot;you don&#x27;t have to work, and you won&#x27;t starve or freeze, but you also won&#x27;t have any luxuries&quot;. And yes, all luxuries get more expensive.

&quot;Work&quot; is a heavily overloaded word that cleaves meaning in a very unhelpful way. I&#x27;ve met great artists and scientists who tell me about &quot;their life&#x27;s work&quot;. Things they did, or would have done, even without money. There are people in therapy who are &quot;doing the work&quot;, and they pay well for that. I know one millionaire who volunteers at a hospital and another at a theatre. When you get older and get a measure of life, perspectives change. What the author describes is domination and the abject penury of exploitation that flourishes under failed systems. We need a richer language to talk about these things. The real poverty is in our understanding.

I think there&#x27;s enough to discuss around the stranglehold monopolies have on employment, or that pay should allow people to live, not just survive, or that we shouldn&#x27;t tie people&#x27;s value to their jobs. Articles like these do nothing to sway people away from the uncontrolled-capitalism lobby.

I wonder if the author could enlighten us on a more successful system? Do they envision a world where...no one works or produces value? Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals?<p>If they can&#x27;t understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can&#x27;t take their case seriously. If they can&#x27;t cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can&#x27;t take their case seriously.

Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capitalism and the modern wage system is going to go over well

Posting their cool essay on a computer that needs internet that needs electricity that needs power plants that needs natural resource extraction that needs heavy machinery that needs metallurgy that needs large factories that needs engineers that needs universities that needs thousands of years of human capital etc etc etc<p>If you don&#x27;t like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.<p>Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.