this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Here's a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I'm talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for "least work required to live" is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.
There's been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn't exist - but we're still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I'm not a "Retvrn" guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.
And stress, damn stress 24/7 ever since mobile phones appeared. Some company tequires you to answer even if it's your off day.
There's a solution for that, BUT the only way you can fairly negotiate is during a job interview - pretty much any other time the company has an imbalance of power
This is a common confusion though when people say serfs worked only half the year that is working for their owner and doesn't include all the other work they need to do to live - to actually eat and have a basic life involved a lot of toil.
Of course not for rich people but that's never changed.
This isn't really true. Subsistence farming and hunter gatherer society sucked. It was continuous work to not starve, and a lot of people did starve.