I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work). There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true? If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?
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I don’t know about you, but for me, work is the side-quest.
I did not get any work yet but yeah, my main quest is knowledge to prove myself wrong
own only what is available to a farmer from the past (a piece of land and a couple of barns), desire only what is available to a farmer from the past (a hearty dinner and strong tobacco, not a new iPhone), and then you can live like a farmer from the past today.
I am kinda like this except that I care about my skincare and Internet. So without my sunscreen and laptop with Internet connection, I am not happy. If I have access to these things plus fruits(or any other cheap vegan alternate), water, and a room to shit and sleep, I want nothing else.
can you tho? land/barn/… are not free
I still don’t understand what the cons are. Maybe there are some arguments? In my country, a hectare of fertile black soil costs $1,000. Is this an unbearable amount? I’m sure the world is full of such countries.
And yes, buildings can be built independently. If you buy absolutely everything, then you are not a farmer, but a farm owner. The same capitalsit that half of the comments are against. =)
In France it’s not legal to build anything on agricultural land, and the lands you can build on are much more expensive, and you’ll need permits and to pay taxes. So I really don’t see how one could really isolated himself like you said
Why is that? there are places in the world where a land costs almost nothing, and you can build a barn yourself. Like… a farmer from the past. =)
By the way, there are really a lot of holidays, but do you know what a harvest is? When the wheat ripens, you can’t tell it, “Wait, wait, my shift is over.” You collect it around the clock. And if we’re talking about the present past, then you assemble it with your hands, without automation.
UPD: And then, after standing with a sickle for 9 hours, you get to the house (which you also built yourself), take care of the livestock, have a hearty dinner, smoke a pipe to ease the pain in your whole body, lie down on the bed and instantly fall asleep from fatigue. Then you sleep without dreams, wake up and return to the field. My grandfather led this way of life until his death. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it very much. But in general, as already mentioned, he really did not use the money, except in rare cases. Usually.
Because the people who own everything aren’t being slaughtered in the streets.
Are you South Asian? This extreme mentality I only found in South Asians being a South Asian myself.
eat the rich? I think it’s getting fame all around the world
Not that but the way you are eating rich. The slaughter thing is quite brutal and against human rights.
The daily systemic violence of capitalism and imperialism is far worse than the revolutionary means to end it.
But it will never happen cuz you know whenever a country tries to be a socialist economy, Uncle Sam buys people from that country and always make sure to not let that happen. As long as there is Uncle Sam, world can never have a socialist economy.
There are several socialist countries already. The US’s time as the unipolar hegemon are quickly fading, the US cannot even win against Iran. As the global south develops economically and gains its own footing, and the US gradually decays, we see more openings for additional socialist countries. No system is ever static, no empire lasts forever.
for example? USSR is no more China is state capitalist Scandinavian countries are welfare states?
Those are true, it’s the shift to capitalism. Before excess wealth could be gained through colonization. Once that was done it became about squeezing out as much as you can from your workers. However the good businessman would have squeezed everything they could out of their workers while colonizing. (Like the US in the Middle East since WW2 or more recently Venezuela)
A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.
A phrase that I’ve found really useful in understanding this is “cultural hegemony”. This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It’s a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don’t feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I’ll attempt to give the gist of it
The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it’s natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying “that’s just life”. They can’t imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say “wow, that’s so good, you should sell those” — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.
To sum up hegemony, the latent ideas of society, or “common sense,” is ruling class ideology. Ideology is presented and maintained through bourgeois intellectuals, such as the education system, media, etc. Gramsci’s counter is the development of a proletarian party, which creates proletarian intellectuals that can disseminate proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism (Gramsci was ML).
To expand, the greater idea is that we are all philosophers, whether we understand our own philosophy, or world outlook, or not. Common sense is a world outlook, and living in capitalism without consciously understanding that how we live in it shapes what we actually believe leads to upholding capitalism. This is the importance of dialectical materialism, it eliminates the bourgeois-friendly idealism and mechanical materialism that plague modern thought, and logically leads to proletarian emancipation.
I am South Asian and that “that’s just life or fate” attitude is common where I live.
After I hit 40 hours I’m gone. I acknowledge there is a certain amount of privlege required to do that. It took me 20 years to get to that point but Im proud of it and I wanted to brag.
Capitalism
the biggest evil
Are there any other systems, or point in history, where a country’s population could live without working?
I don’t know whether to assume this question is in good faith or not. Can you restate what you think the OP is asking? It’s not about whether there was ever a time when no work was needed.
I’m not interested in
wasting my time against a sealiondebating capitalism.I’m not coming from a defence of capitalism. I’m just pointing out that people have had to work in some capacity to live all throughout history. People would still need to work to live under any system.
I’m just pointing out that people have had to work in some capacity to live all throughout history. People would still need to work to live under any system.
Nobody said otherwise.
… the title in OP asked, “why do we live to work, rather than work to live?”
The response was “capitalism.”
So: precisely under (not-capitalism)… we could “work to live,” rather than “live to work.”
That’s true, but the point is in the current system we’re working a lot harder than necessary in order to benefit a few people at the top
Working in what context? There are native peoples all over the globe that work to live and not to enrich a single sociopath.
The concept of 9-5, 5 days a week is exclusively from Unions and organized labour.
As are the ideas of workers rights, any kind of safety regulation, minimum wages, paid days off(holidays and vacation).
These ideas are going away because we forgot that Unions are critical to the idea of a middle class.
Even the one who are not identified as labors like IT guys, xyz engineers, they have a lot of pressure and the shitty corporate culture.
We need to fix this definition because it is wrong. Labor is anyone who gets paid to work. As opposed to Capital who makes money off of owning stuff.
IT guys, engineers, doctors are labor unless they literally own the company.
I agree. The legal definition of a labor must be encompassing of these people too.
unless they literally own the company
And even then, most of them are still labor. It’s shocking how many companies outsource to people who ‘own their own company’ to avoid labor laws. For example, Uber.
IT is a fairly new concept and companies have rigorously resisted the creation of either a union of IT workers or a society of one like doctors and engineers enjoy
Why would companies have a say in this? Lol
Companies never like unions, it’s the workers who create them to protect ourselves
Because they intimidate people trying to organize, either subtly or with overt violence.
They will also go after fundraising to block it, they will shut down locations where it is getting traction, they will outsource until the issue is dead, they will encourage the 1-2 year employment cycle silicon valley employs to prevent the kind of bonds that lend themselves to organizing.
Edit: they will also just bribe the leaders and organizers. Everyone has a price.
I believe that for IT it was more the result of how the technology had increasing productivity and revenue that empowered IT employees to negotiate good contracts for themselves. Because of this they saw no need to organize and considered themselves in par with the owners of the company. Now LLMs are used to undermine IT work and that is partly why tables are turning.
Compared to pre-WW2 era, the work week and day has decreased from 12 hours/day, 6 days per week, thanks to the more militant labor movement.
In more recent decades, productivity has increased significantly, so we should be able to produce the same amount as before, with less labor: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
But I’ll let you guess who is cashing in the extra profit from your work. Tip: it’s not you.
Back then all you had was the clothes on your back an half a sack of grain at the store. There’s more free time if you don’t produce anything.
And an onion tied to your belt, which was the fashion at the time
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with ain’t it and what it is scares me.
It will happen to you too.
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Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.
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Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of “how much do you need for living” and “how easily could you find another job”.
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Farms had a lot more work than just 9-5. Labor unions fought very hard, and many paid with their lives, to get work hours restricted to 9-5.
Not true. For most of human existence we worked on average like 4h a day. More on harvest and sowing season, practically nothing during the rest of the year.
And before agriculture, we didn’t really work like that. You did stuff all day, mixed in with a lot of socializing and resting. But no one had a job and people didn’t need to spend x amount of time doing y.
So not sure what you mean by this. The idea that humans live to work is exclusively a product of the Industrial Revolution.
Being self employed helps. My workday doesn’t end at set time - it ends when I’m done. Sometimes that’s 10am, sometimes 7pm. Then if I feel like I’ve worked too much and could use a vacation I just don’t schedule any work for the rest of the week/next few weeks.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do work a lot but it doesn’t feel like work really because I have total control of everything I do and I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. What also helps is that I manipulate the physical world - not bits on a computer. When I’m done I can see what I’ve built and on top of all that I get genuine gratitude for it. Lots of it actually - people are awesome.
Interesting as most of self employed I met online are coders or virtual assistants.
Aren’t you slave to your customers instead of your boss though ? Can you really afford to just close the door and go sunny side of your want to?
I do small- to medium-sized renovations jobs. Ofcourse I can’t just leave while a project is still ongoing but next time the phone rings, there’s nothing stopping me from saying the next available time is a month from now. Also, I have over a hundred individual customers, so I can afford losing some. If working for one starts feeling like being a slave, I can just not take future jobs from them.
That sounds like a nice situation. Broad market, customers by the bucket. That’s quite nice! I admire your line of work. I could never to it following my personal attempts to renovate my own home. You must have acquired a whole lotta skills to get where you are .
I’m mostly self-taught. These things aren’t that hard if you just know what you’re doing, and internet is full of instructions. Looking at my own home, nobody would believe I do this for living as it’s where my every first attempt at something is located and much of it is what I’d now consider sub-standard quality.
Well yeah but that’s the thing; knowing what you should be doing riiiiiigh before the concrete dries on you last mistake xD
And getting « the hand » for everything. Like applying plaster; from my first wall to my last it tell quite the story. And that’s if there’s no shit luck like « ho what’s this sus beam embedded in the wall doing and how do si deal with it no that I have a very large opening to do for this news door frame ».
No really fuck all that anxiety. Even with the all Internet cheering ;-)
Yes, in a way, but on the other hand, time invested benefits them, not their boss. They own their means of production.
Yeah true that. Well possibly at least. They do own their skills at least. The rest is possibly rentals :-/
The rest is possibly rentals :-/
Nope. Even the truck’s paid off.
Companies need to make line go up. You could increase productivity by using more tech (computers, tools, etc), but you can also do it by working longer. So the people in charge said “why not both?!” And here we are.
I feel like some of it also is “work until you’re done” still. Hourly jobs pay per hour. But salary jobs typically pay you for work accomplishments, not time. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of tech improvements and processes have oversold their productivity improvements… example: AI will make you go code 10x as fast! So managers hear that (typically upper management, not middle/lower management who actually see it) and thus expect people to instantly do 10x the work. So you now have to bust your ass off working longer hours to meet that expectation. Good middle management will push back and reset expectations, but often the damage is done when they can half their work force with the assumption that they’re going to be so much more productive now that this new magical tool is in place.
The corporate culture is also quite insane and dehumanizing. This motivates me to be poor than to earn these fellows.
A group of about 30 middle managers pushed back on policies and processes that were killing the business, hurting employee moral and eroding customer confidence. They were told “no and that they were the problem and needed to do better”. Next meeting was, hey look at this new AI chatbot that will make everything much faster, like AI is going to fix everything.
I feel like looking at work at merely profit maximization is missing a big part of the picture.
There’s a big part of it that’s social positioning within an organization. I’ve worked more than a few jobs that could have been part time or been eliminated entirely, thereby saving the company money, but there is social value of being a manager that employs +1 people, so those jobs stayed.
There is a massive amount of weirdness going on at companies that is entirely unrelated to the balance sheet and wouldn’t be out of a place in a Byzantine Court.
What other choice is there?
Let all our work given to AI and we be sitting like rulers on it. When bored, make some music or skit and put it online or just watch AI cartoons. (A pretty naive take which I think many of the “tech-bros” have)