Despite technology allowing us to work less, we work more. Yes we should be grateful of technological advancement, but too many people are unnecessarily depressed and suicidal, and it doesn't have to be this way.
Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...
Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).
It's only after you remove every modern convenience and distraction that you begin to appreciate how important these slow, repetitive, indoor tasks were to human psychology. They allowed one to make good use of their time indoors while distracting from the crushing boredom of having nothing to do and affording time to socialize with family and neighbours.
Now, I'm not saying this is an idyllic lifestyle. It was certainly one of the factors that drove so many people to the squalor of early industrial cities where they might be poor, filthy, and poisoned but at least they had light, drink, and entertainment. But I think it's important to point out that our ancestors managed to get by with a great deal less than we do today while still finding comfort and fulfillment and potentially expending much less effort and suffering a great deal less stress than we experience. It's something to think about at least.
How do we measure this? I've been less well off in the past, having to spend more time doing chores like that, and not having a 9-5 job filling up that part of my day. Compared to now - working more, but with more money - I was more stressed and less fulfilled and very aware of all the effort I was expending because I couldn't afford all the conveniences I would've wanted.
It was not a bit of both. It was work. Yes, they could chat while doing some easy repetitive tasks, the same way as worker in work now chat while doing repetitive tasks. However, this was not low effort hobby you do whenever you feel like and can take random amount of time. It was work that needed to be done whether you feel like it or not. And preferably fast while keeping quality, because there was a lot of work like that. It also had to be done whether you are nine month pregnant or not and whether baby wake you up at night or not.
I don't know why you think it was supposed to be slow work. That makes sense only insofar you see and treat it as a hobby instead of as actual task that needs to be done, because you need result of it.
Fun fact: washing cloth without washing machine took whole day once a week. It was physically hard tiring work that required you to beat the thing to beat the mess out of it in cold water. If you want meat (which they definitely did not ate often), you gotta kill chicken. And clean it. Again, messy work that takes a lot of time.
I've also gone hiking in the mountains in California. Been on the beach in Italy. Walked around in the center of Munich.
As a 14th century peasant I probably never even knew those places existed.
I can also get pain medication if I have a headache. I can go to a doctor to fix my broken bones if I happen to get one. Oh, and the likelihood of dying of a random infection or chicken pox is exceedingly low.
Is is worth spending more time in a nice, warm, comfortable office to be able to do all of those things? Hell yes. Is it all shits and giggles all the time? Of course not.
So yes, it does correlate.
Realistically I also like to live in a nice house, do have to (well, by choice obviously) take care of three kids and like to enjoy a luxury here and there.
That takes money. I have tried multiple times to build my own companies, but sadly haven't been successful in that.
So that's for the travel argument.
As for the headache medication argument - I have that only because thousands of people have spent a lot of time in offices and labs developing those drugs and treatments.
Personally, my work mostly revolves around making wind turbines more efficient at producing energy by helping with data analysis. I also like to think that's my small way of offsetting the environmental damage I do by travelling. It's probably not enough, but still. something. So yeah, I'd say spending time at the office correlates quite nicely.
The reason we have all these advances that increase our quality of life is because generations have worked their ass off to build them
We should always strive to improve, but the article had the tone of "oh look how bad everything is" while implying that it hasn't always been like that. Things are far better now in almost any quantifiable measure than they have ever been in human history. Not enough people talk about that.
None. How many do you know?
For all that we have issues with a culture where people check work emails at home and are otherwise on-call, we've moved remarkably far from a culture where work was truly pervasive, where it formed the backdrop of everything else.
All of which is to say that both the quality, as you point out, and the purity of our recreation have improved quite a lot. Counting up a nebulous "time off" value seems to seriously misunderstand the changes in how we live.
Sounding pretty attractive to me right now.
Or, that everyone who works hard reaps the rewards, ignoring the ever-increasing disparity in compensation?
But the only thing I'm saying is to not over romanticise the past. The life of a 14 century peasant was not good compared to mine.
I also realise that a lot of the comforts I enjoy are because lots of people spent time in boring offices before me. The article sounds quite dismissive of that.
I'm forever grateful and do my part to help. Nobody owes me a good life.
And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.
That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day.
Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years.
This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow.
If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.
My father-in-law grew up on a very small farm in Poland. I know from my wife that when she would visit her uncle (who inherited the farm) in the summer, they would work long, hard days. I'll ask my father-in-law about winters. Something tells me there was plenty of work to be done in the winter as well.
He said that winters are definitely less work than summers, but that means that work days are more like 10 hours instead of 14. He said they still have to tend to the animals (milk cows, feed chickens, feed and cleanup after cows, horses and pigs), gather firewood, pump water from the well, clear snow, etc. Plus they do stuff that they simply don’t have time for in the summer. Repair things, spin wool and hemp, pluck geese for down, etc.
That being said, when he was growing up in Eastern Poland, 7 years of school were mandatory and he said basically all families adhered to this requirement. This indicates that there was some level of surplus generated by this lifestyle, because children become pretty useful by 5-6 years old, so having them spend 7 years being non-productive at school is a big deal.
They were also dead by 35.