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Comment by mumin-abu-jamal | Hacker News Reader

"we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food"

We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html

This "original affluent society" hypothesis is much-promoted but much of it just isn't true.

Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging of the mongongo nuts, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more. See:

http://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/01/was-the-agricultural-rev...

I don't understand the base of this debunk. Nowadays, food 'collecting', food processing, DIY (taking care of tools) are not counted into working time but come extra and are taken from 'free' time. And they amount to 1, perhaps 2, working day equivalent per week.

Sure: "40 hours a week" for moderns is also an underestimate.* But the figure everyone goes around repeating about hunter-gatherers is a more dramatic underestimate. The accurate !Kung estimate is 48-56 hours spent on these things: so we seem to be about the same, but with massively improved quality, cost, and nutrition for us.

The debunking applies to the claim that they had more leisure than us. Lee says: "work week... of 2.4 days per adult... [the bushmen] appeared to enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies."

* Industrialised-world cooking time per week seems to be about 6 hours. https://www.statista.com/statistics/420719/time-spent-cookin... Difficult to find average shopping time, but call it 5-7 hours a week. https://www.statista.com/statistics/521924/time-spent-househ...

But what was there to do with this free time?

Rest. Socialize. Make babies. Goof off, make others laugh. I'm gonna guess that some folks had games, and children likely invented them.

You forgot die in pain because your food was contaminated or your water has bacteria. Can we stop with the happy savages myth for a second?

This is a false dichotomy.

People do that in the modern world as well. Just because that stuff was true doesn't mean the rest is false.

I'm definitely not someone that wants to go back to the old times either.

With regards to "what was there for them to do?", the GP responded with the most authentically human things. Just like money can't buy happiness, technology can't buy you fulfillment and meaning, even if both can make you more comfortable.

There is no way to say this without sounding smug, but I'm reminded of talking with new roommates in San Jose about 10 years ago

* them: "we all split the tv bill, it's $45 a person"

* me: (gasping at a $220 per month tv bill) I actually don't watch tv

* them: (in disbelief) but what do you do after work???

Nowadays this would probably be less weird since we have more streaming options but this whole idea that time is an expanse to be filled as trivially as possible is concerning. What do you do with your unfree time? Is it more purposeful than what you do with time you have at your disposal?

Sort of tangential, but I have a similar thought whenever someone says they don't want to have kids because they don't want to "give up their freedom." No one bats an eye at the idea of spending 60 hours a week between work and commuting. A lot of young people don't even particularly care that much where they work, as long as the pay is ok, as opposed to say, starting their own business and making less money but having far fewer demands on their time.

Obviously people have got to make a living and it's not my place to say when people should have kids, but I don't think a lot of people have a very clear idea of what freedom means.

I just had a kid, and I understand this idea completely. I like being a parent but among other things, it means that major life decisions are MUCH more constrained.

Want to live somewhere else? Hope the schools are decent. Want to live in the city? Hope you can afford a bigger flat. Want to go on a holiday? Hope you're ok with a pissed off kid (and neighbours) on a flight, or lots of time spent entertaining them on a train, etc. Also your choice of destination will be different.

It works for bigger decisions too. It's harder to take huge risks (start a company, etc) when a kid is counting on you.

Also, we've considered changing country someday and now it feels like there's this weird deadline where it's not so bad if she's 2,3, or 4 when we do it but hugely disruptive if she's 10 or 12. We wouldn't have had those concerns before.

And time. My god, it's so time consuming. All of my side coding projects, including ones I've thought might turn in to a business, have ground to an utter and complete halt. As well they should - she's more important, but it's still frustrating. Life is pretty much {"bare necessities to keep a career going", "child care", "nowhere near enough sleep"} - though I hear this gets easier as they get older.

Yeah definitely, I didn't mean to be flippant about the amount of time it takes to raise a child, I have 3 myself, just that people don't hesitate to give up a similar amount of time to a job they don't care about, so I don't think it's really about freedom, it's really about priorities.

My wife and I own our own business so we're both home with the kids. For my own "freedom", working from home has been far more positive than having kids has been negative, but boy, I really hated working in an office so I may just be weird.

We're also considering homeschooling, so we don't have as many of the concerns about location, which would definitely be stressful.

I could be wrong but I believe homeschooling reduces the ability of the children to experience social situations which have an impact later on with their development

This was a major concern for us, but the more I think about it, the less concerned I get.

What I remember from school is a lot of social status competitions that weren't great for self esteem or regular adult life. I was generally popular and considered a nice guy in school and I still cringe at the way I behaved as a young adult. Part of that is just growing up, but a large part of it is that learning how to be very social in high school makes you kind of a jackass by normal adult standards.

Over my life I've also met a lot of homeschooled kids who seem "weird" compared to their peers because they act more like adults than children. The half dozen or so homeschooled kids I knew both as kids and adults have all become well adjusted adults, including the "weirdest" ones. I can remember as a kid thinking to myself how weird they were, and now I'm embarrassed for having been so judgmental as they turned out just fine.

And nothing I hear from friends or relatives with kids in school makes me feel like the kids are missing much by being at home. The same people who suggest that homeschooling hinders social development have practically monthly stories about bullying and conflicts with teachers and social cliques and it sounds like a lot of stress to subject a 6 year old to.

I agree completely that it's important that kids learn social skills but I think it's plausible that public school doesn't provide a better environment for that than home.

In any case, this is becoming less of a problem as the internet enables us to find lots of opportunities for kids to get together with other homeschoolers for sports, hikes, clubs, etc.

Can you elaborate? Or message me? I suspect we have similar mindsets.

Mostly I just think that there are certain places where it's socially acceptable to give up all your time, like to a career. But if you're a smart young person, you're considered to be giving up your future (at least by your peers) if you have kids too young, and I think whether that's true depends a ton on the person in question. I'm of the perspective that a lot of people trade their 20s for a paycheck and weekends getting drunk when they might be happier doing... whatever else, but it's socially acceptable to work and party away your twenties.

Everyone has different priorities for what they want out of life. My wife and I were really profoundly unhappy with the whole 9-5 employee thing, so we started doing web design on the side and eventually started earning enough to quit our jobs and we've sinced moved on to other things that we find more fulfilling than web design.

I mostly take care of the kids, supporting my wife in business when she needs it. I used to be a lawyer, and I can tell that when I tell people I'm basically a stay at home dad that they think I'm not achieving my potential.

But I know how being a lawyer made me feel and I know how dadding makes me feel and even though I still have a lot I want to accomplish from a business perspective, this is by far the best use of my time right now.

That is, I'd much rather do this than work 40 hours a week in order to pay for childcare and have some extra spending money. I'm trying to soak up parenthood while the kids are small and need me constantly and try to let them be independent so that I can reclaim my time as they get older and hopefully in 6-10 years, I'll be back to focusing on interesting business stuff without having to worry about starting a family.

And once again, I'm not suggesting that everyone would be happiest taking care of their children. My wife is much happier running the business.

We've just gotten a ton of mileage out of questioning assumptions about what makes a good life and ruthlessly pushing our life toward what we feel works best for us at the expense of social convention and so far it's worked really well.

We've ended up with a whole life that is really, really weird to a lot of people.

We work together from home (a lot of people like the office and that's cool, but not us) and spend basically all of our time with each other (a lot of couples tell us that they couldn't spend that much time together, but not us) and the kids and we're confident in our abilities to educate our kids in a way that hopefully achieves a better outcome than public schools (lots of people are sure that public school is better than homeschool, but we think technology offers some really cool opportunities). Our kids are still quite young but so far we're doing well, we'll see. We're also not opposed to shifting gears and putting the kids in school if we all think that would achieve better outcomes, or shifting gears in anything to move closer to what we want.

A lot of our friends are getting really embedded into their companies about now, and while the security seems enviable sometimes, it's a lot more important to us to be able to live where we want, and even when work is crazy, it's on our terms, and we think we're going to have a lot more control over our lives in our 40s and 50s than our friends who consider themselves "more free" than us right now.

Time will tell who ends up being right, but it's quite interesting and enjoyable right now!

Thanks for the detailed response! My wife and I are contemplating some large life changes and also feel like the way we've set up society is not actually the best way to live. How much of your work exists to make your boss' boss' boss, and your landlord, wealthier? Why can't I work half as much for half as much money? I never want to buy anything but the odd vacation anyway.

Exactly!

You're welcome, and good luck with everything! :)

"It gets easier" is a lie that the longer-serving parents tell the fresh meat, so they have some hope to cling to whenever they start to go crazy. Maybe it gets easier after they get a stable job and move out; I'll let you know after my anecdata results come in.

Sure, you eventually stop changing diapers, but that chore gets replaced by something else. And that one by something else, over and over. You're a debugger and fixer for a general-purpose natural intelligence project, and you have to strike a balance between two goals: it won't get destroyed by the world, and it won't destroy the world.

At the very least, I can confirm my 1 year old is far, far, far easier than she was at 3 months old.

Still exhausting, though.

Though I do agree with the general point of your premise - spending 60 hours a week working+commuting sounds horrible (I've worked to keep commutes under 15 minutes by bike, walk, or transit). Unfortunately it's non-optional for most people.

This actually brings to mind one of the issues of such a full world - there's not many places you can go to check out of the 9-5 and live off the land. I'm sure sustenance farming is really hard, but I'm not sure it's worse for the soul than spending 2000+ hours a year at a bullshit job.

I understand this.

As a single guy, if I want to get drunk, play my guitar, and/or watch It's Always Sunny, I can do that. Whenever the fancy strikes me. If I want to go drive two states over just to ruminate. I can do that. If I just want to take a nap. I can do that.

The claims on my time are small. A child changes all of that.

The idea that free time should be filled with entertainment rather than intellectual activities and social engagement is surprisingly modern.

Even only 50 years ago, in many cultures, people were spending more time reading, writing songs and playing instruments, engaging in politics, doing home DiY, gardening, improvisational theater.

I think the key difference is time spent making vs consuming. I don't know what the ideal ratio is between the two but think we've veered to too much consumption. The replacement of pc's with phones worries me for this reason.

Can you give example of such cultures? My impression was always that it was contrary to what you wrote. For example, tourism (taking a train to a neigboring city just for fun) was invented in XIX century England to show common folks that there's something other than drinking that they can fill their free time with.

What do people do when they go camping or hiking? What do people do when they go to the beach? What do people do when they go to a park? What do people do when they have dinner with their family and friends?

If you can't sit still and enjoy yourself just being, you will be in constant pain, and any break in that pain is only momentary relief. Most people pile distractions on top of distractions to shield themselves from their misery.

Thats pre civilization. Does it count?

Yes, it's human history

Unless it was written down, it's human pre-history.

And yet human beings still existed before developing written language, so the pertinent statement is still baseless:

>As human beings we have never had as much free time as now

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