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Comment by mox1 | Hacker News Reader

You think that today in 2019, we spend more time at "work" than at any other time in history? That's just false.

Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6.

You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?

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Physically you are right. Mentally, maybe not. If you are in an information based job like writing or programming, then it’s very easy to carry your job around in your head. I may only program for a few hours a day, but the problems definitely come home with me. It takes a considerable amount of self awareness to both realize this and stop it.

This is definitely true. "Open-world" jobs are par for the course in the Western world, where deciding what you have to do is part of the job, along with predicting, strategizing, and reflecting. It is a lot more cognitively engaging and also heavy. Farming and mining certainly have aspects of this, but a majority of the work was drone work -- exactly the type of work to go first in automatization. What's left is necessarily cognitively difficult work.

You're not thinking on a long enough timescale. Hunter gatherers only worked 10 hours a week :)

They only hunter/gathered for that long.

How much time was spent in meetings, how much time preparing food, fixing clothes, patrolling territory, scouting things out, making home improvements etc.

If the modern person only worked for food, then I think a few hours a week would suffice.

ah yes, meetings, that famous bane of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle

I wonder if they have a scrum master, who tells everyone what to do, but no one has ever seen him hunting.

Halve the working time of today by 50% and we would reach levels that could be called "not insane".

The situation in the late 19th century was a historical aberration and workers neither since nor previously worked that many hours. Note also that in that period, Western society was full of day laborers, hobos and other chronically underemployed people. That is how capitalists could force workers into working insane hours at low pay. Because if they didn't want to do it, then there were thousands of others that were willing to. And importantly, most women were not employed which they are now. Given these factors it is not certain that the average person worked harder in the 19th century than the average person does today. The average factory worker certainly did, but that is different.

I don't get what is with these snarky replies all over Hacker News these days. His point was that people work a lot. Quarreling over whether some people some time during history has worked even more is missing it.

Even 'unemployed' women worked really hard back then. Without electricity, all the washing, managing the home heater, cooking, cleaning tasks have to be done on muscle power alone.

Doing a load of laundry on a hand washer and scrubbing board takes forever and is pretty brutal. So is getting up super early to put coal in the furnace (and then keeping it going all day every day). Running a stove you have to load with wood means starting really early. Churning butter by hand. Possibly grinding flour by hand. Making everyone's clothes by hand - when the sewing machine came out it made Singer incredibly rich because it saved so many women so many hours sewing their family's clothes by hand.

Nearest extant comparison would probably be Amish women.

Yes, that is why I wrote that women of that time were "not employed" not "not working". Household chores can be considered work, but that brings into question what is work and what is leisure? Raising kids is certainly a lot of work but it is also entirely optional so why isn't it leisure? arvinism however wrote "more time at work than ever" which can't mean anything other than hours in employment.

There's no snark in that comment.

And less of our time at work is spent actually working.

This might sound good in theory, but time spent at work not working can be soul destroying.

The average farmer definitely worked less than 40 hours. During harvest season it was more than that no doubt but overall the time spent on work was less and more diverse. It was only with industrialization and capitalism that work took over such an enormous amount of our time. At the beginning of the 20th century, people fought back hard to get the amenities like 40h week and sick leave that make work bearable today. It certainly wasn't Henry Ford who introduced the 5 day work week. It was the workers who protested for it while people like Henry Ford sent strike breakers and police with machine guns to mow them down.

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