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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

We have always traded our time for survival. That is why the species is intelligent. If anything, celebrate that you only spend 40 hours a week on surviving. Celebrate that the alert, productive, valuable time you invest is slowly building even better futures.

Besides, work is demonstrably good for our mental health. I'd go insane if I didn't have responsibilities, just like a sheepdog will.

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Current hunter-gatherers populations that can be observed in the world nowadays "work" only 20 hours a week. So 40, or even 50 for some, is way out of what would be "natural". Of course we now live longer, etc. I'm just countering the argument that 40 h is little to survive.

I would have to agree with you. When agriculture was invented, so was "work", that is, something that is separate from your real life. There's a reason agriculture didn't properly take off for hundreds of years, even though people knew that planting stuff makes it grow. Tending the earth was a shitty business, hard work that took most of the day without proper tools. Gathering stuff was a lot easier.

Work is in no way "natural". Having to eat is quite natural but for most of humanity's history you could just eat stuff from your immediate surroundings, with little time spent on gathering food. These days we spend 10 hours a day to a acquire the means to eat. I'd say people we're a lot smarter thousands of years ago.

I'd say people were a lot fewer thousands of years ago.

Yep, and that was mostly before some fool introduced agriculture, which led to 1000-fold increase in the human population... not to mention the introduction of diseases because we're not meant to digest agricultural products. Doh!

And what diseases are these? If you are thinking of the classic diseases of civilization, that isn't a problem with agricultural crops.

autoimmune diseases? grains?

Wow, that was specific.

so you think the advent of agriculture was a godsend to humanity?

I am not interested in playing this game.

It's not even about agriculture. In medieval europe peasants had a lot of leisure. Of course harvest season was brutal, but much of the rest of the year was easy.

Asian rice agriculture was endless back breaking work. But that wasn't the case in Europe.

Last thought- many people actually spend only a part of that 40 hours a week generating money for survival needs. The remaining discretionary bits should also be celebrated- even a minimum wage worker can save up enough to fly across America in a month or three. I'd say that is an improvement over wagon trains, wouldn't you? The same goes for so many other things you can spend that money on. The time you traded empowers you to do many things you could never do all on your own. Seize that opportunity. Go skiing in the Alps. Scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef. Be happy.

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