The Mythology of Work (2018)

Maybe, but it also can be much worse. Any of your owners can exploit the situation via fraud and if they hide it well you won't know until the whole fails and you lose whatever your investment was. Co-op is still a good model for some things, but beware it isn't clearly any better and can be much worse.

In some cases co-op is more exploitive because they use the "you are a member" line and get you to believe it and so you don't even realize how bad it is.

When a co-op is good it is good. However don't fool yourself, it isn't always good. So long as you are not fooled they can work very well.

It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?

For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.

Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.

But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.

There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.

When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.

Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.

This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.

So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.

And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.

And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...

The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.

I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.

1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.

I wish I knew more about what scholarship people are relying on to come to this conclusion. Can someone point me to a definitive source?

Subsistence farming is not an easy job.

* Great exercise.

* Builds local knowledge.

* Cameraderie with a tight-knit team.

* Driving trucks and planning routes (assuming role rotation).

[0] https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.p...

What straw man ? It's written in the essay: "everything got done without work". Nope, it never happened.

This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.

Pain compensated. Environmental consequences hit the fan. Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment ...

And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way.

I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well.

So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it.

Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?

In real terms: if every renter received equity in what they pay for rent (- maintenance) then housing would be more fair as both rent prices would come down as well as purchase being more affordable as landlords start selling the stock

Edit: note that I guess i’m replying to both you and the original commenter

It would require far less labour to secure these living standards if all the land in the world weren't already claimed and violently defended by a property-owning class. Looking back through history, it's plainly evident that most ownership, especially of land, was acquired through violent means that most would condemn today.

If there were some great reset where we could all agree on a fair system in which no one had any benefits or disadvantages due to some historical events, there is no way the same labour trade "deal" would be maintained.

its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society.

sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby

The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.

Stuff like this:

> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.

The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.

A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.

The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.

Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.

It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.

This wasn't that long ago.

We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)

Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.

But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}