To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us.

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...

Women particularly spent almost all spare time making clothing - because a pair of pants could take a month to make. Sure it wasn't backbreaking work in the fields, but it wasn't spare leisure time either.

You're right, it wasn't either but it was a bit of both. Our perspective often misses many aspects of home life in the past because we are living in such a radically different environment than even our grand parents and great grand parents. When we think of "spare time" we imagine the few hours we can snatch before bed when we zone out and watch netflix or browse social media. Spare time for people living a subsistence lifestyle on a farm before the modern era often meant the entire winter or at the least every moment after the sun went down when you were limited to staying in doors with a lamp or fire as your only light source.

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.

> potentially expending much less effort and suffering a great deal less stress than we experience

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.

> You're right, it wasn't either but it was a bit of both.

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.

Yes, and that physical exhaustion is what we were made for. Not sitting in a chair 10 hours a day. Your body is far healthier doing a few hours of demanding physical activity every day. It follows that our minds are adapted to that rhythm as well.

While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually study then is through archeological records from before the birth of cities, which are unfortunately limited in what they can say.

Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.)

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).

I wouldn't say it's the only way. You could certainly gather data from experimental archaeology. True, you couldn't duplicate the lives of early hunter gatherer's precisely since you would have to take certain precautions to protect the well being of the researchers and you would be limited in your choice of locations but you could certainly perform experiments that would tell you how much time was necessary for gathering food, hunting, preparing food, making clothing and tools, building and repairing shelters, etc.

I work my ass off. Lot more hours than would be technically necessary. High tech as well.

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.

One thing that's always suspicious about those "peasants had more time off" claims is that they imply medieval peasants had a bright line between work and recreation in a way that's just not true. Talking about the day with your family while you spin wool or sharpen a sickle is... work? play? all of the above?

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.

>Talking about the day with your family while you spin wool or sharpen a sickle is...

Sounding pretty attractive to me right now.

But that is a false dichotomy. Your working long hours in an office in no way helps or correlates with the ability of being able to travel, or to have headache medication.

Technically, you're probably right.

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.

Alot of people are workaholics, maybe because they feel aimless and need some outside driving force. I work, but I also make alot of time for family and other activities. I turn down jobs that ask for more then 40 hours a week and I've quit jobs that had an unhealthy obsession with having your ass in a chair 8 hours a day at exactly 8am.

If you care about offsetting environmental costs of travelling, etc. consider donating to coolearth.org! About 70$ can offset an average carbon footprint for a whole year I think... It‘s one of the most effective charities against climate change and comes recommended by people such as Will MacAskill and Peter Singer who have founded a movement concerned with effective charity or „doing good better“. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

It's kind of sad to realise reading a comment like this now makes me instantly suspicious about whether or not this is "true" enthusiasm or something motivated by profit. It's a fundamentally hard problem to solve, but IMO it is one of the bigger hurdles facing places like this now.

Even when you're not doubting the recommendation enthusiasm, it's hard to not be suspicious of the charity itself, given how badly most of them are managed.

Work long hours to make money to pay for nice things like travel and medication because those things take time and effort to create and time spent creating should be rewarded and we reward people spending time working long hours creating things with money.

So yes, it does correlate.

ooh. much better put than my longer rant in sibling comment.

Maybe it does, if he works at Boeing.

The reason we have all these advances that increase our quality of life is because generations have worked their ass off to build them

Modern healthcare is the one thing I would be truly scared to give up. Fancy food, elaborate shelters, and rapid transportation are things that don't really matter much to your actual happiness. The idea that a cut on your thumb could kill you in your early twenties is pretty scary though.

I am not sure how the two are related. Are you implying that your view of quality of life (“work hard / travel the world”) is universal?

Or, that everyone who works hard reaps the rewards, ignoring the ever-increasing disparity in compensation?

Certainly, I've been very lucky. No argument there.

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.

I hear you and I think the comparison was quantifying the time spent in labor more than anything else.

So because we have it good now we shouldn't seek to do things better?

I never argued that. I do believe that things are much better now than in the 14th century though. That's the comment I replied to.

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.

What if you quantify against Europe? The article is pointing out the unhealthy work obsession and work environment of the US. How many people do you know with vacation the won't take for fear of losing their job? That is not the norm in every country.

> How many people do you know with vacation the won't take for fear of losing their job?

None. How many do you know?

At least a quarter of my coworkers when I worked at HP.

No, but because we have it good now we shouldn't frame the discussion to seem that the current situation is dire. We can and should do better, but things are already pretty great.

Just an FYI: hunter gatherers haven't been a significant portion of the overall human population for thousands of years. Like it or not, humans uncovered an ecological niche in the form of agriculture that was vastly more successful than hunting and foraging. The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day.

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.

> The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day.

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.

Great reply, thanks.

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.

This thread is getting pretty stale at this point, but I talked to my father in law about winters on a small farm and figured I’d relay the information here.

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.

Indeed, the typical American now spends more hours just to pay for land to sleep on than hunter-gatherers did to live.

This isn't true. Hunter gatherer life is nearly universally harsh and violent. I posted an article on this in the same comment thread. Modern humans are miserable, for sure, but older forms of life were not better.

> Hunter-gatherers only worked 2-3 hours per day.

They were also dead by 35.

That is misleading. Infant mortality was high, but for those who lived past childhood average lifespan was not that far off from what it is today. https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

What you said is also misleading. Hunter gatherers could live as long as people live today, but they frequently did not. Murder rates among hunter gatherers are insanely high. And there are all manner of disease that are no longer fatal, but once were. Heck, I've had several infections in my own life that would have been catastrophic 100 years ago.

OK. they only had a 50% chance of making it to 5 years old. That's much better!

So more “vacation”, but dead at 40. Sounds like a great trade.