I'm not sure that is true.

Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not.

>You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner

Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer.

>You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.

It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof.

Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive.

>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.

>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

That is very environment specific.

Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.

There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.

You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).

I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)

Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff...

You could be perfectly content (and more happy than most office drones with 1000x the stuff) with a couple of clothe articles, food and a basic home...

> Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff..

Uh, sure? This is a complete non sequitur, as nobody is making the claim you're describing. If you actually read my full comment, I address this directly by saying that it's a much more reasonable argument that utility from all goods isn't equally distributed and the important ones haven't gotten easier to get at the same rate as the unimportant ones.

That doesn't mean that it's not incredibly factually inaccurate to think that access to consumer goods hasn't become mind-bogglingly higher

And even if you replace "office drone stuff" with more highbrow items... You really don't need a lot of books either. I'd die an accomplished man if I grokked what's on ~2m of my modest bookshelf. Hell, if that was all what was available at me, I'd probably get there sooner.

Yeah, the universal things more people crave after the basics (food, shelter, health) are covered are, I'd say:

- a sense of meaning - a sense of purpose - the ability to influence their environment - community - companionship - love - sex

And those are not to be found in consumer goods, and would be a problem in 1200 as much as in 2019 (if not more so)...

We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.

They were literal pioneers. It was considered an incredibly difficult lifestyle by everyone else back then too.

An isolated homesteader's lifestyle would be vastly different to a medieval village community.

The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.

I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin

That's a great quote. I've often said that fulfilling work is one of the great joys in life, but leave it to Ursula LeGuin to say it better.

Then why do I hate cooking?

Nobody has to like everything. I like cooking, I hate doing dishes and cleaning. I know people who hate cooking and enjoy dishes. It is good to have a mix of complementary skills and preferences in a household.

It's a hell of a thing when, as a cook, you can stand up from a good dinner you made and walk away from the mess knowing that your roommate Barry wants to have a quiet hour of not talking to anyone doing the dishes and tidying the kitchen because he has actually been looking forward to it and that's what gives him peace. The same peace I got from chopping vegetables and stirring pots.

I've even met someone who likes doing laundry! They wash and iron their own dress shirts despite being perfectly able to pay an inexpensive dry cleaner and describe it as "Cheaper than seeing a shrink".

You make it sound as if washing and ironing is a massive chore.

Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to throw away, no use of dry cleaning chemicals.

> When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes.

3 mins? I iron my shirts, five a week, and it takes me 10-15 mins per shirt, depending on the shirt.

There's something wrong with your technique or the materials.

Because your brain is thinking of other tasks or responsibilities, and you feel as if you’re wasting your time, or need to rush to finish.

Additionally, if you’re not experienced, you don’t know how long something will take, and the indeterminate estimate is off-putting.

Correct?

I recently experienced this with a specific work-related task, where I was shocked to find myself enjoying doing something that I usually hate. When I asked myself what the difference was, the only thing I could come up with was that during this particular run-through, it was the only time that I wasn't rushing through the task while thinking about what came next.

Any additional insight into what's going on here? I'd love to wield this power to help myself love other things that I hate.

For me it's because it's repetitive and can't be optimized well. Programming has spoiled me...

There are many definitions of cooking. Do you hate cooking for thanksgiving, when step-parents are coming for supper on sunday or when you slap peanut butter on loaves of bread ?

This seems counter-intuitive, if you consider the work choices throughout history. People who had no choice did all the "direct benefit" work (cooking, cleaning, etc) whereas those with money engaged in a bunch of pursuits with no clear benefits, just for the sake of it: science, theoretical math, philosophy, art, etc. Often the fruits of their work only came after their deaths.

No, they really worked less hours including those things, and it has been studied a lot. In fact, a lot of the work was those things precisely.

(Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner").

You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy).

Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.

What kind of french farmers? The land owners with their subsidized businesses, or the hired hands?

No, small farm owners (domestic professional production of e.g. wine, cheese, etc, but not in any large quantity).

And with no use of "hired hands" in the sense of large "factory-like" farms.

French farmers and farmers in the EU have a lot of support from the CAP (subsidy). Having said that there are a lot of pressures suicides etc farming Is not some dream job.

Working on a side project to scratch your own itch feels very emotionally different than working for someone else.

And in the same way washing clothes or making dinner doesn't feel stressful in the way working for someone else does.

That is not universally true. I would much rather work (at my employer) than do household stuff. I like to cook but I still by the pre-planned bags with recipes since I don't like the planning part. But I pay someone else to clean my home since i rather work.

May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.

To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.

Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals.

Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.

French farmers did nothing 1/3 of the year now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives.

>now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives.

Not just France, suicide rates are up among farmers the world around

A couple of examples:

The U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...

India https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides...

it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around