Re:Two Years of Vanlife: A Retrospective
by Miner49er on Friday December 06, 2019 @11:50AM
(#21723540)
Idk, Americans also spend a lot of time on things that are necessary like that:
Cleaning, paying taxes, commuting, exercise (because most workers don't get it at work anymore), buying and cooking food, taking care of house and car, laundry, etc.
I huge amount of time is spent on those things and that wasn't included in the 40 hours.
You're right that I shouldn't have used the 40 hours in my first most as it isn't an apples to apples comparison. The fact remains though that in comparison people in first world countries today have much more time that doesn't have to be spent on productive tasks then people in most of history. Cooking food list in your example took much more time in the past, and cars require much less maintenance then a car.
The article also talks about how peasants took frequent rests, but this is because they were doing extremely physically demanding work, not because they had a chill schedule.
Edit: A great example is that in Mexico and the American Southwest one of a woman's traditional tasks was grinding corn by hand, which could take up to 5 hours for her families supply. Other areas of the world that ate grains and didn't have access to mills would have had to spend a similar amount of time.