In the late 19th Century, workers in the US steel industry commonly worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, which turned into twenty-four-hour days when the night shift went to day shift and vice-versa.

Snow - subway = no work? Hardly. In the suburbs, people drove, in the cities people walked.

Sure but that example from the steel industry surely was an outlier? What % of the workforce was still agrarian in the late 19th century?

As for the suburbs and people walking etc...mostly agree.

But surely you'd agree that the onset of the internet has extended most people's working hours in a significant way.

What's the < year 2000 equivalent of receiving/responding to a work email at 10pm?

Agrarian is pretty terrible for work/life balance; rather than responding to email at 10pm, you're delivering (supervising the birth of, not transporting) a lamb. Or getting up at 5am to milk the cows.

Pure arable farming is a little different, but harvest time would be dawn-to-dusk working for everyone.

It's a mix really, peaks of heavy physical work, usually during the summer, lots of downtime in the winter, with mostly animal feeding/milking twice a day. This lifestyle is still somewhat prevalent in Eastern Europe, and one can easily tell apart villagers who work the land and those who work in factories, the latter being more stressed and worn out both physically and mentally. (source: personal observation across several decades)

> What's the < year 2000 equivalent of receiving/responding to a work email at 10pm?

Your horse running away or the wolf jumping into your sheep pen among others.

Humans have never had a dearth of interruptions.

What's sad is, today, most of those interruptions are completely ignorable (no one has a sheep pen thats not well protected and monitored) - yet, we treat that work email at 10pm with the same urgency as one.

Atleast back then, it was your sheep pen.

Your sheep pen on their land across most of the world. And sometimes not even that.

I'll be facetious and say it's now: Their sheep pen on their land across most of the world.

On a more serious note, their land really applies to the rich could tax you. They didn't care about taking care of the land - the only reason why they owned it is to tax it.

Nothing's changed for the better on that front.

The internet has extended the working hours of many people I work with in a significant way. It has not, that I know, extended the working hours of our letter carrier, the staff at the grocery store, the police on patrol, most medical professionals, etc.

It is easy on these forums to imagine that everyone is working in a similar environment.

> What % of the workforce was still agrarian in the late 19th century?

They worked pretty hard, too. In Virgil's Georgic I, there occur the lines "toil conquered all,/Remorseless toil, and poverty's shrewd push/In times of hardship." Things hadn't changed much until the 19th Century.

>Sure but that example from the steel industry surely was an outlier? What % of the workforce was still agrarian in the late 19th century?

Steel wasn't particularly an outlier compared to other industrial workplaces. Everything ran around the clock in shifts and shifts were longer with less breaks because low-training factory work tends to gravitate toward conditions that are the minimum of what is legal while still attracting sufficient quality labor. Farmers worked longer and harder before everyone and their brother had plenty of mechanized horsepower at their disposal. All the stuff you have to do to maintain the horse/oxen that you use for work gets tacked on the beginning and end of your workday.

I wonder why that was downvoted. Anger for proving that arcadia never was?

I don't think people were driving to work from the suburbs in the late 19th century.

I'm not sure I buy those examples - candles and lamps existed before electricity. People walked through snow. And my first startup in the dotcom days would have been considered "remote", despite no internet connections in our homes - we worked on a local system, and transferred code via floppy disks to each other and the clients.

So yes, we are too busy... but not due to pragmatic limitations - we simply have gotten too caught up in our work.

Peak work was during the industrial revolution.

Also, on farms, people were always working.

At least with farms you get a seasonal cycle. It’s not full on for the whole year.