Re:The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
by Nifty3929 on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:19PM
(#36933524)
A roof, food and leisure time are historically luxurious. Poverty is the natural default. Anything more than that requires a lot of hard work as a society, and has only been realized in the tiny sliver of humanity that is recent (last ~200 years) western society. Everywhere else and at all other times has been starvation, strife and constant work to subsist. And you die by 40 on average.
Re:The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
by wizofaus on Sunday July 30, 2023 @04:06PM
(#36935378)
Studies of how remaining hunter/gatherer tribes around the world have/had been living suggests that's not really true - shelter, food and leisure time were almost always readily available. What wasn't was modern medical technology, which has been almost solely responsible for massively reducing deaths in childbirth and early infancy and giving us the average lifespans we enjoy today.
Even among civilizations that founded around agriculture, there's little evidence that homelessness, starvation or lack of free time were the constant reality for the masses, even if there's no question what life they did have would be considered incredibly basic by modern developed-world standards.
Re:The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
by SergeAx on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:57PM
(#36934030)
Roof, food, clothes, furniture, mobile phone with internet plan, flat TV, streaming subscription...
Re:The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
by polygamous_bat on Sunday July 30, 2023 @06:52PM
(#36936833)
How many streaming subscriptions do you need to forgo to have a down payment on a house? Could you please do the math?
Keyword "luxurious".
People first and foremost want to be able to have a roof, food, some leisure time, and so on, not luxury.
And people could have a lot of that for more than "a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries". Between common wrong tropes, movies, and ignorance of history, the past is hugely downplayed as to these aspects.
The "industrial revolution" era of Marx and Dickens time, actually worsened (for the first 2 centuries or so) the working conditions and increased the working hours for huge swaths of the population. People had to be forced (via law, violence, and destruction of their prior livelihood) to go work in factories (and many fought hard for keeping their rural way of life).