There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work.

And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.

Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.

I recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.

My favorite recent read on the topic was from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an...

TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household

I thought of the same series, but that's not the tl;dr I would have chosen at all. I would have gone to part 4e where I found this quote near the end:

> We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers.

It's nice to think that our ancestors didn't have to work as hard, because it justifies our own desire for more leisure time. IMO that desire is justified anyways; but premodern subsistence farming/any sort of self-supported lifestyle is incredibly labor-intensive compared to modern agriculture, regardless of whether you're a serf or a freeholder.

I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.

> modafinil

Militaries once issued coca, while opium was sold at markets as recently as the 1930s (over-the-counter).

Across the board it seems like things were rougher and cruder “back then” whenever ever back then was.

They had more freedom in other ways.

> I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.

And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.

Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?

Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.

> Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?

… what?

No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.

Oh I thought you said for 400+ years (small) farming has been as ethical as it is now.

I understand that you're saying:

> [slavery] is not representative of farming as labor

But I disagree, since it clearly has been. Military, prison, servitude, employment, even the tyranny of "the man of the house" - all these hierarchical authoritarian social structures (whether or not they were ever noble or righteous, or useful) have improved ethically over time in the lives of those subjected to the violence of these systems - the conditions used to be a lot worse, across the board.

Labor is not solved in terms of ethics, but it's a lot better now.

There are a few million people in jail and supervision in the USA, offloading the crudity and performing the work of incentivizing conformity, at slave wages as we speak.

What was imprisonment like in 1920? 1320?

What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?

I’ll take now

“Things can’t be bad now cause they were bad before”

"Things can't be good now cause they were good before"

That doesn't work.

I didn’t make the comparison in the first place.

Sure, or “things can’t be better because they were worse”

You don’t have a choice about that, and it isn’t a history race.

I’m just suggesting a world where jails and prisons are literally replaced with batteries and datacenters. It’s a medieval institution at best.

I don't know shit about farming but I still don't think there is a single true statement in what you've said. Why would a farmer not be expected to work a 40 hour week? What farmer doesn't have targets, goals, deadlines, constraints, expectations? You think agricultural workers don't depend on, use, and abuse drugs?!

This reads like, "My job is very complicated, yours is very simple."

I've worked on a traditional farm, and it's definitely hard work, and lots of it, but it is finite. Sure, there are some things you could always do, but usually there are a fixed number of tasks you plan for a day, and many of them have to be done at specific points in time. This naturally creates breaks between work.

Not in winter, for geographies that have serious winters.

still need to feed the livestock multiple times a day, chop wood, fix stuff around the house

I think the difference is they're completable jobs. You work until it's done. At least for the day.

You aren't chopping wood everyday. Hopefully that's been prepared.

Feeding yes.

In summer it's non stop work, in winter you do fuck all.

I’m not sure where this idea came from that shit in old books is inherently rational or they would have any frame of reference to compare it to the modern world. Everybody’s conception of the worst is based on their own experience.

I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars.

I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.

We should all listen to guys like your boss. Circumstances have changed a bit but their beliefs are generally directionally correct and they have some great lessons to teach.

I’m directly between his age and the age of the people he criticizes. He has absolutely no understanding of what challenges young people face. His path to stability has vanished. There’s no apprenticeship program in that union anymore and in the ones that are, the percentage of your living expenses to your income is incomparably higher. The younger people work more hours than he did at their age and have a hell of a lot less to show for it because it buys a hell of a lot less. Since wealth compounds, this is not merely a temporary setback — it’s a completely different arc of progress. Many have replaced pensions with riskier and less stable 401ks. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His formula for success in life basically starts with “begin an industrial career just before the peak of the golden age of US manufacturing in a heavily industrialized area in the golden age of organized labor.”

In South Korea everyone was recently using 3x leverage on the stock market—which mostly consists of just 2 companies, so concentrated that American institutions aren't allowed to call their index funds diversified—because you have nothing to lose by losing 200% of your money. Which did happen last week as the market crashed. Those people are no worse off for losing 200% of their life savings, because they are already at zero if they don't literally win the lottery—life savings weren't enough to be net positive.

I think it’s pretty hard for people that came up in the 70s and 80s who are ending their careers to wrap their heads around how shit it is to try starting a career/life right now. Even when people outright tell them, they assume those people are exaggerating or making excuses for not challenging themselves. Back in those days there was always some other route. The entire lower-end of the job market, including just about anything entry-level, is so deliberately extractive now that, by design, you just ‘can’t’ get ahead. That’s where the financial nihilism comes in.

I feel like they were more confident back then. They knew if they followed a certain path they were likely to succeed. Now it's all murky and it's obvious that most paths lead to failure, but it's not obvious which ones don't.

Well imagine having the entire first like decade of your career happen before the Reagan era blessed the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of anyone, even if they were core parts of your company? Before Private equity, rampant off-shoring, etc. etc. etc. Even in the nineties people were saying things like “don’t switch jobs too often because it will make you look disloyal.” Well now, in many industries, if you have the same job for 5 years people think you’re just unmotivated. Considering how little employers are willing to invest in employees compared to recruiting shiny new ones, it makes sense.

It's true, but part of the problem is that there is an oversupply of people seeking high-skill jobs before they have had the time to actually build those skills. Whereas if you need to a guy to haul lumber around, and there's a guy standing in front of your lumber saying "I can do that", he can probably do it right now and you pay him for it.

There are still jobs like that, but living standards have increased so much that they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones, to the point that it's considered like a "boomerism" to suggest doing jobs that people in other countries are happy to take to live at a 1970's standard of living.

Even in the US there are seasonal blue collar jobs like that. Youth generally last until 25 or so now though, and that's partly just a skill issue/matter of mindset, because it didn't sound weird for a 20 year old to work in a factory or on a boat back then like it does now.

IMO the giant difference between now and then is the massive gap in income/wealth between people just starting out or working 1970's style jobs, and jobs with global reach and high leverage (ie the most capable produce 2-100+ times the value, but the average person produces nothing of value or negative value). There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's. I think that's what causes most of the angst tbh, that there is so much more opportunity cost and variance in outcomes now because of global trade/technology, if you just want to work to live you're not going to the same results as people who live to work, or people living places where they literally have to "work to live".

To be honest I don't think the boomer mindset of just working to live and play with your expensive toys was ever a very good one, because it led to the consumerism that makes people think they need $10M to retire or seek $200k jobs right out of college without actually wanting to do those things enough to achieve them (and not needing them anyway)

> there is an oversupply of people seeking high-skill jobs before they have had the time to actually build those skills

This is not a new problem and does not lay at the feet of job seekers. Manufacturing trades are a few decades ahead of software development in this respect. Before off-shoring, being a tool and die maker was one of the most consistent paths to getting a really well-paying job. It took a long time to get into it: often a decade or more of on-the-job experience and only the best machinists qualified. But they’re crucial to most manufacturing, so most companies, even small ones, had a path to progressively bring new, inexperienced people into the trade, build their skills, and turn them into the people that companies needed. Then, off-shoring meant that they didn’t need as many tool and die guys as they used to have, so they mostly stopped taking apprentices. As time progressed, they had a seeming never-ending stream of experienced people to fill those dwindling roles, but now, there’s a problem: almost all of the people from the original system are retiring, and almost nobody’s been training apprentices, so the entire industry is at risk of losing that crucial manufacturing skill. Meanwhile, China has tens of thousands because 80s executives sent all of our knowledge over there in the 80s and 90s and they just kept progressing. As an aside, anybody who says “there will be new jobs,” as a response to the possibility of AI-driven job loss should visit the rust belt. There were new jobs— we as a society just didn’t care enough about the people we discarded to help them see the benefits of that.

Companies in the US right now, tech notwithstanding, largely see no commitment to helping maintain a labor pool, or help individual workers progress into more useful workers. They think it’s immoral to spend a dime on anything that isn’t going to contribute directly to this quarter’s bottom line.

> there are jobs like that

Yes I understand this. I’m a tradesman and I encounter all levels of blue collar workers far more frequently than just about anyone around here.

> they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones

People don’t hold out on those jobs. I see people doing them all the time. They’re no different from uber or DoorDash. You just don’t see people doing those jobs as a career because they can’t provide you, let alone your family, with basic necessities.

Firstly, those jobs aren’t stable enough to bet your housing on, let alone with kids or whatever. Secondly, they never offer health insurance, which is an absolute must in the United States where your kid breaking their arm could put a low-wage family in the red for literally years. Let alone getting cancer or something.

> living standards have increased so much

Standards of living have not universally increased- the cost of convenience goods, electronics, entertainment, clothing, and other things have decreased. The cost of many necessities, such as housing, health care, and education, have all increased much more quickly. Go look for some visualizations that juxtapose the basic cost of living with wage growth since the 1970s— life, in general, was SO much cheaper then. It was SO MUCH EASIER for young people to get their adult lives started. Then look for a visualization that shows, for each year, what the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of the federal minimum wage was since the 70s. Blue Collar wage growth peaked in 1981.

> There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's.

To whom, how many jobs are there vs the population size, and how long does one basically need to be floated to get into it surely enough to make it a career? One of the biggest correlating factors among people who successfully founded businesses was having enough family support (money, connections) to float them through multiple failures and get a foothold. Even if there are more people for whom that’s true, that does not mean it’s a generally viable path. It requires starting on second base.

The amount of wealth concentrating in the higher echelons and the widening chasm between them and everyone else show how little those opportunities avail themselves to most people.

Life has gotten much better for the wealthy. Everyone else is hurting and cheap flat screen TVs don’t change that.

That we should act like "self made men" when in reality it took entire multiple lifetimes worth of effort where people in power were finally allowed to create a society where a common trades worker could enjoy an upper middle class lifestyle?

Hard pass, I'd rather talk to his union rep.

The union rep is, indeed, a good dude!

That is not the claim being made though. The difference is between work done (and payment due) being defined by time spent, vs work done being defined by tasks completed.

A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still.

Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.

As some other commenters pointed out, the comment (and the book) are not making claims about work hours. Seeing it from the perspective of "dawk to dusk" with our, now time-based perspective is the wrong interpretation of it because it imposes our view of work and time on a task-based life.

You would work dawn til dusk, but you would: milk the cows at 06 AM, have a walk/chat/game with friends, bring the animals out, have breakfast, have a nap, refill water for animals, do some weeding, go have lunch with the other workers, etc. Then in the evening you bring the animals back in. So while you had a "15 hour workday" on the clock, your day is not consisting of actions and improvements without an end that can be done indefinitely, but by tasks that arise gradually at certain moments. All the time between the tasks is "time off" in the modern interpretation, and then you have a completely different view of work, because there is no pressure to produce at any point.

That's a very romanticized view of it. The pressure to produce is if you don't plant the seeds, there won't be crops later in the year. If you don't harvest the crops, they'll rot in the fields, and you'll go hungry. If you don't fix the fence, then a fox will get into the chicken coop and the sheep will get out.