TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
… what?
No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner 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.
What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?
I’ll take now
I’m just suggesting a world where jails and prisons are literally replaced with batteries and datacenters. It’s a medieval institution at best.
This reads like, "My job is very complicated, yours is very simple."
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.