It is precisely the post-industrialized culture of consumption, and economy of progress that is robbing individuals of our free time.

When did laundry and cooking and doing work at home cease to be a social function and instead move into the sphere of "work"?

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

Do you realize that you're basically implying that housewifes were chilling at home while their husbands were doing the real work? Home work has always been real work, but us men didn't really feel it before we had to do more of it due to gender equality.

housework is indeed real work, real labor. But post-industrialized societies have worked to strip joy from all chores. The idea of of a housewife is a good example of this — A woman alone in a house cooking for another person, cleaning a vast amount of things that endlessly collect dirt. So long as we don't reach the singularity there will be chores to do, mouths to feed and things to clean. Is it easier to spend all our waking hours devising "technologies" to "simplify" life or is it easier to re-evaluate what a simple life is and embrace that labor is a part of life.

Don't confuse the two issues here – the ability to let one person stay home, in a traditional 2-parent household was a great thing. Expecting that to always be done and always be a woman was terrible and sexist.

But, now, are we really saying the "liberated housewives" are any more free? They're even more constrained by the need to earn a paycheck so that their families can remain at the same level as their parents or grandparents were able to achieve on one income. Yes, they're on closer (but not equal) footing with men, but I don't think I'd really say we've increased the freedom of anyone here.

Than we did historically? We do.

Things that I am forced to do, I do not consider "free time", although for some reason anti-technologists like to consider at-home labor to be "free time", so they can make it look like pre-industrialization people had less work than we do today.

That said, with every passing year there is measurably less stuff that I have to waste time doing, mostly thanks to the power of the internet.

There's a sad irony in the image of first world citizen who can't waste time cooking so they consume large amounts highly processed ready-made food from places like trader joe's and sits down to watch Game of Thrones for three hours and browse pinterest.

Alternatively, I don't waste time cooking and instead spend that time eating with friends at a restaurant and not having anyone burdened by the cleanup afterwards (well except for the staff paid to do so).

strictly speaking, the only thing that's necessary is for me to have food in my stomach. A lot of people enjoy cooking (and I have the luxury of being able to do so with close friends sometimes), but there's little point in romanticizing me heating some water and pouring in pasta in a bowl when I'm by myself. As others have said, a lot of people don't have the luxury of being able to make i.e. cooking and cleaning a social activity.

Beyond the whole socio-economic "guy/gal working 2 jobs" thing (Why do we think working 2 full-time jobs solely to survive is OK?!) , there's even the "person who doesn't really have many friends at the moment". I know some people who find themselves in such situations after moving to a different country for example.

As for things like cleaning, I think the meta-solution to that is to live in a small place and not own many things. Gives me more time to watch game of thrones (or browse HN ;))

Many people enjoy e.g. watching TV than cooking, and there's nothing wrong with that. More power to them.

Due to a broken governance model that the world uses, we have poverty; technology is already advanced enough that most of us don't even need a job. Humanity is producing enough for everyone's need (but not greed, like gandhi said) but we haven't a fair distribution. Getting a job is our way of distribution of wealth.

Female literacy levels is a good leading indicator of social and economic development[2].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/hans-rosling-washing-machi...

[2]] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_impact_of_female_...

I disagree that modern life is somehow unnatural or participating in it requires some form of submission. Providing for our needs in a more convenient fashion is one of the pillars of civilization.

I understand that not everyone in this world has the luxury of free time, but if one has the ability to shop on Amazon, making time away from work and the internet is almost definitely an option. It's thinking like that which will hurtle us towards an Idiocracy-like reality.

Except that so many of those genuine moments can't be created with any sort of precision. They happen exactly because they are outside of what was planned.

We suffer from a lack of time because we have too much crap planned or demanded of us. Abstracting away all the small things sounds wonderful, but it's exactly that pursuit of efficiency above all else that is killing us.