i really strongly disagree. because what i do for a living and what i’d do if money stopped being a thing are both the same. just because people are willing to pay for this stupid luxury doesn’t give it more value–
yet when i do it as a goof off thing, people judge it as not worth-while as much as when i get paid for it.
i would say meaning is at least in part imbued.
How do you pay for food? How do you pay for the place you live in?
If somebody else is buying these things for you while you goof off, then you’re a burden on that person. They have to work more because you want to work less.
huh? me personally?
i get paid for art.
only when i have money and don’t have to work for some stint of time, i do whatever other art i want.
in one case it’s just wankery, in the other it’s work. wank/work is the same damn thing, but in one case it’s “valuable to society” and in the other it’s not…? i don’t buy it. i think we just shift the definition of “valuable” just because someone’s paying for it.
nothing about paris hilton is valuable in a sociological betterment way. what’s she bringing to the table? but she has money, so most people don’t question her work-ethic. that’s a dubious little nugget, isn’t it?
you said if you’re not contributing, you’re impinging on others. ok, but how is it that a person who lives a self-sustaining lifestyle who does nothing to give back to man is “impinging” on anyone?
if i go live off someplace with a little sustainable garden or whatever and do nothing more than maintain stasis for myself, how would i be impinging on anyone?
i think you assume that if one is not contributing then clearly someone else has to pick up their slack, but that’s more of that puritan work ethic myth stuff…
Then I have no problems with your lifestyle. Read what I said above: You’re supposed to do the amount of work that is necessary to supply the needs for yourself and those you are responsible for and to supply anything extra you want to have. Once you’ve reached that level, additional work is optional.
If you sell enough art to take care of your needs, then go ahead and do whatever other art you want to for your own pleasure. If you can make one piece of art in a day and sell it for enough to live off of for a year, then go ahead and do whatever you want for the other 364 days.
Nobody has to work just for the sake of working.
I find this very hard to believe. I can’t gather a day’s firewood in 45 minutes, even if you gave me and axe and a saw. They forgot to factor in the time spent running from predators and battling neighboring tribes. Gathering firewood, rebuilding shelters, protecting food stores from vermin, raising children, making clothes/shoes, all take significant time. They lived under the threat of death from famine, drought, predators, and disease.
None of this sounds like a life of leisure to me.
If hunting and gathering was an intrinsically easy, we would all be hunterer-gatherers. There would have been no impetus to change.
In other words, that is one very incorrect hypothesis.
Even when the season makes food more abundant, there is still the impetus to hunt. People really really like meat, for one thing, and then there are the other products that animals provide (like leather for clothes and bones for tool). These products are essential for daily living as well as relations with other people, in the form of trade.
But food is exhausted after awhile, which necessitates movement. Either the gatherers must expand their search radius each time they go out, or the camp must move. Sources of water also shift, so that limits where they can go. As do the presence of other camps and known predators.
Gatherers, who tend to be women, can’t just leave babies at home in the care of others because they are nursing. This includes children who would typically be weened in our society, like four- and -five-year-olds. So these women are not only working in their search for food (digging for roots, filling big sacks of nuts, making mental maps of plants that haven’t bloomed yet so that they can be visited in the future, etc.), but they are also lugging around babies and keeping an eye out on the toddlers.
Back at camp, if the men aren’t hunting, they are tending fires (critical not for scaring off predators, but for keeping an eye out for them), making and fixing weapons and tools, and training youngsters. Hunting is an exhaustive effort that can take days and days.
At night, someone has to keep an eye out for predators. The camp is never totally asleep. People take turns keeping watch. That’s work.
The biggest difference between their lifestyle and ours is that we think work ends at a set time and then we can go “live”. In other societies, working is not limited to 8 hours. It is distributed throughout the 24 hours of the day, with some down-time in between. Also, there is no such thing as “burn-out”. Unless your relatives really really love you, a person who is “burned-out” is ass-out. Burn-out is a construct of 21st century Western Civilization.
Anyone who thinks hunterer-gatherers have an easy life really don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
There isn’t enough area in the world to support 6+ billion hunter-gatherers, so that’s not an option now.
As to why people stopped being H-Gs in the first place, it didn’t start everywhere at once. It started where it was easiest to farm, so it was probably easier for the first farmers to make the decision between (moderately) hard work and no famine versus low work and high risk of famine. Of course, once their population increased to the point where they could no longer H-G, there was a risk of famine regardless.
And at that point we get into cultural evolution. Since farming can support more people per area than H-G, cultures that promote farming will tend to do better as a culture and spread themselves, even if it is harder on individuals from a stress perspective. Those cultures have a greater population and a greater food surplus and so can spread themselves through war even if individuals within would rather be [del]sailing[/del] camping.
And then fast forward to the Middle Ages. Peasants weren’t allowed to hunt at all! (or gather in the Kings Forest either for that matter) You can’t really say that they decided to not be H-Gs when they weren’t allowed to.
You are “supposed to work” until the job is done.
Really, the OPs question reflects a sort of Western sense of affluent entitlement. We tend to be so disconnected from the product of our labor that most Americas view work as an annoying chore they are forced to perform in order to receive enough money to pay their bills and do the stuff they want to do.
The reality is, in a larger economic sense, everything around you - your clothes, your home, all the furniture in it, the laptop you are using to surf the internet (as well as the internet), your car - all of these things come to you as a result of a long, complex chain of people working on stuff. Sure, we have automation, but that just lets us produce for more people and allows people to work on other stuff that can’t be automated.
In a free Western economy, you are largely allowed to chose your work, depending on your skills and abilities and the availability of that work. If, as a freelancer, you are content with your income level and the lifestyle it supports, then you are working the amount you are “supposed to”.
In fact, it is very clear that when man went from H-G to farming our life got worse. Farmers were less nourished than hunter gatherers and were smaller of stature. Crops which could be farmed back then were not as nutritious as what could be gathered. Denser populations led to more disease. I haven’t read specifically that famine increased, but I’d suspect so. If a region stopped producing a H-G can move, but a farmer is stuck, especially if he is indebted in some way to civil society.
But in the long run farming supports a bigger population, so we are more or less stuck.
Well, let me see how you allot your time.
8hrs/sleeping
8hrs/working
1hr/traveling to and from work
7hrs/leisure.
That is a shitty life. 17/24hrs you are either asleep or plodding through life.
Your work should be part of your leisure.
Otherwise, to quote the BFG (Big Friendly Giant), by the time you turn 50, you’ve really only lived 14.5 years.
As have most people, I would think.
As I said upthread, it’s not like I haven’t been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to make it better.
I don’t think hunter-gatherers had an easy life - but I do think that in some ways, they probably had a happier one. In modern society, work often isolates us from other people and from the natural world, and in many jobs it’s not easy to see exactly how what you’ve spent your day doing fits into the larger scheme of things.
But when a hunter-gatherer is making an arrowhead, the utility of the final product is immediately clear to him and to everyone else in the tribe. He’s not just moving electrons about in cyber-space, a small cog in some vast supply chain. Ditto with gathering wood or tanning a hide: the task that needs to be accomplished is clear, the reason the task needs to be done is also clear, it’s easy to see when the task has been finished, and the result can be appreciated by everyone.
And in a hunter-gatherer society, people are usually working together - and socializing as they work. There’s no artificial division between “work time” and “leisure time” as there is in modern Western society.
As you said further upthread, perhaps modern Western life is overly abstract, and it chafes us in ways we have trouble coping with. Maybe we modern cultures are like Esau and, having traded our birthright for a mess of pottage (or air-conditioning), are only slowly coming to realize that the bargain we made isn’t as filling as we’d thought it would be?
I’ve mused on a similar question before and it came down to this:
Say you win the powerball lottery (think enough Millions to live on the interest), what would you do?
And that answer is very different for everyone. Me, I’d still have to be productive (working) but I think I’d find something that took up about half my day instead of most of it.
Definitely. There’s really no debate as to who the happiest people in the world are. Those living in small comfortable communities.
There is a tradeoff, which is length of life.
Being appreciated and socializing are two of the greatest keys to happiness.
I guess we need to be careful not to fall into the grass-is-greener trap. Because like I said, while I feel the existential angst associated with moving around electrons all day, I also like not being snatched out of my tent by a hyena, quenching my thirst with dirty water, or dying in child birth.
We don’t HAVE to be worn down by our industrial lives. Much of the stress we deal with in life is artificial bullshit that we do because someone else is making up the rules. Like breaking your back to meet unrealistic quotas on the factory floor or working through the night to meet arbitrary deadlines. Or workplace policies that are anti-family (mandatory overtime, for instance) or that just don’t make any common sense (like requiring a doctor’s note when you call in sick). I think the accumulation of what may seem like minor beefs can really work a nerve after awhile. Maybe if humans were more humane in their money-making endeavors, there would be less of a trade-off between widespread happiness and civilization.
But that is you, alone. When you have a community to help it goes much faster.
Which most folks aren’t usually doing.
Other than raising children, none of that needs to be done all of the time.
Except for predators, they can’t be helped even if you work 24/7 on them. As for predators, when two or more of us are together we ARE the top predator.
Apparently there is one: Beer.
Emmmm…how does that not make sense?
Companies want to know that someone hasn’t simply decided to use their sick days as extra holidays - forcing people to get a doctors note allows them to check that the person really is sick.
One icy day when the streets were quite literally iced over, I stepped out the door to go to work, slipped, twisted my right ankle, and got a minor sprain. I hobbled back inside to call the boss to tell him I wouldn’t be coming in and would probably be laid up a day or two. He demanded that I bring a doctor’s note with me when I came back. The streets were iced over. Even if they weren’t, I couldn’t drive safely because of my foot. I tried to explain all of this to him, and he still insisted on a doctor’s note. I refused what was clearly an unreasonable demand and got docked two day’s pay. I don’t know about you, but losing two day’s pay is a pretty big deal to me.
Another supervisor demanded that I find someone to take my place whenever I went to the bathroom, because I work the front desk and the phone has to be answered. It didn’t matter if my bowels were bursting, I would first have to find someone to answer the phone while I was in the bathroom. Not only was this a great inconvenience, I also just couldn’t picture myself running around the office saying, “I have to go potty, could you answer the phone?” I told her that, as a matter of personal dignity, I would not comply. There were several tense arguments and she threatened to write me up, but her supervisor reminded her what an ass she’d look like if she actually did this.
I’ve got lots of anecdotes like that. The simple fact is that the working world inflicts many indignities and needless hassles on working people, and Monstro’s point is quite sound. Doctor’s visits are both troublesome and expensive, and requiring a doctor’s note every time a worker has a cold or a minor injury really is an unreasonable imposition. This may not be a big deal in itself, but combine it with a hundred and one other work-related hassles and the stress can really begin to wear you down.
You have to find your passion. There’s something out there that resonates within you. Unfortunately, most folks don’t find it and settle for second best and as a result, they are not happy.
Or as someone else (I forgot who) once said: Find what you love to do and let it kill you.
It makes absolutely no sense to require a doctor’s note when you are sick. DH is required to do this. What it entails is, he gets sick, calls in, then has to go out and infect some more people, and pay the doctor $55 copay for the 5 minutes it takes the doctor to write the note.
It’s total B.S.