I’m thinking of dishwashers, clothes washers, automobiles, and grocery stores. I consider those my “support” network since I don’t have to grow my own food, raise horses, or wash everything down by the river. Think you’re tired now? Imagine having to do that.
Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
This has been the root of a few arguments in my house. I support increased efficiency to enable more free time. My wife supports increased efficiency so she can get more done.
The is true, but to the point of the thread, you’d meet other people down washing their clothes bu the river. It would be a communal activity.
We don’t have communal activity anymore. No reason to interact.
The most community I felt was when I was in poverty, like boarding house poverty, and a storm wiped the power out for ten days. We all came together. It was brilliant.
Once the power went back on, everyone withdrew back to their homes, and resumed isolation.
I agree about washing machines, which is why I emphasized them in my comment, but not necessarily about physical work in general.
To the first world office worker it may seem like modern life is practically incomparable to the life of a subsistence farmer, but consider where that worker’s clothes come from, who grows his coffee, who mines the materials that make his car. A lot of those people live in circumstances that are not unlike laborers in societies of the past. A good amount of them are even slaves.
Thanks to modern technology those workers produce far more per hour than they ever would have in the past, and the beneficiaries of their work enjoy wonders that people in the past could only dream of, but I’m not so sure the bottom classes physically labor much less if at all. It can just seem that way because the population is larger now, the hierarchies of civilization now stretch across the globe rather than just the local area, and the scribe class takes up entire countries.
Maybe the lower classes really are proportionally smaller than they used to be, I don’t have any statistics to that effect in front of me, but it could be the case. After all complex technology requires a lot of intellectual activity to create and maintain. But if that is the case I think there is still something to be said about how increased productivity wasn’t used to make the lives of the laborer class much easier, but instead to grow the size of the scribe class.
I’d say even globally we’re better off when it comes to amount of physical labour since the number of people being able to survive on physical labour of others has ballooned. Most of the world I’d say are service economies, people do office jobs instead of physical labour. Even fields such as construction are to large degree mechanized in many industrialized countries, same for agriculture, many factories have robots doing the actual physical activity and humans are more in supervisory role and so on.
Office work might be stressful and soul crushing, but it’s not quite the same as actual demanding physical labour.
Sure, like I said I just think its notable that we used the increased productivity to proportionally increase the size of the non-laborer population rather than reduce the per-laborer workload.
Like, to use an analogy, you know how in ‘The Jetsons’ George Jetson goes to work every day, pushes a single button, then takes a nap? I know that sketch wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a joke, but think about how its implied that every family has a breadwinner husband like George with a similar job.
I feel as if, if it were like the real world, there would be a single guy frantically pressing buttons for 8 hours a day while about a billion people are supported by his effort. Though, granted, that’s a definite improvement over all of them having to work like that.
I guess in the context of the post it depends on the cards you were dealt in the first place. In a world that’s almost entirely commodified almost every aspect of human/animal labor into something that can be purchased and utilized with either money or personal ownership, the question is at what stage of independence does the tradeoff of our world seem better?
Granted, for people who are privileged enough to grow up in a modern urban environment who are not homeless, most of these are simply quality of life improvements. However, for those who are not privileged enough to have these opportunities (grow up in an area without reliable electricity or food supply, accessing the internet through their phone exclusively, started out their independent lives homeless or indebted, etc…), it can feel like you are having it worse than people in an era where you exchanged your physical labor for the resources and outcomes you desired.
To bring an analogy, a middle class or wealthy person of our modern day would be unlikely to desire to go back to an era of having to live off a natural landscape devoid of much of the technology we enjoy today. They are beneficiaries of our current system, so that makes rational sense. On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
Bruh, I live under the poverty line. Most of the people I grew up with lived under the poverty line. I grew up in one of the poorest regions of America.
There is stillno comparison between the living standards of today and those of, say, 200+ years ago.
I come from a family where coming home to see all the lights off because the electricity couldn’t be paid on time was not an abnormal sight, wherein I, the child, had to be shuffled through family members to whomever had their lights on at that particular moment. Where meals had to be skipped 'til payday. Where we lived in crumbling apartment complexes in high-crime areas. Where single-parent families working two jobs was not an abnormal setup. Where my mother lived in constant fear of losing her job due to declining economic conditions in the region.
It still had nothing on the crushing poverty of working-class existence in the past.
I’m thinking of dishwashers, clothes washers, automobiles, and grocery stores. I consider those my “support” network since I don’t have to grow my own food, raise horses, or wash everything down by the river. Think you’re tired now? Imagine having to do that.
Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
This has been the root of a few arguments in my house. I support increased efficiency to enable more free time. My wife supports increased efficiency so she can get more done.
I for sure believe we reduced the amount of physical work done by a shitload. Hand washing clothes is a shitload of work and takes ridiculous time
The is true, but to the point of the thread, you’d meet other people down washing their clothes bu the river. It would be a communal activity.
We don’t have communal activity anymore. No reason to interact.
The most community I felt was when I was in poverty, like boarding house poverty, and a storm wiped the power out for ten days. We all came together. It was brilliant.
Once the power went back on, everyone withdrew back to their homes, and resumed isolation.
I agree about washing machines, which is why I emphasized them in my comment, but not necessarily about physical work in general.
To the first world office worker it may seem like modern life is practically incomparable to the life of a subsistence farmer, but consider where that worker’s clothes come from, who grows his coffee, who mines the materials that make his car. A lot of those people live in circumstances that are not unlike laborers in societies of the past. A good amount of them are even slaves.
Thanks to modern technology those workers produce far more per hour than they ever would have in the past, and the beneficiaries of their work enjoy wonders that people in the past could only dream of, but I’m not so sure the bottom classes physically labor much less if at all. It can just seem that way because the population is larger now, the hierarchies of civilization now stretch across the globe rather than just the local area, and the scribe class takes up entire countries.
Maybe the lower classes really are proportionally smaller than they used to be, I don’t have any statistics to that effect in front of me, but it could be the case. After all complex technology requires a lot of intellectual activity to create and maintain. But if that is the case I think there is still something to be said about how increased productivity wasn’t used to make the lives of the laborer class much easier, but instead to grow the size of the scribe class.
I’d say even globally we’re better off when it comes to amount of physical labour since the number of people being able to survive on physical labour of others has ballooned. Most of the world I’d say are service economies, people do office jobs instead of physical labour. Even fields such as construction are to large degree mechanized in many industrialized countries, same for agriculture, many factories have robots doing the actual physical activity and humans are more in supervisory role and so on.
Office work might be stressful and soul crushing, but it’s not quite the same as actual demanding physical labour.
Sure, like I said I just think its notable that we used the increased productivity to proportionally increase the size of the non-laborer population rather than reduce the per-laborer workload.
Like, to use an analogy, you know how in ‘The Jetsons’ George Jetson goes to work every day, pushes a single button, then takes a nap? I know that sketch wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a joke, but think about how its implied that every family has a breadwinner husband like George with a similar job.
I feel as if, if it were like the real world, there would be a single guy frantically pressing buttons for 8 hours a day while about a billion people are supported by his effort. Though, granted, that’s a definite improvement over all of them having to work like that.
I guess in the context of the post it depends on the cards you were dealt in the first place. In a world that’s almost entirely commodified almost every aspect of human/animal labor into something that can be purchased and utilized with either money or personal ownership, the question is at what stage of independence does the tradeoff of our world seem better?
Granted, for people who are privileged enough to grow up in a modern urban environment who are not homeless, most of these are simply quality of life improvements. However, for those who are not privileged enough to have these opportunities (grow up in an area without reliable electricity or food supply, accessing the internet through their phone exclusively, started out their independent lives homeless or indebted, etc…), it can feel like you are having it worse than people in an era where you exchanged your physical labor for the resources and outcomes you desired.
To bring an analogy, a middle class or wealthy person of our modern day would be unlikely to desire to go back to an era of having to live off a natural landscape devoid of much of the technology we enjoy today. They are beneficiaries of our current system, so that makes rational sense. On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
Bruh, I live under the poverty line. Most of the people I grew up with lived under the poverty line. I grew up in one of the poorest regions of America.
There is still no comparison between the living standards of today and those of, say, 200+ years ago.
I come from a family where coming home to see all the lights off because the electricity couldn’t be paid on time was not an abnormal sight, wherein I, the child, had to be shuffled through family members to whomever had their lights on at that particular moment. Where meals had to be skipped 'til payday. Where we lived in crumbling apartment complexes in high-crime areas. Where single-parent families working two jobs was not an abnormal setup. Where my mother lived in constant fear of losing her job due to declining economic conditions in the region.
It still had nothing on the crushing poverty of working-class existence in the past.