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.
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.