We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market
Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.
We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
"Free time" for a medieval peasant is a very misleading statistic, because it's only counting the amount of time that the peasants worked for their feudal lord - which was about as high as it could be, because of the amount of work that the peasants would have to do beyond that. Without modern technology, they had to gather firewood (I did this on the weekend and it's hard enough with chainsaws, a 4WD ute, a hydraulic log splitter - would take forever with an axe and mule cart), tend their own crops and livestock, mend and hand-wash their own clothes, work on their houses etc, which is all counted as time off work even though the peasant would die if they didn't do it.
The first couple of google results just seem to say your view is a very common mistake/misunderstanding people make when confusion "not working" with leisure time.
>Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Depeds on if they were the ones who had arrived in the land of abundance or not :)
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Irrelevant comparison. Completely apples to oranges existence. Its almost as if is a different species if you take in education, culture, health, food, society, knowledge etc.
On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
> ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces
For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.
I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year.
In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.
All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it.
“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...
As for many things, there's a synthesis that seems more realistic here:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-peasant/
Hint: it's not 150 days.
However, what the work time estimates are missing in this discussion is that you maintained relationships with all your neighbors and most of the village.
Exactly the opposite of the modern world, your work was solitary and your leisure time was social.
In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.
If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.
It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work
Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
Really? This just proves the point of the grandparent comment. I can think of at least three types of activities off the top of my head: sports (granted, not all of them, but definitely true for my sport - squash), music (playing an instrument in a group setting), and volunteering. I also know people who are in a bridge club with people twice their age.
There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.
All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.
I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.
I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.
> Things people mostly do when they feel good.
This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.
> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.
Hustle culture. Everything has to have a purpose. Ideally commercial.
This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.
No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.
No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
> No time for baking treats
> No time for being a governor at the local school
The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.
Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.
Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.
> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?
This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
> Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats?
I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate.
> Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
It depends where you live. If you're in a country with low population growth then the housing cost increase from 2-earner families isn't a big deal. You might be slightly lower down in the house affordability tier, but you will get a house. If you're not (e.g. the UK) you basically have to both work to get a dwelling.
And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s, and their parents could in their early 20s. The trend is obvious, and its conclusion has arrived.
If you can do significant community-strengthening work while also doing a normally 40-hour-a-week job then I'd be pretty surprised. Maybe you only sleep 4 hours a night.
But it's all just work, all the ways down.
What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.
So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
Most unions pay their elected officers and administrative staff. Members might volunteer for some activities but the roles that come with a significant time commitment are jobs like any other.
VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.
The VFW is just a stand-in for any community "lodge" type organization, all of which have been in decline for decades. Yes, this is somewhat about the "cool" factor -- young people largely don't want to be seen in a Moose Lodge, Elk Lodge, Lions Club, Masonic Temple, etc., and these organizations typically have backwards views on female membership, have racist histories (or presents), etc. -- but the fact remains that, instead of doing this community-oriented thing, people are doing other, market-oriented things. Instead of playing darts at the American Legion, they are paying to go to an escape room, or even just staying home and gaming or shopping on TikTok. Even country club membership is in decline, so this isn't only a working class phenomenon.
I'm not as sure what point you're making about union staff. Surely there has been paid union staff for decades -- no real change there AFAIK -- and being "active" in the union doesn't mean you are doing paid staff work (though part time positions for retirees aren't that uncommon). There's a lot of stuff going in on a truly active union local that is definitely not paid work: being on the committee that builds the 4th of July parade float, organizing the games for the summer member picnic, organizing a group to go work in union colors at a Habitat for Humanity build, putting together care packages for sick members and sending groups to visit with shut-in retirees. You're right that, sadly, few locals are this active anymore, but it was once common.
In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
If you look at any society in history, those things disappearing is the opposite of natural.
While it's true that there are some positive factors causing it (e.g. housework has been made far easier through inventing/factorying/delivering/installing of appliances like vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers, and the world has just become easier and safer to be in for women through things such as reliable cars with power steering, mobile phone, and policemen who respond) there are a lot of negative factors that just push those time-rich, more society enriching-capable women into the world of work.
The main one being what I already mentioned: house prices force them to work to pay a bank back for paying a boomer a massive price for a house, to keep up with the other two-income house bids.
> But it's all just work, all the ways down.
> What you are describing is working for someone else
That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.
But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents?
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5.
And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.
Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid.
And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.
But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
> "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract."
I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.
Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
> that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about
Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.
Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.
How do you suppose people in those times would even meet some love interest in a far away place, aka the next town over?
I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life.
If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.