- But our drive to work is not an intrinsic part of who we are. The best evidence for this comes from hunting and gathering societies that enjoyed levels of leisure time most of us could only dream of.
- Research conducted among Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in the 1960s disproved the idea that our pre-agricultural ancestors led lives of unremitting hardship. Despite the harshness of their environment, the Bushmen made a good living on the basis of only around 15 hours’ work per week.
LOL man writes article about how we maybe don't have to work FT to be happy, refugee takes the opportunity to work FT on an extra full length response - maybe I should've taken the hint here and gone for some brevity - :P ___ I guess I have two major responses to this article. First, the Bushmen-work-15-hours-a-week-and-that's-an-ideal-lifestyle part: I confess. I did a little more research. It was funny. The first few articles I found all said about the same thing - in slightly less vague terms - as this one. That's cuz they all had the same author. Here's one. Then I found some other articles. It turns out this guy studies the Bushmen, has for 25 years (that's cool; he's an expert) and he wrote a book about them - which is what fed these articles, essentially. That was good context to have. I just wasn't confident i was getting a full and precise picture from this first link. Terms like "The Bushmen made a good living" struck me as genetic and vague; what is "a good living"? How are we defining and determining that? It turns out, Bushmen spend 15 hours a week acquiring food, it's true. Then they spend another 15-20 hours a week on domestic chores and etc. That brings their workweek total a lot closer to the regular 40 we Americans clock in. I also think it's important to consider: it's great that these Bushmen live in a fecund and stable environment where they can depend on food sources being consistently available year-round, but I doubt that is the norm for hunter-gatherer societies across the world as a whole. There are a lot of places where you have to stock up food while it's available, because in the cold season, or the dry season, or the wet season, or whatever, your food sources become more scarce, the weather becomes harsher (so hunting is harder/more taxing), and essentially, you hit lean times. It's good for the Bushmen that it works, but I think it's a questionable premise to say, "Because it works for these guys, it would work for everyone!" And of course, Suzman neglects to mention the other 15-20 hours a week the Bushmen spend working on things that aren't just finding and hunting down food. __ My second thought is...less concrete and less provable, but none of the articles I reviewed really succeeded in proving its counter, so I'm going to put it out there. Honestly - and I know I confessed I'm all order-y and productivity-focused and regimented and whatever earlier this week - but honestly, 1) there's literally nothing in any of the 4 articles I saw to support this conclusion; 2) on a personal level, I have to disagree. I can't claim to speak for everyone else but I don't think I'm so special that I'm the only person who feels this way either. I absolutely have a deep, intrinsic drive to create, to produce, to identify work/tasks/projects and set myself in orderly fashion upon completing them. When I first got a full time job, I was a young procrastinating can-coast-or-fake-it sort of kid. I devoted most of my work time to avoiding work. I crammed in work last minute in intense intervals, delivered stuff on time and generally correctly, and then I'd spend the next 2 weeks doing nothing until my due dates came around again. It was not a fun time. I don't think most people who clock 40 hours/week actually work every minute. (I do think some jobs and classes of jobs do fill most of that 40; retail work, restaurant work, customer associate-phone work, for instance.) My work management doesn't think that either; when they did productivity planning they set the expectation that regular capacity was about 80%. Or 32 hours a week. Which is now on par with the whole Bushmen work investment discovered above. My life got better when I accepted work. Now I'm speaking personally, but my life is significantly better and I am much happier and more successful when I have goals; when I have expectations for myself and have to meet them; when I am challenged; when I have sustainable routines and habits and consistency. I can come up with lots of stuff to do in my down time - my non-work time. Do you know how long 40 hours/week is? I can come up with enough entertaining bullshit and personal objectives and self-driven projects to fill my 72 hours of free time every week. But if I suddenly had 40 more hours available on top of that... ...I mean, I'd basically have to find or give myself a job in order to fill that hole. And I'd do it. Because I don't think work is just about making money, or putting food on the table. I think people benefit from structure; from direction; from tasks and turn-around times and action items and deliverables. I think work is good for people as a whole because it gives people as a whole something to do. You think America's fucked up now? Give the whole country 25 more hours a week to watch TV and post on Facebook and drool. I bet that obesity problem would become a mega obesity problem real quick, and if TV programming's bad now...well, I don't think all that free time we'll have is going to make it less sensationalist. In fact, I think the reverse. Some people don't need a job to get that work. And I know I am generally more self-driven and derive more feelgoods from productivity than probably the average person is. I'm not bragging, frankly it'd be a little cool if I could tone down the "BUT WHAT ARE YOU DOING OF VALUE RIGHT NOW?" from time to time. It took me a long time to accept that life is a journey to be enjoyed - not a direct path up a high mountain to one defined and measurable pinnacle of success. But, life being a journey and all that... I never knew anyone who got very far running on satisfaction and indolence. __ I think - a 15 hour work week or no work week sounds great in theory. I question how many people would agree with that after going a full month without working. And of those people who would - I would have to question - are they actually happier, more content, and all their needs fulfilled? Or are they just high off of - well - a lack of responsibility? How are they spending their new free time? Sinking 40 hours a week into alcohol, TV, weed, reddit-browsing, facebook posting, video games and napping might influence a person to call themselves "happier than when they spent that time working" -- but I for one -- would seriously doubt that assessment. -- articles referenced same author but more stringent article - NYT financial times book review by other author npr If you pick one, read the NPR article, I think it's the most coolheadedly bestBut our drive to work is not an intrinsic part of who we are
Not mentioned is the fact that the world can no longer support a population of hunter-gatherers. We evolved to compete for scarcity. Fertile women were scarce, or good hunting grounds were scarce. If you could not compete for that scarce resource you made do with less (or didn't). Poof. tomorrow, work is no longer necessary. There's still the problem of resources and their allocation. It could be argued that the modern human lifestyle is nothing more than an extremely elaborate exercise in tribal fealty. I think it was Nikolaas Tinbergen who said that the modern human lifestyle is the worst evolutionary adaptation since the peacock feather. Regardless, it's what we've got. Food, water and shelter could be in unlimited abundance tomorrow and we'd still have to compete for it. The history of war is not the history of poverty and deprivation, it's the history of greed.
I've been thinking about something to reply to this with. Something told me that there's a counterargument, but I couldn't put my finger to it at first. Turns out, you said it yourself: Minimalism and mindful consumption have been getting traction over the last decade or two. I think the reason for it, mostly, is that people find it difficult to manage their urges to buy and consume, in a world so full of things to do it with. I think people are recognizing that, without managing that urge — in a way no producer of food or luxury items will ever help you with — they're going to spend far more than they can afford, and most people are savvy/unfucked (in a sense of having few things that would skew their perception) enough to account for that. People have been having an increasingly tough time getting a job in the first world, both because of the sudden population boom due to rapid industrialization of production... ...and because of the decrease in wages this (and many other things, including women starting to work during/after WWII) meant. People clearly see that they're getting less and less — or, more precisely, are being able to afford less and less. Some are drowning in credit as they try to cope with the pressure of not being able to buy whatever they want, that's true, but more and more people are willing to take a cut so that they can still afford what they need. Maybe, with automation on the rise, this is where we're heading: a new plateau of desire and consumption, with a much higher base level of production to supply us what we need. Then again, I'm mostly talking out of my ass here. If I'm getting something wrong, that's on me.If you could not compete for that scarce resource you made do with less
I've said it myself at much greater length: The problem is the gist of the article is "we don't naturally need to work, therefore a future where few people work will be fine." It's a thinly veiled argument for UBI, as these kinds of articles tend to be. The reason I raised the points that I did is that UBI articles generally ignore math in favor of (A) the milk of human kindness (B) the bounteous explosion of productivity in the face of automation without really examining the socioeconomic questions at the heart of "some people work, some people don't." We're not hard-wired to work. Duh. As a species, though, we are easily bored; nobody puts in a 40-50 hour week and then spends all weekend in the garden because they're trying to save money on vegetables. "Work" then is kinda squiggly, as _refugee_ kinda tried to point out. Here's the thing, though. Productivity has been going up since the invention of agriculture. Leisure time has not. Sure - I'd rather file TPS reports than work in the salt mines but as society grows increasingly complex, our ritual engagement with that society increases as well. If we did not believe in the ritual of "work," our society would not advance. I believe that we're about to see challenges to our definition of "work" but I also believe that those who opt out will starve. That's a different argument than the pursuit of minimalism. Minimalism, after all, has traditionally been about the luxury of eschewing physical goods while asceticism has traditionally been about the purity of eschewing physical goods. Both are choices... ...and if the world decides you're an ascetic, you aren't. You're just poor.Turns out, you said it yourself:
I'm... not sure where you're getting that from. The idea that it might be a pro-UBI article makes some sense, but need you go deeper?It's a thinly veiled argument for UBI, as these kinds of articles tend to be.
The author's argument is everything will be fine because we don't want to work anyway. The classic UBI argument is some variation of "won't it be nice when we can find something fulfilling to do with our time other than fill out TPS reports" and the author's version is Kalahari bushmen only spend a few hours a day digging up grubs and spearing kudu. He's hardly the first - Conrad Lorenz put forth the noble savage and his life of leisure in On Aggression and Daniel Ash turned Conrad Lorenz into a talking gorilla (really) in Ishmael. However, the slant pushed by Lorenz and Ash (and the 4-hour work week guy and the your money or your life guy and the rich dad poor dad guy) is don't work harder than you have to, you simp while the UBI guys are always about "we'll need to figure it out soon because automation is going to take all our jobs whether we want to work or not. No, it's not explicitly a UBI argument. But it's only the UBI guys who pose the question only to answer "everything's going to be just fine." Is there a "but?" Everyone's gonna be fine, we don't have to work, Big Yellow Father will take care of us. "We need to rethink our relationship with the workplace" is an argument that society shouldn't have to work. QED, UBI.For those of us not tormented by visions of a Terminator-style dystopia, the most urgent question posed by automation is: “What will people do if robots take their jobs?”
Our preoccupation with keeping everybody endlessly productive risks harming our and many other species’ future. Most of the strategies proposed for dealing with problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss aim to find more sustainable ways for us to continue to produce and consume as much as we do. Likewise, most proposals to manage automation’s impact focus on how to find new work for those nudged out by robots and artificial intelligence.
But we should draw comfort from the knowledge that we are not genetically hard-wired to work. Automation provides exactly the opportunity we need to rethink our relationship with the workplace and relinquish our dangerous obsession with economic growth.
I see. Thanks for putting it clear before me. Do you think UBI is going to be a necessary part of the upcoming social structure once automation kicks off into double-digit job takeover?