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.
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.
Depeds on if they were the ones who had arrived in the land of abundance or not :)
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.)
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".
“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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.