How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Post by BookLoverL »

Even nowadays people have to spend a significant amount of time cooking, cleaning, etc., and that's not included in the 40 hour workweek, so really if we're trying to find out how much better the hunter-gatherers have/had it, we should add the total average chore time to the 40 hours before we make the comparison.

I imagine that the less tough the climate a particular group found themselves in, the less work they had to do to get the food they needed. So groups living in the Arctic and/or the desert would naturally have to do more work to get the same amount of resources, due to the general sparseness of resources in those areas.

User avatar
Ego
Posts: 6357
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2011 12:42 am

Re: How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Post by Ego »

While I cannot imagine doing 9-5 for 40+ years I find it useful to look at how others do it.

Image

Some Chinese companies advertise 996 to lure talent away from 997 companies. 9am to 9pm 6 days a week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Toska2
Posts: 420
Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2015 8:51 pm

Re: How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Post by Toska2 »

In my mind I make four clear distinctions.

Hunter-gather-early farmer
Guilds & craftsman
Industrial revolution, sweatshops and factory
First world work

The third implies doing highly repetitive mindless drudgery. A singular pattern beyond sun up to sun down, rain or shine, winter or summer. I worked at a tier 2 auto supplier cutting parts off a sprue tree. Stuff like that. Its a different type of stress and tired (weariness?) The third also implies that it still happens today.

Judging the popularity of movie-show marathoning and football weekends, people are barely functional outside of work.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9369
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In her memoir "Flyover Lifes" about growing up in small, relatively affluent, heavily Republican, Midwestern city in the 1940s, one of my favorite, wickedly insightful, novelists, Diane Johnson, notes that the adults of her childhood worked less than the adults she knows now, even though they had far fewer technological tools at their disposal, such as dishwashers. Their evenings and weekends were filled with activities such as visiting, reading, playing cards, doing crafts, or playing golf. They had the time and energy to engage in such leisure activities, because none of the women worked outside of the home at all, and most of the men had a good deal of autonomy over the necessary work on their prosperous farms, small businesses, or civil service type jobs. They weren't spinning their wheels out at the hyper-bleeding-edge of the extreme efficiency needed to keep the 21st century global system from spinning apart at all tangents.

One thing that really made me think about this was taking a couple data science courses online after reading a number of books on the topic of energy and civilization. Why does the seriously nerdy profession of Data Scientist pay 6 figures? How does this make sense in terms of units of energy being moved across the landscape?

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9369
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: How do most people do this whole compulsory 9-5 thing for 40+ years?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Designing a lifestyle is kind of like designing a garden. Given as much freedom as necessary, each one will likely be very unique.

Post Reply