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I sometimes do enjoy taking my tent out and roughing it for a weekend - then I want to get back to all the expensive comforts that my modern life gives me.

I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don't want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work.

People have this romantic notion of history thinking that nobody had to work, it was just play all the time, but that is almost entirely false. Worse in the few cases where somebody didn't have to work we quickly discover that it was because they had many slaves doing all the work for them. In reality your typical person today is working much less than at any previous time in history. If it seems otherwise it is because you are not counting all the work - hunter gathers may have only spend a few hours a week hunting/gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting/gathering was done preparing the results of that work. Those mud huts they live in - a lot of effort to build and keep up. Those blankets they sleep on to keep warm - a lot of work to make them (and they don't last forever).

I am a member of the local food co-op. While not a perfect model for society, I think it's a good example to provide some alternative to the system of work we all take for granted.

I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts.

In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run.

This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords.

It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.

Co-ops are great, but they don't really work for any business that requires a large capital investment. Like farming might seem simple, but if you want to make it cost effective then you need a lot of expensive equipment like a $800K combine harvester. Where does that capital come from? It's tough to find members who can contribute that much money to join.
Great example, thanks. There must be realistic limits to scaling such models? Administrative, land to crop to member ratios, etc.? Exploitation/arbitrage must find its way in at some point where it becomes an economy... (Not trying to argue definitions, just thinking about practical governance to extend the model to practical human scales.)
> This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships

Maybe, but it also can be much worse. Any of your owners can exploit the situation via fraud and if they hide it well you won't know until the whole fails and you lose whatever your investment was. Co-op is still a good model for some things, but beware it isn't clearly any better and can be much worse.

In some cases co-op is more exploitive because they use the "you are a member" line and get you to believe it and so you don't even realize how bad it is.

When a co-op is good it is good. However don't fool yourself, it isn't always good. So long as you are not fooled they can work very well.

Yeah, we'll have one guy who like, who like, makes bread. A-and one guy who like, l-looks out for other people's safety.
> For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete.

I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.

Where are you getting the 60-80 figure from? In more recent past we have indeed worked more (at least in developed countries), e.g. the Industrial Revolution, but just a little earlier, like the Middle Ages, we were working far less. People like to joke about peasant life, but they were mostly not working much during winter and fall, or after noon in the warmer months
"far less" is not well supported. As much as people try to claim that today's norm of 2000 hours per year is akin to slavery, the reality is that average human working hours have fluctuated between 1500-3000 across most places and time periods for which we have data.

1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.

>like the Middle Ages, we were working far less.

I wish I knew more about what scholarship people are relying on to come to this conclusion. Can someone point me to a definitive source?

Subsistence farming is not an easy job.

I remember reading an article based on a paper that tried to replicate small-scale hunter-gatherer "week". It turned out that "work" was less than 20h per week.

As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).

That's anyways what I remember.

>As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days.

When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.

Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.

That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.

The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.

I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.

Missing context unfortunately, sorry!

This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.

So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.

And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.

And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...

> it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_

It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?

For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.

Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.

But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.

There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.

> Today we work about 40-50h per week

In the US. In Norway an årsverk (year's work) is 1695 hours on average, 37.5 hours per work week. The actual average hours worked per week is about ten percent lower.

I suspect you mental model of the past is maybe overindexed on Industrial Revolution stories where industry was utterly off-the-rails
The millionaire mustache guy retired young. He still did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, but only on his time. It lasted for about a decade. Then his (now ex) wife realized she liked the things money can buy and the fallout from that forced him back into a job. (I'm not sure where he is now)
“Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?”

As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones

To do:

- find someone to collect my garbage and recycling

- find someone to fix my utilities when broken

- find someone to put out fires - real ones

- make sure there are enough people in those roles

- find ways to make those things seem "fun"

Interesting and novel take. Do you think making that would enable you to also make a better distributed note taking system, or do you think you need the distributed note taking system first?

Perhaps we need to make a diagram to decide.

Ah... and what about the mythology of no work ?

Granted, there are vast amounts of wasted work hours these days, be it farmers producing food when 30% of it goes straight to trash or those poor souls stuck in bullshit office jobs. But this:

> Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work.

Is a straight-up lie.

assuming the "work" as defined in the dictionary has always existed, there is a time when the way we're working now didn't exist
No one said anything about "no work", but that's an attractive straw man. Most people don't mind working hard, but they don't want to be exploited which is the point of the essay. Exploitation is rewarded under capitalism which must perpetuate the myths the author calls out to make it easier to exploit people.
The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.)

Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.

No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.

Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House

The pay increases just enough to make it slightly less uncomfortable to stay at work, than to do something else.
There is a lot said about exploitation in the book and in the comments here on HN. I would like to start a kindergarten (a day care for toddlers and pre-school kids) in Switzerland, where such service is very scarce and expensive because the state does not subsidize preschool childcare. What HN community recommends me on the form of legal entity that I should use to start this venture? Options available are corporation, non-profit association or co-operative. What would be the most ethical and non-exploitative option which would work business-wise at the same time?
In 2025 and beyond it is my sincere hope that we stop lauding articles that merely present problems without providing any substantive thoughts on how to solve them.
I'm not going to say if this author is successful or not, but isn't the first step to addressing a problem identify there is one? Step 0 of stop, drop, and roll is to say to yourself "You know what, I think I'm on fire."
Hey I must miss something certainly as I don’t see what is the substantive thoughts shared in this comment that would mitigate this issue of unmerited laud for mere careful exposition of a perspective. Surely it’s just me missing the point.

Also to stay authentic with our noble mission to only talk about things we have practical actions to move to, I would suggest that we request deletion of some Wikipedia articles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...

It doesn’t even present a problem.
The reality is that people LOVE reading articles like this. They love sharing articles like this. Anthony Burgess wrote a wonderful preface to a clockwork orange which I consider inline with this concept in which he wrote:

"Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. We like to have the pants scared off us by visions of cosmic destruction. To sit down in a dull room and compose the Missa Solemis or The Anatomy of the Melancholy does not make headlines or news flashes."

All the anti-capitalist doom lit out there has its place, but all of the adults all agree that its intellectually dishonest. This article is just calling out something with no attempt to improve or offer a way forward (thank you to the parent comment for calling this out). Its even ignoring that there are many people who actually enjoy the state of affairs.

Entirely solvable, but requires thinking and discussing things that many find uncomfortable: socialism, equality, etc
There needs to be a mechanism in capitalism that provides some essential goods for free and incentivizes that behavior. A likely source is to tax it from companies making luxuries (the economic definition), provided companies actually pay the tax fairly, and lawmakers don't leave gaping loopholes.

We need to undo how expensive it is to be poor - this is exploitative capitalism against the poorest. And the essentials should seek to be lowering prices, not go up like luxuries.

The deal then changes to: "you don't have to work, and you won't starve or freeze, but you also won't have any luxuries". And yes, all luxuries get more expensive.

This already exists, somewhere between universal basic income and social democracy.
I would go one further: give government powers to simply purchase things that work well out of the free market, and run it in a way that is pro-quality-of-life rather than profit. Is fast internet working well? buy and invest profit to increase coverage and speed. A lab makes good drugs? don’t buy its drugs, buy the lab.

The capitalist incentive remain: A gap in the market can yield you wealth for 10-20 years until you’re bought out. and government only buys the highest performing stuff of the bunch.

Challenge is having a system that is resistant to gaming

"Work" is a heavily overloaded word that cleaves meaning in a very unhelpful way. I've met great artists and scientists who tell me about "their life's work". Things they did, or would have done, even without money. There are people in therapy who are "doing the work", and they pay well for that. I know one millionaire who volunteers at a hospital and another at a theatre. When you get older and get a measure of life, perspectives change. What the author describes is domination and the abject penury of exploitation that flourishes under failed systems. We need a richer language to talk about these things. The real poverty is in our understanding.
I think there's enough to discuss around the stranglehold monopolies have on employment, or that pay should allow people to live, not just survive, or that we shouldn't tie people's value to their jobs. Articles like these do nothing to sway people away from the uncontrolled-capitalism lobby.
I wonder if the author could enlighten us on a more successful system? Do they envision a world where...no one works or produces value? Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals?

If they can't understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can't take their case seriously. If they can't cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can't take their case seriously.

> Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals?

Trade offered! You receive: enough sustenance to live for a day and a roof above your head so you don't have to sleep under a bridge. I receive: your 12 hours of labour of my choosing.

Yes, it is a mutually beneficial transaction, and millions of people historically have accepted it. Yet somehow there is this nagging feeling it might not be "fair"... but that's absurd, isn't it? It's both completely voluntary and mutually beneficial, so it has to be fair. That's what "fair" means, after all, doesn't it?

The authors are anarchists and produce quite a bit of writing elucidating their alternative vision for society. Just read their essays and books.
Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capitalism and the modern wage system is going to go over well
That's because hacker news is often an echo chamber of venture capitalists (or VC wannabes) whose success depends on perpetuating these myths.
Posting their cool essay on a computer that needs internet that needs electricity that needs power plants that needs natural resource extraction that needs heavy machinery that needs metallurgy that needs large factories that needs engineers that needs universities that needs thousands of years of human capital etc etc etc

If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.

Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.

You did it, you posted the meme.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

oh, it's a matter of means, opportunity and peace of mind.

this little dependency sequence is exactly how I, again and again, come to the conclusion about what climate change is driven by and climate change (re-)actions should be.

but in terms of change: others need to change so that change can hold the line.

example: good teachers are scarce. and when there are a few or only one at your school, most of their good impact is offset or entirely negated by their colleagues. and that's not life, that's not what it is, that's not how it goes.

It's because people in the dependency sequence refuse to change and instead serve someone who poses as a devil because the motherfucker gets them high on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'that's not my job', 'I don't care', 'I don't even care about not caring', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ...

AND: at almost every step in that dependency sequence, there are better ways to do things. implementation takes quite a bit of time and so there is no surplus to last years surplus, something that hasn't created any added value to civilization since the beginning of time.

everything is going on and these 'nobody cares' people are f u c k i n g annoying and so are all these 'normalizers' ... instead of adding value, they just serve those who ruin games and playing fields in exactly the ways that others are actively trying to change for the better, which is why there are demands for bottom-up change: your bossies won't tell you to change so you have to get it yourself instead of 'just doing your job', ffs.

you are right, of course, it's a personal matter, fuck whoever; but from a rational, game-theoretical, and super-rational perspective, what you said is nonsense and so is using that dependency sequence as an argument. Especially in the lights of all that shit in storage, or cleaning out storage for new shit that can only be marketed via deception and cross-media priming, and so on ... ...

just provide people with means, opportunity and let them have peace of mind, then you'll see what side they pick, which is where we end up, again, "burning men" with psychedelics and our decades of experience in cool fields and wonderful remote places, 'just doing our jobs' ...

we really ruined too much potential of capitalism. it's sad, but the wall-street rich did to capitalism what communist leadership did to communism; only that communism didn't get to develop that long ...

Title: Portfolio Communists threatening to ruin Capitalism and America from the Inside. ... no, needs work, any ideas?

Hypocrisy is a baseline human aha-moment, btw, you can't use it in or as an argument. There should be a fallacy for that, if anyone has time to formulate one.