[bmmayer1]

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work.

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?

It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.

Sure, work is changing, and many people are lucky to be able to detach from such schedules with exciting and unknown results for the future workplace. But those of us fortunate enough to have had access to 9-to-5 jobs would be tone deaf to act like it's such a traumatic experience, when so many people in the world would be so grateful to have such an opportunity.

[lj3]

> Really, barbaric?

Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say,

> It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

And if that doesn't convince you, this letter Bukowski wrote just might: http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/charles-bukowski-rails-ag...

edit: I just remembered: this reminds me of an article called 'why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you'[0].

[0]: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...

[gdulli]

> > Really, barbaric?

> Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is.

It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem.

But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make.

> awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic

Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.

[jgrahamc]

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation?

I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

[jerf]

"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"."

As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this time period their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough. Not to mention many of these hunting trips often spanned multiple days from what I gather. I suppose militaries had a lot of cohesion, as long as you don't mind defining "loved ones" as "my squadmates". Family farms still generally would end up with the family cut in half between the women and men, assuming the men even stayed together. Etc.

I can't off the top of my head think of a time period where there wasn't a large portion of the population separated from at least half their family for long periods of time.

The current situation isn't perfect, but let's be precise about what we're comparing it to, and when exactly it supposedly existed and was widespread.

[scarmig]

1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies.

2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it.

Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies.

The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.

[jerf]

"Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist."

Yes, they do, even now. Of course, they're so inconsequential on the world stage that you don't hear about them much, but yes, they exist.

Now, you have the problem that they probably won't accept you, and will probably eventually try to kill you if you seriously set up next to them and start truly doing the hunt-gather routine.

But then, that's the authentic hunter-gatherer experience too.

(I don't believe the garbage about how peaceful they supposedly were. It is logistically ludicrous.)

[scarmig]

No one is claiming that hunter gatherers were peaceful. It weakens your argument to try to put words into people's mouths. I might as well say, "well, why are you claiming that there's no crime or inequality in modern society? There obviously is!!!1!"

And no, they don't. Sure, you can find a random tribe in the barren wastelands of the Kalahari that's ostensibly "hunter gatherer," but they are much more integrated into the economy of South Africa than any hunter gatherer society would have been two thousand years ago. Most people born into those hunter gatherer-lite societies spend at least some time working in the capitalist economy.

Compare that to millenia ago, where hunter gatherers occupied some of the most economically productive regions of the world. It's an apples and oranges comparison.

[nindalf]

That is an extraordinary claim you're making, that people had to be forced to remain within agricultural societies. Of the scholarship in this area that I'm familiar with, nothing supports this. If you're aware of research that suggests otherwise, please share it.

I often see this nostalgia about how much better things used to be, compared to how bad it is now, whether that time period is 5, 25, 100 or in your case, 10000 years ago. This usually glosses over the very real downsides of living in any of those time periods. In the case of hunter gatherer societies here are some problems that we no longer have to deal with once we moved to agricultural societies with central authority. In no particular order

1. Vagaries of food. You had to constantly find food, because storage wasn't easy. You could have a few months where you had plenty of food but a difficult week could see some friends and family die of starvation. This was a very real danger. Compare that with what a difficult week looks like today. This led to

2. Constantly moving. You could never stay in one place too long. You really like the area you're currently at? Too bad, move on before food sources dry up here. What if the new place is not as good and food is difficult to find? Too bad, keep moving. This led to

3. Leaving behind people. If a person could not walk at the pace of the group, they would be left behind to die. There was no quiet corner they could retire to, they had to walk or die. Not just old people. If a person broke their leg, and couldn't walk for a couple of months, they would be left behind to die.

4. Safety. If you lived in a large group with strong fighters this wasn't a problem. But if you didn't, or encountered a larger or more skilled group of fighters, you could see everyone in your group killed except for younger women. That's less of a problem in societies where a central entity has a monopoly on violence.

There is absolutely no doubt that all of these factors led to a high mortality rate. Once people moved to agricultural societies that were relatively safer and had relatively stable sources of food, the population exploded. The choice that people made was not forced upon them. Indeed it would have been difficult to do at a time when society had just started to change and central authority was still weak. Rather it was just people choosing the safe, stable option rather than the interesting one.

The interestingness of being a hunter gatherer is what modern societies find attractive - eating different things everyday, moving to a new place every couple of weeks, almost like a constant vacation. But it ignores the constant spectre of death that hangs over every such society.

My understanding of this topic is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I highly recommend it.

[scarmig]

Off the top of my head, there's Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" [1] (popular writing, so grain of salt) and James Scott's more academic "The Art of Not Being Governed" [2]. From the first reference, "One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5'3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors."

So a few points. First of all, you elide between comparing hunter gatherer societies to early sedentary societies and contemporary industrialized societies. They are very much not the same, and I prefer contemporary industrial societies over both. This was purely a statement of leisure time, which was higher in HG societies than contemporary ones.

The comparison between early sedentary and hunter gatherer societies is where hunter gatherer societies have a pretty attractive value proposition. Some points: the threat models between agricultural and hunter gatherer societies are different, and you can sustain a higher population per acre with agriculture, obviously. But people never wholeheartedly embraced sedentary, centralized societies. They germinated in particularly fertile areas where states could most effectively maintain themselves and extract excess value from highly productive land and labor.

But if being agricultural and sedentary were an obvious, natural course of events that everyone would choose, you'd see agriculture and sedentary states rapidly spreading to the boundaries of the geography that can support people via agriculture. That's not what you see: you see constantly fluctuating exteriors in a contested relation with borderlands. The people living in those areas constantly switched sides depending on convenience and what was best for them at a given time. For instance, sometimes, Han China would offer incentives for people to take up sedentary agriculture (no taxes!), and they did. But this wasn't stable, and people would be more than happy to switch back to other lifestyles depending on the state of the economy and the incentives they faced.

Over time, the total area of those borderlands shrunk as a result of technological progress and more capable states. But this took literally millenia.

[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

[Bartweiss]

> ...while many people use their words to sing the praises of [hunting-gathering] their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough.

I think you're overestimating how much you can have that if you wanted it. I realize many people would reject that life (or at a minimum want modern medicine alongside it), but basically no one actually has the choice.

Hunting-gathering became steadily less 'appealing' as it became impossible to do effectively. In America, start from the near-extinction of bison. Add the privatization of most land, mass agriculture destroying the great plains habitat completely, fenced cattle farming destroying western spaces. (That also destroyed the semi-hunter-gatherer vaquero lifestyle, which people were mourning mere decades ago.)

You can do this anywhere - urbanization of the American East, desertification of the Southwest, the list goes on. And if you want a less-nomadic version, since the open spaces for nomadism are gone, you run into more modern laws actively preventing it. I know people who grew up (not at all as hunter-gatherers) in houses out in the woods that are now completely illegal because electricity and running water have been mandated.

I'm on a soapbox here, yeah. But I know people who do want this lifestyle, people who've tried for this lifestyle, and the simple answer is that it's not actually available. For most people, that choice is gone. It can't coexist with modern civilization, and that might be a price worth paying but we ought to admit we paid it.

[mercer]

I wrote a long response, taking a wider and wider perspective, and trying to be nuanced and yet opinionated, until I realized that if all this climate change stuff that's been posted on HN these past weeks/months is true, and I have little reason to doubt it, the only discussion worth having to me seems to be on the level of 'should be work towards a global government, and if so, how tyrannical can it be to still be worth the alternative of mankind disappearing?'

I'm not being snarky or theatrical, or judgmental; this is something that's cropping up all the time and I'm kind of wishing someone wise would tell me I shouldn't be as worried as I am about climate change fucking shit up on a level that dwarfs pretty much everything else.

And to be clear, I personally love spending time discussing the ins and outs of, say, The Lord Of The Rings, and I'll keep doing that to stave off depression. But for both good and bad I'm starting to wonder if I should go all-in on working toward solutions - if any - to playing a part in preserving humanity.

[gdulli]

Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die.

And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.

So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.

[kevincennis]

"Forced" doesn't seem like exactly the right word.

[Doxin]

It seems pretty fitting to me. Work or don't eat. Technically you could decide to starve of course, but it's at the very least coercive.

[goalieca]

I wouldn't go to work if I didn't have to. It can feel like prison some days. Forced is the right word.

[recursive]

Why can't everything just be free? Life is so unfair.

[pc86]

Even the US has plenty of support programs that you can survive without a job.

[mantas]

You can bum around and live off welfare. Quite a few people have pulled that off and seem to enjoy it.

[jackhack]

Enough so that in Hawaii, for instance, they are providing airline tickets to those who will volunteer to leave the island (and its welfare system) and go be a burden on the mainland, instead.

[JoeAltmaier]

And every weekend. And evenings and mornings. And the kids are at school anyway.

This is such a first-world sad-sack complaint.

[tsunamifury]

Many of us work 14 hours a day, plus occasional weekends, don't yet have kids or a house, and are at the top of our field.

You can call it whatever you want, but its not adding up to a "better life."

[fsloth]

Chained to a desk from 9-5 is inhuman if the work is not intrinsically motivating. From quality of life perspective I'm not sure if it's much better than generic hunter gathering.

The fact that it's materialistically much better than scraping living by in some hellhole does not validate the concept.

The fact that it's a safer and a healthier work environment than some other does not mean it could not be better.

Sadly, it's the status quo. Yes, calling it barbaric is hyperbolic - but the end is not to find out the specific philosophic understanding of the condition but to create propaganda and motivation to find something better.

[krapp]

Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line.

To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done.

Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains.

UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.

[pc86]

Most of HS class did not go to college. They knew with alarming certainty that whatever they did for work was not going to be enjoyable, was not going to pay enough, and for some of them would even be physically dangerous. It was just a fact of life. Work was something shitty that you did so you could put a roof over your head and food on the table, and what you did outside of work was your life.

The privileged few on HN (myself included 100%) who find their work rewarding, fulfilling, and extremely lucrative, are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what "work" is like in the real world.

[fsloth]

"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..."

I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale.

There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lots of the conventions our civilization has are tradition based and eminence based. They are not the pinnacle of human development.

Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

[krapp]

>Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

Who are "we", though?

Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo. The people capable of making such decisions already enjoy a very high quality of life.

[fsloth]

"A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo."

Generally, providing better wellbeing for employees is profitable. Or, that's at least what trendy management books tell us. I don't have a clue, I'm just a frontline coder. See for example Hamish "Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't"

[purplethinking]

Early agriculture was indeed the worst. But look further back, to a time before agriculture. Hunter gatherers spent significanly less time actually hunting and gathering that we do working today. And while off work we have a hard time mentally letting go of it, hunter gatherers instead had pure free time. I'm not saying life was perfect back then, but in terms of work we can clearly strive further. Agriculture has been fairly brief time in the history of our species, so perhaps we shouldn't be using it as a base line.

[ellius]

I think he made the mistake of ignoring half the connotation of the word. "Barbaric" really implies a combination of two underlying ideas. He's right insofar as the 9-5 is backwards and unsympathetic to human beings, which I think is his point. He's wrong in that it isn't physically brutal. The problem is he picked a word with a complex connotation when he needed a simpler one.

[hectorr]

That's true, but language is constantly evolving. I actually think we need a cultural shift in how we perceive work. The high intrinsic and extrinsic value we place on it served a lot of communities really well for millennia, but things really are changing these days with robotics and narrow AI. Language is one of the main tools we have to work with.

[return0]

> It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival,

It's not actually. Farmers did not work 9-5, and only worked when weather permitted it. i believe 9-5 is a remnant of industrial era

[yawz]

> the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, working long hours in the fields, barely achieving subsistence, sharecropping for feudal lords or tyrannical landlords.

We should have never left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. :)

[jackhack]

Because nothing beats dying at the ripe old age 30 with a toothless mouth, body failing of undernourishment and disease (especially parasites), common death in childbirth, the slightest infection becoming a death sentence, and so on.

[yawz]

Well... These things are not inherent characteristics of hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They were the same until very recently :).

[Declanomous]

I think his ego gets in the way of his argument. I was thinking about how melodramatic he sounded about all of this, and then I got to the picture of him standing cruciform under a spotlight, and all I could do was roll my eyes.

[Fricken]

I doubt he chose the photo. While a great writer, Coupland is a bit shy & awkward as a speaker.

[Declanomous]

I understand that he didn't choose the photo, but the body language strikes me strange, what with the arms outstretched. I'm probably being a bit harsh, because it's not his event, and he didn't set up the stage, or the lighting.

Regardless, I view speakers who make gestures like that with skepticism, since I associate the posture with grandiose self-interest.

[geoka9]

I've no idea about the guy, but photos from live events can be very out-of-context, so I wouldn't put too much weight in this.

[Declanomous]

That's fair, but the context I'm using is the rest of the article, which is rather grandiose itself.