[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.