I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.
From TFA:
> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.
It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.
Because at the beginning they got an increase in food security for a small increase in hours worked. Then as time went on their population grew larger and they became better able to divide into agricultural, administrative and violence specialists and with their greater population and capacity for violence they expanded. The greater population and military prowess meant that in a competition with hunter gatherers for land and other resources the agriculturalists generally won. They couldn’t revert to hunter gathering without huge loss of life due to the loss of food and over time their population grew until they were near the carrying capacity of agriculture and sometimes overshot and died in famines or wars.
Agriculture is great for a small number of generations for everyone and then you can’t go back without mass death.
I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater than what it was when I had no job. It really gave me some respect for the willpower required to run your own business.
You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm actively trying to get this out of my head. Not saying that I want to slack off, but I definitely need to slack off from time to time, and I struggle with allowing myself to do it.
> You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively.
I'm undecided on whether I see that as a "mind virus" or just the right choice to maximize happiness in the long run. My impression is that spending my time doing unproductive things that I strongly enjoy (like videogames) is somewhat of a local maxima in terms of the happiness it can bring me. One day my favorite game servers will be shutting down, or scraping along with a small fraction of players as everyone's moved on to the next game, and I will have virtually nothing to show for all the time spent. In the best case I'll have a handful of memories that I enjoyed, in the worst case I'll have a deep regret that I spent my most capable years on something that is of no use to me anymore. Presumably by being productive I can avoid that regret, and I'll have skills, money, or creations will be useful to me for much longer. That's my theory of how sacrificing some happiness in the short term should make me much happier in the long term.
What then about skills or creations that society deems less useful? Think of the classic starving artist trope. All those underground artists who make little to no money.
This effect is particular prevalent in the US. As someone who moved here from the UK it was quite a cultural shock to realise that being "idle" was, for some reason, considered "bad".
Sometimes I think that decades of spending all our productive time in a 'work' setting make people feel like they like it, might be a basic psychological adaptation mechanism. In fact, being an able human and having months of time at my disposal is scary :)
There's so much other "work" that needs to get done that I could easily fill it up if I didn't have to be at work so much. As it is, I've put in 20 hours this weekend around the house and I've barely put a dent in my todo list; I've got to go back to work tomorrow to get some rest.
I don't think you are right about people not enjoying their work, in the US context at least. The vast majority of workers seem to have pretty high job satisfaction. In fact, a quick search shows concern when average nationwide job satisfaction drops below the mid 80%s, which seems phenomenal. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/147833/Job-Satisfaction-Struggl...)
As for wanting to work less, that's probably true, but I'll bet you could get that result for almost any question involving extensive time commitment- for example, I love my kids dearly and love spending time with them, but if grandma offers to watch them I'll take her up in a hot second.
The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time.
Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work less, they need more money. Now Starbucks needs to pay more people more money to maintain the same hours. This circles back to the popular discussion of automation and UBI or whatever, where Starbucks now has robots and the employees don't exist anymore.
On another note, I'd rather work a job I don't enjoy than be unemployed, I've had periods of unemployment and they were pretty bad.
Raise the minimum wage while reducing the work week to 4 days for full time employment (this brings the minimum wage closer to where it should be after not being raised for decades, while also giving labor a share of the productivity gains they should’ve been receiving since the 70s).
You squeeze Capital with labor law and regulation. Any reduction in employment due to rising wages can be fixed with social support systems funded by corporate taxes that were previously tax breaks or deductions on automation expenses.
The wealth in the system exists to do this. It’s a distribution issue.
Technically true. But the minimum wage is still clearly an anchor. The amount above minimum is a signal of your worth as a worker. Consider this[1] income distribution chart (with its precipitous falloff left of the minimum wage mark). It's clear that "at or just above minimum" is the largest demographic, even if it represents a small fraction of the whole. If the minimum wage were raised, it wouldn't simply bunch the left of the graph together - the entire curve would move.
Yes, I even mentioned that in my comment, the problem is actually implementing the system. It's all well and good to say "UBI" but getting it past the lobbyists and through Congress is another thing. I'm trying to understand how we get there, not the end goal, since that's obvious.
A bunch of rich people want UBI for some reason. It's very simple unlike say healthcare so it is harder to stealthily undermine, which is the main tactic of unpopular lobbying. So it has probably more of a chance than other stuff at the same scale.
I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.
From TFA:
> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.
It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.