[chris_acree]

I think we do have more time off. This page (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours) indicates working hours are nearly half of what they were 150 years ago in wealthy countries. Even assuming some faults in the source, I can't believe working hours haven't dropped significantly in that time, and many household chores are also taking less time due to technology.

While I also would enjoy more leisure time, I agree with the parent that most of it would go to consuming media. What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?

[claudiawerner]

>What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?

I can't speak for others, but I'd be less stressed, and I'd be more easily able to savor the moments when work isn't coming. I'd have more motivation to program rather than play video games, just as I used to do before I got my job. To say "we have more time off" when the comparison is the generation that came before me, never mind the standard from 150 years ago - to me means pretty much nothing. It's very similar to how people sometimes say "what are you complaining about? Compared to the standard of living in medieval times, you're living like a queen!". Who's that really going to convince?

The second point is that there's a tension. Many of the same people who subscribe to some variant of utilitarianism still want to moralize about how people use their time, by dividing things into higher or lower pleasures, without being able to justify it. For example, they say a high pleasure is programming or (maybe) chess. A lower pleasure is, as J.S. Mill described it, something for pigs revelling in their own filth (today, people will say this amounts to video games or 'media consumption').

When people say "things are better than they've ever been", I'm inclined to agree, on most fronts. When people use that as an argument to tell me to shut up and deal with my lot in life, it's profoundly sad.

[em-bee]

indeed. humanity evolves, and so progress to improve our lives is inevitable. there is pretty much no point to stagnate.

moreover with the coming automation of many jobs, working on improving our lives is pretty much the only thing that's going to be left to do. (and any kind of exploration of the universe)

it's one thing to not just complain and sulk about how bad our life is right now, as if earlier generations had it any better. but it is quite another to actually work on making life better.

as long as there is a single living being that is not well for whatever reason, we have an opportunity to make the life of that being better.

[micromacrofoot]

The time around the industrial revolution was particularly bad for work. I wonder what working hours looked like pre-industry?

[syntheweave]

Pre-industry describes early modernity, the period where press gangs roamed the streets to capture people and force them to crew a ship, and slaves were taken from their homelands and their ancestry decontextualized, rendering a return impossible.

While you could certainly make the case that the hours were fewer(because it was still agrarian) the state of labor relations suggests a huge demand for cheap workers, not efficient workers. Productivity needs inputs: with no canals or railroads, you couldn't get resources to factories in quantity, so you couldn't get the gains of automation. So the idle hours reflect a general impoverishment of possibility: nothing better to do with the idle bodies. Making them cheap, rather than good, reflects the drive to accumulate within the zero-sum dynamic of merchantalism. Or rather, you wanted to define good as "loyal to me and skilled at attending to my needs", which is different from "good at the job". So there was a lot of emphasis on preserving the body but minimizing resistance.

The labor exploitation in early industrialization reflects the combination of productivity dynamic and merchantalistic norms: now, in a competitive marketplace where you have a lot of opportunities to make products and quickly build wealth, there is a reason to overwork bodies and then dispose of them. That's never gone away, we've just engaged in some collective pushback from time to time, as Marx outlined.

But it could be that we're on the verge of another shift in the norms of labor relations. I suspect that's what is going on now. There are a lot of "pieces of the puzzle" that are ready to nibble away at existing norms.

[yourapostasy]

> What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?

I won't speak for people in aggregate, nor cohorts. But for myself personally, if my work week dropped to 30 hours with the same compensation package, I'd pick up the pace learning other maker skills so I can build solutions to scratch my own itches, learning a couple other natural languages and cultures faster than I'm learning them currently, and in general do what I currently enjoy when I take time off from my gigs.

The great part of this era is the endless array of autodidactic opportunities easier to access than ever before. It was already endless in previous eras, but the pace was slower, and the scope of what individuals can accomplish themselves was more limited. If I had the money and time for example, I could build my own personal MDx lab that was just impossible in the 1970's; it wouldn't be CLIA certified, but I could test to my heart's content. People talking about the "curse of immortality" speak an alien tongue to me.

[heavyset_go]

People worked fewer hours in preindustrial society[1], and people had more time off, as well.

[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

[Aunche]

The author makes the mistake of projecting their modern attitude towards free time towards those living in preindustrial societies to conclude that people were better off as peasants that overworked factory workers. Every example of industrialization in history proves this wrong, however. Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most. Any moderate illness, accident, or natural disaster spark disaster for a poor farmer's family, so they'd prefer to work a shitty factory job for 80 hours a day for the sake of the small amount of security.

[heavyset_go]

> Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most.

That might be the case today, but at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it was less so. What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves. Early factories were known to maim and kill, the hours were long, cities were full of deadly disease and the quality of life upgrade you might see today didn't exist as wages were so low. People needed to be incentivized to work in factories, and it wasn't fair compensation that was the incentive. The incentive was being driven from the lands that had sustained workers and their ways of life for generations, and systems of laws that forced them into workhouses.

I wish I remembered the quote from around that time, but from memory it went something like, "It might take a commoner a weekend to make himself shoes that will last him years for free, but for that same person working a factory, it would take a month's wages just to buy a pair of shoes that fall apart in the rain."

[Aunche]

>What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves.

Enclosure laws certainly were a massive factor into workers moving to factories. However, I reject the Marxist historian's implication that some aristocrats we're inspired by capitalist ideals to become greedy, which allowed them to take lands from the poor farmers. Rather, they were always this greedy, and market conditions simply let them actualize that greed.

The Black Plague decimated the population of Europe, which allowed the peasants to gain more leverage and gave them common land. However, by the early 1600s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England#Histor...), the population had grown back to its height, and the aristocrats had the leverage to claw back these privileges. Indeed, that was when the first formal enclosure acts were introduced (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).

Moreover, my point about preindustrial/early industrial workers not placing much importance in free time still stands. They could have worked for the enclosure and had more free time but still chose factory work.

[sitkack]

I witnessed this on a trip to Vietnam 15 years ago, the rural kids had a life of leisure but much less material wealth. The city kids (or farm kids moved to the city) worked for more but had cell phones and scooters (cars in the west), they could ride their scooter to the KFC.