[0xbadcafebee]

Too much for whom? For businesses, definitely not too much; if you're awake you could be working. For workers? We worked less when we were hunter-gatherers, and even peasants up to the industrial revolution worked seasonally and thus had an average of 20 hours a week. Now we work 40 hours a week for 44-48 weeks a year. And for what? To pay too much for health care, be stressed out constantly, sit in traffic commuting, and waste away sitting in a chair ruining our eyes staring at screens.

[kneebonian]

You know I hear this repeated about how people who did substance farming supposedly did less but that just doesn't seem to square with my experiences. Two examples I'll cite are the first is the experience recorded by my great great grandfather, he grew up on a farm in central Utah and when he was 14 years old his dad told him to take the sheep and go up into the mountains and don't come back until it snowed. I guess you could count it different but I think we'd be hard pressed to say that wasn't full time 24/7 work for 3 straight months, then when he got home he would have to work the harvest, repair the fences, etc.

Another more modern example is the Amish, I don't know if you've had a lot of experience with the Amish but they know how to work, they start before sunup and push through to sundown, taking a short break for lunch and then back at it for hours on end, I definitely wouldn't say they average 20 hours a week over the year.

I just see this claim repeated over and over and it feels like it doesn't make sense and is pushed more because those repeating it like it than any substantial basis in reality.

[heavyset_go]

Your great great grandfather from your anecdote worked during/after the Industrial Revolution.

Historical evidence shows that people worked much less than they did during and after the Industrial Revolution[1].

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[varjag]

Herding sheep didn't change dramatically with Industrial Revolution.

[heavyset_go]

It did, considering much of the pasture lands and commons traditionally used by herders were enclosed, along with economics changing in order for people to afford things like taxes, rents/mortgages, and goods that were once made at home, or by craftsmen, that were now factory-produced and sold via commodity markets. Those economic changes necessitate the creation of surplus value to be sold in markets for money versus doing just enough work for subsistence.

You can see this change with the tenant farmer model. Traditional use of the commons was eliminated by privatization, and farmers then had to rent back smaller plots of land to sustain themselves. Tenant farmers now had rents to pay, so they had to create a surplus of value in order to afford that rent, and could no longer just engage in the subsistence farming they had done in the past, which meant doing more work.