[Laremere]

This take ignores the unpaid work performed for the family and community, largely by women. When two people in a family are employed, more of their household labor (cooking, caring for the young and the old, etc) is purchased instead of provided by a family member.

[adrianN]

Housework productivity has gone through the roof since the invention of dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, etc. My grandma used to actually work hard the whole day to run the houshold. My family today manages with maybe two or three hours of light work per day.

[ornornor]

If only we did the same with other work, we’d also all only be working a few hours a day rather than 8–9 still.

[_heimdall]

People don't actually want this. We sell ourselves on the Jetsons-like idea of automating away our daily tasks so we can just live our lives, but that scares us.

Most people don't actually seem to want to have mist most of their waking hours free to do whatever they want.

[ornornor]

I do think so as well. "But what would I do with all this time?"... I find this so sad.

[_heimdall]

I do get the fear of having all that time. I assume it gets back to people not really having the time to deeply know themselves and being afraid of what they'll find. Day to day life is a whole lot easier with distractions, even if those distractions are frustrating or miserable in the moment.

[ornornor]

Sorry to hear. I hope you'll get past that fear one day and discover how rich your life can be without work filling most of your days and taking up most of it (potentially for someone else's profit.)

[mschuster91]

But how would Jeff Bezos swim in money if his underpaid parcel couriers would be able to financially survive on working four hours a day?

It's utterly ridiculous how much of the productivity increases of the last decades ended up not distributed to the workers either in terms of wage/salary hikes or reduced working hours. Something like billionaires rarely existed for a long time, usually it was the royal family and that's it - and now, alone in the last 20 years the amount of billionaires is 6x higher than at the start of the millennium. All of that wealth has been looted from the lower classes and in quite a few cases the taxpayers.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/220002/umfrag...

[pmontra]

Add sewing, making and repairing clothes, curtains, sheets and covers, etc. We buy them now.

[watwut]

To be fair, they were buying those in 1940 too.

[pmontra]

Yes, but they cost much more than now so it was very common to have a sewing machine in every house and use it. If you're 30 and have a sewing machine at home now, chances are that you're a cosplayer.