I remember reading an article based on a paper that tried to replicate small-scale hunter-gatherer "week". It turned out that "work" was less than 20h per week.
As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).
>As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days.
When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.
Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.
Very good point. I would also add and I believe that is why we have insurance for almost any and everything nowadays as well. Society/industry/capitalism (all these larger systems than ourselves) are mostly all really just a safety net with long term survival and procreation in mind.
That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.
The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.
I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.
This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.
So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.
And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.
And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...
> it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_
It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?
For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.
Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.
But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.
There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.
As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days. The rest of the week was for maintenance and leisure (so it's not like five days of staring at the sky; it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_).
That's anyways what I remember.