Why do we live to work rather than work to live?

Capitalism

The concept of 9-5, 5 days a week is exclusively from Unions and organized labour.

As are the ideas of workers rights, any kind of safety regulation, minimum wages, paid days off(holidays and vacation).

These ideas are going away because we forgot that Unions are critical to the idea of a middle class.

Farms had a lot more work than just 9-5. Labor unions fought very hard, and many paid with their lives, to get work hours restricted to 9-5.

Companies need to make line go up. You could increase productivity by using more tech (computers, tools, etc), but you can also do it by working longer. So the people in charge said "why not both?!" And here we are.

I feel like some of it also is "work until you're done" still. Hourly jobs pay per hour. But salary jobs typically pay you for work accomplishments, not time. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of tech improvements and processes have oversold their productivity improvements... example: AI will make you go code 10x as fast! So managers hear that (typically upper management, not middle/lower management who actually see it) and thus expect people to instantly do 10x the work. So you now have to bust your ass off working longer hours to meet that expectation. Good middle management will push back and reset expectations, but often the damage is done when they can half their work force with the assumption that they're going to be so much more productive now that this new magical tool is in place.

Compared to pre-WW2 era, the work week and day has decreased from 12 hours/day, 6 days per week, thanks to the more militant labor movement.

In more recent decades, productivity has increased significantly, so we should be able to produce the same amount as before, with less labor: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

But I'll let you guess who is cashing in the extra profit from your work. Tip: it's not you.

Subsistence farming is a lot of work. Apart from that, the wealthy have always acquired their wealth by theft, usually from the less wealthy. So we've always been living to work, because the ruling class needs us to steal from.

Because the people who own everything aren't being slaughtered in the streets.

We "live to work" because our corporate overlords demand that we be productive for production's sake.

Regarding work before industrialization, it's more complicated than that. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, so a lot of people, especially enslaved Africans, were literally worked to the death and received severe physical punishment if they didn't work properly. For free people, they didn't have to do the amount of work we do in order to afford food safety, though "worker rights" didn't exist for them, either. Abusive boss? Shut up and fuck off. Stolen pay? Too bad.

One of the biggest differences, however, is that people tended to socialize a lot more, and having friends to watch your back when things get hard is one of the best survival mechanisms. Out of food? Good thing my neighbor is willing to spare some of his while I fix some boards on his home. Maybe he's not asking for anything in return this time because he feels like this is paying back for a favor I did 3 months ago.

Interesting fact: the first indigenous tribes that the Spanish enslaved once they started colonizing Central America were completely unprepared to the European work brutality forced upon them and would often kill themselves if being captured for slave labor was inevitable. Before that, they had never needed to work so hard to sustain themselves.

A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.

A phrase that I've found really useful in understanding this is "cultural hegemony". This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It's a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don't feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I'll attempt to give the gist of it

The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it's natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying "that's just life". They can't imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say "wow, that's so good, you should sell those" — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.

Man, I get where you're coming from, it all seems endless and stupid.

I was just thinking about this the other day in fact, but then imagined what life was like as a hunter gatherer. The search never stops for food, there is rarely an abundance, and nothing to keep that abundance from rotting away when you have it.

Every creation we've ever made is to simplify our lives and/or to protect them. Building those things increase abundance and leisure time for awhile, but then the birth rate goes up and we need to build more. Building better communication (to simplify our lives) meant that more people from farther away need stuff, so we need to increase production, so more workers are required. It's a feedback loop.

Some world events pause or reverse this loop for awhile, but it never stops. If you want these things that help around the house so you don't have to do them, that costs money, so you work.

I've seen stories of people who just move out to the woods for decades, but though they are 'independent' from the man, they're still struggling day to day and often end up stealing stuff that others bought so they can get by, or relying on common taxpayer services when things go awry.

I think it's simply a part of the universe. I learned once that life isn't the opposite of entropy, it's a small opposing force that itself decays. Something something rage against the dying of the light. Anyway, /rantoff

I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work).

Yup. In the ancient world, ascetics and monks would practice "having daily schedules" alongside various other harsh forms of penitence, like self-flagellation. One of the ancient Greek authors (Plato?) spoke about it unfavourably even in that context.

The flip side of that, is that if your animals or crops need something now, they need it now. There's no maximum hours or work-life balance, either. Still, it's fair to say most people that have experienced that much prefer it, if you put aside how uncomfortable the work itself is.

Because it's kind of crazy, it's also worth mentioning that people slept twice in a day, with some time spent up during the night.

There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true?

Kind of.

Confining ourselves to Europe, there were a lot of public holidays in ancient Rome, and to a lesser extent lots of religious days and festivals in medieval Europe. The medieval holy days were more about fasting or similar than time off of work, though. And, in Rome, there were no weekends yet, so holidays basically served the same role.

Plus, most holidays were optional in both, so a deeply poor person or a slave with a tough master might work fairly continuously.

If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?

When industialisation came in, 12 hour days were fairly standard. Arguably, working hours have gone down.

As to why we work on schedules now, you basically just have to in a complex, highly specialised society. If you're using tools you made and maybe a couple your friend the blacksmith made, and using them to produce food and housing from "your own" land, sure, it just all has to get done sometime. If you're having a formal meeting or vote and show up 2 days late, like is recorded becoming a problem in medieval republics, it's a bit disruptive.

Being self employed helps. My workday doesn't end at set time - it ends when I'm done. Sometimes that's 10am, sometimes 7pm. Then if I feel like I've worked too much and could use a vacation I just don't schedule any work for the rest of the week/next few weeks.

Now don't get me wrong, I do work a lot but it doesn't feel like work really because I have total control of everything I do and I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. What also helps is that I manipulate the physical world - not bits on a computer. When I'm done I can see what I've built and on top of all that I get genuine gratitude for it. Lots of it actually - people are awesome.

Yeah, but the trade off was that you were bound to the land and social hierarchy was much more rigidly enforced. Your pay was mostly in food and accommodations unless you were in a trade, nobility, or the clergy.

Why do people work more? Because in an industrial setting, the methods of compensation and employer responsibilities are vastly different. Employers are incentivized to treat labor as any other good and will try to lower that cost where possible. In contrast, if you're a form of bondage, your employer is more likely to treat you like capital.

Because our entire world and every system in it was designed not for us, but for the sole benefit of like 100-1000 people.

We work so that they can live.

The question is what do we do about it?

Because we have always worked to live, living isn't easy or cheap, but there's also no reason to make it any harder than it has to be, well except to keep those with more in power. The farm was literally 24hrs of work. When you went home, which was still on the farm, was because you couldn't see anymore because the sun went down or because you were too tired to keep going. Summer break from school was created so that kids and teachers could work the farms during summer.

No matter what your boss says, you are only required to work the hours that you're contractually obligated to work. Your boss and peers might not like you very much and maybe resent you for it, but that's your call to make. When you start a job you are signing a contract, it can be as simple as a single sentence or a full on novel. You and they are only required to fulfill the minimum requirements of the contract.

There's more time off today and 8hr work days because of unions and farm life sucks, it's straightforward and simple but it still sucks. Before unions there were no paid holidays, only the rich got time off.

Seems like someone is feeding you propaganda and glorifying the bad old days. It's not great now but it beats what it was 100 years ago, which is not that far away.

own only what is available to a farmer from the past (a piece of land and a couple of barns), desire only what is available to a farmer from the past (a hearty dinner and strong tobacco, not a new iPhone), and then you can live like a farmer from the past today.

Because we’re Germans, not Italians

Because production is increasingly socialized while appropriation is increasingly private. This is the law of capitalist expansion.

Back then all you had was the clothes on your back an half a sack of grain at the store. There's more free time if you don't produce anything.

I don't know about you, but for me, work is the side-quest.

No, its not true.

The question you are asking ins a personality thing. Most folks work to live.

It's just the ones who are really loud are the workaholics.

I would suspect entropy. Second Law of Thermodynamics states that total disorder is always increasing over time.

Not quite sure what you're taking about. The number of vacation days has been increasing over the last few decades while work hours have gone down. At least in most developed countries. Hell, even having the weekend off has only been around for a hundred years or so. I sure as shit wouldn't want to go back to work on some medieval farm ...

1. Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.

2. Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of "how much do you need for living" and "how easily could you find another job".

Because we allow things to be this way.

Because people stopped standing up for themselves.

After I hit 40 hours I'm gone. I acknowledge there is a certain amount of privlege required to do that. It took me 20 years to get to that point but Im proud of it and I wanted to brag.

I work to live and everyone I know does. No one controls their work gig outside of finding it.

I work 8 to 15. All the afternoon for me, with about 30 vacation days a year. Once I ticket out I can completely forgot about work. You need stronger unions.

Those are true, it's the shift to capitalism. Before excess wealth could be gained through colonization. Once that was done it became about squeezing out as much as you can from your workers. However the good businessman would have squeezed everything they could out of their workers while colonizing. (Like the US in the Middle East since WW2 or more recently Venezuela)

It’s not like that everywhere in the world, but certainly heading in that direction

The more productive we have become the greater the opportunity cost of not working has become.

People generally tend to choose to work the same hours to afford more stuff.

speak for yourself

We? Sucks to be you but that doesn't apply everywhere.

Money.

I'm so glad I work at a place where there are no late night calls, no overtime, and no time tracking. It's all about the results you bring to the table while you're working.

What other choice is there?

Sir David Attenborough has some answers

Many societies need a massive overhaul. I have no doubt that the younger generations will create new ways of living that will systematically transform the '9 to 5' drudgery. AI will merely be an asset in all communities, not a director of times to come.