The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive. What improvements were made were developed to keep starvation at bay. If you gave a medieval peasant modern farming equipment, they’d be jazzed about how little time they’d have to spend plowing and milling and threshing and harvesting and how much more time they could spend getting piss drunk with their family and friends.
A babylonian farmer didn’t “just want to work.” They wanted to live, and that meant they spent their life in back-breaking labour in the fields.
The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive.
Yes, the majority of people who ever lived, but for most of the time we’ve existed we didn’t need to do much labor at all. The reason it’s the most people who ever lived is because the agricultural revolution trapped us into having to grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food.
I don’t see how you could see my original claim of
“Humans are laboring creatures”
Respond to it with
“Humans need to labor in order to make food to survive”
And still come from a place of disagreement.
Never did I claim “people work just to work”. We don’t see people spending every waking hour outside making mud pies. We don’t see people spending entire days moving 100-ton blocks from one side of town to the other just for the hell of it.
If you didn’t work you died of starvation.
The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive. What improvements were made were developed to keep starvation at bay. If you gave a medieval peasant modern farming equipment, they’d be jazzed about how little time they’d have to spend plowing and milling and threshing and harvesting and how much more time they could spend getting piss drunk with their family and friends.
A babylonian farmer didn’t “just want to work.” They wanted to live, and that meant they spent their life in back-breaking labour in the fields.
Yes, the majority of people who ever lived, but for most of the time we’ve existed we didn’t need to do much labor at all. The reason it’s the most people who ever lived is because the agricultural revolution trapped us into having to grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food.
I don’t see how you could see my original claim of
“Humans are laboring creatures”
Respond to it with
“Humans need to labor in order to make food to survive”
And still come from a place of disagreement.
Never did I claim “people work just to work”. We don’t see people spending every waking hour outside making mud pies. We don’t see people spending entire days moving 100-ton blocks from one side of town to the other just for the hell of it.
If people liked to work we wouldn’t invent labor-saving devices
If people didn’t like to work, we wouldn’t have began down the perpetual path of putting effort into meticulously engineering labor-saving devices.
If we liked to work we’d prefer to do everything by hand than use a something that saves our labor.