..currently watching the glacial pace of the clock today in work, as with most days, and I wondered how long as a civilisation has it been that we have had to work for a living? I don’t think I’ve ever considered this question.

I know its a daft question, but who or what is responsible for us having to spend the majority of our lives toiling away mostly in utter futility until we die.

Merry Christmas by the way.

Chucking spears at mammoths was still working.

It’s just that now, the mammoths are in Waitrose Tesco, and the spear is I.T middle management or some kind of tardy tradesman.

You are working to put turkey and trimmings on the table. Years ago you would have been ‘working’ desperately trying to feed yourself and survive.

Pretty much since the industrial revolution.

Ironically, because of the way our taxation works I think most people could earn a salary of 20% less (equivalent of working 4 days a week instead of 5) and only see a 10%-15% reduction in income and could probably save that by trimming a few luxuries or just have less ‘spare’ cash.

Equally Jobs are now more flexible than ever (sadly that goes both ways).

I’m not saying everyone could do it, maybe not even the majority, but a decent amount of the workforce could cut a day a week of work and still pay the bills – 4 on, 3 off sounds an awful lot better than 5 on, 2 off – but I guess it’s not the ‘done thing’.

I’ve been promised more leisure time due to technological advance for the past 40 years.

Working in jobs you love all your life ,what’s that all about?

#followyourheart 😛

Was it Keynes that predicted reduced working hours due to increased productivity. He made the prediction in the early 20th century sometime. And productivity has indeed risen massively since then, we can make all the food and goods we need in a fraction of the time of past centuries. But it turns out we’re too greedy, so we still keep working long hours. Just cos.

Own worst enemy.

who or what is responsible for us having to spend the majority of our lives toiling away mostly in utter futility until we die

An excellent question, the short answer to which is: because rich and powerful people have taken a huge share of the world’s wealth and only give it back to us in tiny amounts in exchange for our labour, or a share of the product of it.

Studies suggest as hunter/gatherererers, we would work less hard:
http://www.greenuniversity.com/Green_Economics/wealth.htm

Interesting question.

For the life of me I can’t remember where it was but I was reading something recently about how current technology could easily support the entire race of humanity to live a life of leisure, with the exception of a small number of clerical roles.

Imagine the great art, literature and music that would get made if everyone was free to follow their dreams…

Don’t worry OP you will soon be out of work 😀
As it says in Neilthewheels link maybe we should think about living with fewer material goods.
Happiness

I love working, I enjoy what I do greatly.

Don’t see why you’d stop doing something you love.

What I do find soul destroying are the folks that hate what they do, yet carry on doing it.

But thier situation isn’t mine, and mine not theirs.

Imagine the great art, literature and music that would get made if everyone was free to follow their dreams…

Hmmmm… 😉

Imagine the great art, literature and music that would get made if everyone was free to follow their dreams…

But how would we be able to afford MOAR STUFF!!???!?

Cutting back on stuff you don’t need means you can work less. Don’t get into debt. Save up for stuff you want because by the time you’ve saved up you probably won’t want it. Make do and mend. Buy clothes from charity shops when you need to buy clothes. Don’t buy make-up or any other other shit you’re sold because you’re not ‘perfect’ enough. You really don’t need a new car that you’ll never own on PCP, or a new plastic bike on credit. Walk or ride instead of driving. Affordable housing isn’t really affordable but it is a good way to get more people into debt for a good chunk of their lives.

But pretty much this-

because rich and powerful people have taken a huge share of the world’s wealth and only give it back to us in tiny amounts in exchange for our labour, or a share of the product of it.

The problem is is that because we’re (me and my OH) not independently wealthy, the only way we can pay our way (rent, food, bills) is basically at someone else’s expense, and that sucks.

edit- look at ways you could save money in your day to day life that might allow you to drop a day or so at work. 4 on, 3 off sounds loads better than 5 on, 2 off 😉

After uni I worked full time for 3 years, landed up in a part time role (3 days a week) for about 8 years, eventually set up as a freelance consultant and went down to 1 day a week – on contractor wages that was enough for me.

Now studying an MSc in Brewing and Distlling at uni, aged 36.

HTH

currently watching the glacial pace of the clock today in work,

Lucky you, 7:30 am to 7pm goes by in a flash for me.

Don’t get into debt. Save up for stuff you want because by the time you’ve saved up you probably won’t want it. Make do and mend. Buy clothes from charity shops when you need to buy clothes. Don’t buy make-up or any other other shit you’re sold because you’re not ‘perfect’ enough. You really don’t need a new car that you’ll never own on PCP, or a new plastic bike on credit. Walk or ride instead of driving. Affordable housing isn’t really affordable but it is a good way to get more people into debt for a good chunk of their lives.

what the..? are these the rules you live by Kayla or should we take this with a pinch of salt? “Don’t buy make-up or any other other shit you’re sold because you’re not ‘perfect’ enough”

seriously?

Kidding aside, I am increasingly losing patience with my current job as it turns out, but sadly it doesn’t allow for any reduction in hours or negotiation as I understand it- it wont happen in my current situation. Plans are afoot to change this next year but we have a second child on the way so that’s about the most important consideration for me right now in terms of work life balance.

Anyways, it was just an idle silly question – some above seem to be measuring their manhood and comparing their lot to others. That wasn’t the spirit of my frivolous original post.

Pinch of salt, you can buy make-up if you like 😉 I’ve had a glass of red and this time of year brings out the militant in me 😆

edit- none of what I wrote was aimed at you directly, OP.

Pinch of salt, you can buy make-up if you like

phew. these brows don’t just happen.

😆 Sharpie?

I’ve cut back my outgoings as much as I can whilst still feeling like I live comfortably even if somewhat basic. It’s amazing how much has been freed up not spending it on all the stuff I used to but didn’t need. It will knock about 20 years or so off my working life as all the extra goes into funding an early retirement. Bizarrely I seem to have freed up a bit of extra time as well. Not entirely sure why but it feels like it has.

Don’t wish your life away and DO something about it if you aren’t happy. It’s nearly forty years since I was 18 and I’ve worked less than half of them, mainly in work I quite enjoyed and that rarely had me clock watching.

Subsistence farmers work 4-5 hours a day. The march for more has **** us all.

What I do find soul destroying are the folks that hate what they do, yet carry on doing it.

How do you cope you poor soul?

What I do find soul destroying are the folks that hate what they do, yet carry on doing it.

How do you cope you poor soul?

I feel sorry for those who love their jobs. The more you hate the job, the more you relish free time. I really don’t like my job and love the time I’m not there. Thanks shit job, you make life great!

you could camp in scotland near the coast, forage for seafood, hunt game etc, get water from streams/lochs etc.

no need for money.

go for it.

And death by hypothermia is th icing on the cake!

you could camp in scotland near the coast, forage for seafood, hunt game etc, get water from streams/lochs etc.

I’d take a guess and say you would expend more calories than you’d take in if you tried this long term and you’d eventually starve to death.

Become a binman – they only work once a week 😆

I don’t hate what I do or the company I do it for, but I do hate having to travel into London daily to do it. As a result though:

Don’t get into debt. Save up for stuff you want because by the time you’ve saved up you probably won’t want it.

I can pretty much afford what I want most months. Provided it’s not a new car. But is this worth the time I spend on a train.

2 years in come January and thinking by 3 years I’ll be back working closer to home. I want a job where I can take a dog into the office.

I often think this

Me and the wife both agree that living in the wilderness and off the land is a great ideal. If you don’t have children.

Bringing children up in isolation is not fair on the kids – as great an experience as it would be for them -social interaction forms a life skill.

Which is a shame as I’d love a cabin in northern canada 🙁

I’ve told her often she keeps me grounded or I’d probably end up like Christopher Mccandless

I only work 6 months a year. But Jesus they are a shit 6 months. Used to enjoy my job on the technical advisor side of things solving the issues and getting people out of trouble with the occasional field trip….planning life was difficult due to the ad-hoc on call nature That job was being made redundant so I jumped to the field side on a 35:35 rotation and pretty much regret it. Despite having a schedule. The menial shite and beuracracy I have to deal with here knows no end. Saving like a mother **** tanning down the mortgage so I can become a bike mechanic again…….

Tl:Dr summary…. Working sucks.

Surely people have to “work” in order for the society we see around us to exist. Think of any service you expect to exist (food conveniently on supermarket shelf, money stored safely in a bank, nice shiny bike available, fast internet so this website works, roof over head), and they all involve people having jobs.

Take it to the extreme opposite and it would be a caveman-like everyman for himself. You want a nice shiny bike? You have to extract the raw materials, fabricate etc. Just wouldn’t work and life would be vastly more limited than it is now. What we have now is simply an extreme version of medieval people swapping their skills for other things (with a bit of capitalism added in).

Saying that, it would be nice if we can work a little less…..

Oh well, I’ve just “retired” (it won’t really be like that) after, apparently 48 years of working, and now our glorious state is paying me the princely sum of just over £11,000 a year. Beats having to work for it, naturally.
The secret, of course, is to keep living long enough to take advantage of it……we can but try.

At 50 I now have a full compliment of 35 yrs NI contributions. In some respects I should be pleased but in others it’s very sad.

We (humans) have become slaves to our stuff and there must be a better way to organise ourselves. I say that as someone on a decent salary and flexible contract whos doing ok in the normal way of measuring ok.

Try reading Homo Sapiens as a easy if slightly depressing summary of the human condition.

who or what is responsible for us having to spend the majority of our lives toiling away mostly in utter futility until we die

The word capitalism is now quite commonly used to describe the social system in which we now live. It is also often assumed that it has existed, if not forever, then for most of human history. In fact, capitalism is a relatively new social system. For a brief historical account of how capitalism came into existence a couple of hundred years ago, see Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

But what exactly does ‘capitalism’ mean?

Class division
Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world. Under this system, the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc) are owned by a small minority of people. We refer to this group of people as the capitalist class. The majority of people must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary (who we refer to as the working class.)

The working class are paid to produce goods and services which are then sold for a profit. The profit is gained by the capitalist class because they can make more money selling what we have produced than we cost to buy on the labour market. In this sense, the working class are exploited by the capitalist class. The capitalists live off the profits they obtain from exploiting the working class whilst reinvesting some of their profits for the further accumulation of wealth.

This is what we mean when we say there are two classes in society. It is a claim based upon simple facts about the society we live in today. This class division is the essential feature of capitalism. It may be popular to talk (usually vaguely) about various other ‘classes’ existing such as the ‘middle class’, but it is the two classes defined here that are the key to understanding capitalism.

It may not be exactly clear which class some relatively wealthy people are in. But there is no ambiguity about the status of the vast majority of the world’s population. Members of the capitalist class certainly know who they are. And most members of the working class know that they need to work for a wage or salary in order to earn a living (or are dependent upon somebody who does, or depend on state benefits.)

The profit motive
In capitalism, the motive for producing goods and services is to sell them for a profit, not to satisfy people’s needs. The products of capitalist production have to find a buyer, of course, but this is only incidental to the main aim of making a profit, of ending up with more money than was originally invested. This is not a theory that we have thought up but a fact you can easily confirm for yourself by reading the financial press. Production is started not by what consumers are prepared to pay for to satisfy their needs but by what the capitalists calculate can be sold at a profit. Those goods may satisfy human needs but those needs will not be met if people do not have sufficient money.

The profit motive is not just the result of greed on behalf of individual capitalists. They do not have a choice about it. The need to make a profit is imposed on capitalists as a condition for not losing their investments and their position as capitalists. Competition with other capitalists forces them to reinvest as much of their profits as they can afford to keep their means and methods of production up to date.

As you will see, we hold that it is the class division and profit motive of capitalism that is at the root of most of the world’s problems today, from starvation to war, to alienation and crime. Every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the worst excesses of the drive to make profit. In capitalist society, our real needs will only ever come a poor second to the requirements of profit.

Capitalism = free market?
It is widely assumed that capitalism means a free market economy. But it is possible to have capitalism without a free market. The systems that existed in the U.S.S.R and exist in China and Cuba demonstrate this. These class-divided societies are widely called ‘socialist’. A cursory glance at what in fact existed there reveals that these countries were simply ‘state capitalist’. In supposedly ‘socialist’ Russia, for example, there still existed wage slavery, commodity production, buying, selling and exchange, with production only taking place when it was viable to do so. ‘Socialist’ Russia continued to trade according to the dictates of international capital and, like every other capitalist, state, was prepared to go to war to defend its economic interests. The role of the Soviet state became simply to act as the functionary of capital in the exploitation of wage labour, setting targets for production and largely controlling what could or could not be produced. We therefore feel justified in asserting that such countries had nothing to do with socialism as we define it. In fact, socialism as we define it could not exist in one country alone—like capitalism it must be a global system of society.

It is also possible (at least in theory) to have a free market economy that is not capitalist. Such a ‘market economy’ would involve farmers, artisans and shopkeepers each producing a particular product that they would exchange via the medium of money. There would be no profit-making and no class division—just independent producers exchanging goods for their mutual benefit. But it is doubtful whether such an economy has ever existed. The nearest that may have come to it would have been in some of the early colonial settlements in North America. Some Greens wish to see a return to this kind of economy. We do not think that it is a viable alternative for modern society. Such a system would almost inevitability lead to capital accumulation and profit making—the definitive features of capitalism.For more detailed accounts of what capitalism is, see Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital, Marx’s Value, Price and Profit, or Fredy Perlman’s The Reproduction of Daily Life.

I have a good job, pay is above average, people are all nice and work is creative, but I have started hating it… I think it’s just the feeling that I am wasting time staring a at screen.. no idea how to change this as I have no other skills

I wondered how long as a civilisation has it been that we have had to work for a living?

Forever. Ask a woman from any time in history.

P-Jay isn’t quite correct about the industrial revolution, IMO. People flocked to the cities to work in shit factories because the alternative was worse.

Re having increased leisure time – I think we do have more; AFAIK people used to work 6 days a week and only have Sundays off. But people have accepted the 5 day week, so if you offer them the chance to work 4 most will say ‘but I can work 5’ and then because they have more money this pushes up the prices that landlords and house vendors can charge, which sets the market value, so everyone ends up working 5 days anyway. But most people aren’t prepared to work 6, so it stays at 5 because that’s what’s accepted.

Perhaps we will find positives from the gig economy and flexible working, coupled with increased automation of jobs, and hours will gradually drift downwards in the future. One of the advantages of UBI, I think.

We are currently getting a couple of pensions and are re-adjusting our work-life balance.

However last week we’d planned a few outdoor jobs so when the snow and cold arrived we were in the house at a loose end.

Boy, that was grim. Although we resisted the temptation of daytime TV, we resolved never to retire.

i used to work a 4 day week (not compressed hours, 30hr week), it was great and didnt cost that much but had to go last year.

moved back to a 5 day week but do 2 days a week from home which saves me 4hrs of commuting.

now negotiating a extra 4 weeks of leave a year (unpaid) so I can take the summer holidays off every year.

Pretty much since the industrial agricultural revolution.

Fixed.