Working Like Our Primitive Ancestors
December 28, 2006
It is generally believed that we live in an age of unprecedented leisure. And if you look back over a 100-year time span, there is ample evidence that things are indeed getting easier. In the 1800s, people spent about 50 percent of their lifetimes working. But today, according to Jesse Ausubel, director off the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, most of us devote only about 20 percent of our lifetimes to work.
These numbers are measurements of the total time we work out of the total time we are alive. They include the times when we don't work at all (infancy and infirmity) as well as the times when we are expected to work less (childhood and seniority).
If you look at mankind from a long-term perspective, working 50 percent of the time is an extreme anomaly. Most of the time, people work much less than that. In fact, throughout most of the hunter-gathering epoch, they worked only about 25 hours a week.
"Our primitive ancestors weren't so primitive," Ausubel says. "They were pretty efficient" at working - and if trends continue as they have been, we may one day enjoy the same amount of leisure they had.
One thing that is helping is the advent of the Internet and the computer, which are allowing people more flexibility in where they work, when they work, and how long they work.
Our ancestors worked till the job was done, and then they stopped and rested. Later on, when they needed to acquire/achieve something else, they worked again. This is becoming increasingly more possible with today's technology.
Freelance marketers, copywriters, and graphic-design professionals can already enjoy that kind of control over their schedules.
I've got to think about this. There is an appealing theme here: that the natural work week is not 50 or 60 hours but just 25, and the natural work schedule is not 8:00 to 4:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 but working and resting intermittently throughout the day.
I can understand how that could become more and more the norm. And I can see how it would make for a higher quality of life.
posted by M. Masterson @ 8:34 PM,
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