Leisure Is the Rule, Work Is the Exception

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is one of those books that demands constant pauses for underlining and (in my case) exclamation points in the margins. Authors David Graeber and David Wengrow have written what feels like a therapeutic unlearning of many of the assumptions Americans are taught about human history, and especially the history of the peoples of North America. Get ready for lots of takes on this book.

There are so many lessons to draw from their work - I have bolded some surprising ideas below - but one provocative thread is around our assumption about how much work our ancestors performed.

“Abundance” is not an absolute measure. It refers to a situation where one has easy access to everything one feels one needs to live a happy and comfortable life…The fact that many hunter-gatherers, and even horticulturalists, only seem to have spent somewhere between two and four hours a day doing anything that could be construed as “work” was itself proof of how easy their needs were to satisfy.  

Graeber and Wengrow review time allocation studies of Indigenous people who still rely on foraging, as well as what we can extract from the archaeological record: “Foragers could easily feed everyone in their group and still have three to five days per week left for engaging in such extremely human activities as gossiping, arguing, playing games, dancing or travelling for pleasure.”

By more recent standards, our current work patterns are still horrifying. The eight-hour workday, one of the crowning achievements of the American labor movement, enshrined “the right to a daily work regime that the average medieval baron would have considered unreasonable to expect of his serfs.” (The underlying research was done by Juliet B. Schor, whom I mentioned in my previous post.)

An optimistic thread of The Dawn of Everything is the high level of agency and choice that humans have exerted over their social and political arrangements throughout history. Shockingly, to me, this sometimes resulted in societies rejecting what we often think of a linear progression from foraging to agriculture to industry to knowledge work (a linear progression that the book thoroughly exposes and destroys). At any rate, as it relates to what we would now call work-life balance: “Foragers…were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should…What some prehistorians had assumed to be technical ignorance was really a self-conscious social decision: such foragers had ‘rejected the Neolithic [Agricultural] Revolution in order to keep their leisure.’”  

One of the book’s framing questions is why humans the world over have become stuck in a neoliberal scheme that satisfies the few at the expense of the many. Why do we work so much? What work is needed?

In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes accurately projected the increases in productivity that we have seen over the intervening decades, but drew the wrong conclusion. Productivity, he thought, would logically lead to a 15-hour workweek and more intentional leisure activities. Instead, “bullshit jobs” have taken over the economy. What work can we do in the new year to ensure that everyone can experience not wealth, but abundance?