The average medieval serf worked way less than we do

 

 suzukyさんがリツイート

precisely. I mean, compare the job of a forex trader or a financial analyst with that of the nurse in the ICU. What is the pay difference? In fact, all this reminds me of that classic by the late Graeber https://t.co/OokH62nveu

— Carlos Oya (@estariade) February 12, 2021

 David Graeber

I’m an anthropologist, and I can tell you there are plenty of societies where people work three or four hours a day. Most peasant societies worked that. You’d work 12 hours a day during harvest time and in the off-season you’d work two or three hours. The average medieval serf worked way less than we do, and the same is true of tribal societies around the world.

現代人が中世の農奴や世界の部族社会の人々より労働時間が ずっと長いというのは・・・・なんだかなあだよな。

Mr Graeber: 

But the overwhelming majority reported themselves to be utterly miserable. They reported depression, anxiety, psychosomatic illnesses that would magically disappear the moment they were given what they considered real work; awful sadomasochistic workplace dynamics.

My own conclusion was that psychologically, it’s not exactly that people want to work, it’s more that people want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference to other people. In a way, that’s what being human is all about. Take it away from them, they start to fall apart. So it’s not exactly drudgery.

As Dostoevsky said somewhere: if you want to totally destroy a prisoner psychologically, just make them dig a hole and fill it in again, over and over, all day long - and in some gulags, they actually tried that out as a form of torture and he was right, it worked. It drove people completely crazy. I think people can put up with even boring work if they know there’s a good reason to be doing it.

無意味な労働を強いられると人は気が狂ってしまう。人は労働のために労働しているんじゃなくて、世界や人々に貢献しているんだ、と感じるために労働しているんだ、と。