alt Hacker NewsI think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
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x-complexity • today at 2:05 AM
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"Free time" for a medieval peasant is a very misleading statistic, because it's only counting the amount of time that the peasants worked for their feudal lord - which was about as high as it could be, because of the amount of work that the peasants would have to do beyond that. Without modern technology, they had to gather firewood (I did this on the weekend and it's hard enough with chainsaws, a 4WD ute, a hydraulic log splitter - would take forever with an axe and mule cart), tend their own crops and livestock, mend and hand-wash their own clothes, work on their houses etc, which is all counted as time off work even though the peasant would die if they didn't do it.