Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
So I was mega rural and my school never had more than a hundred kids, all aged from preschool to high school aged. And let me tell you that there isn’t anything little kids like more than full contact violent sport with full grown teenagers and/or adults.
There would be this game we’d play until it got banned then a few months later we’d change the name and start playing the same game until the teachers finally noticed and it was banned again.
You’d line all the kids up against the school building, mixed ages so between six and sixteen, decide on an end point, one kid would be “it” and their job was to tackle another kid to the ground while everybody else tried to run to the other side. If anybody got tacked to the ground they were then also it, and the number of people you’d have to run past would get larger and larger until every kid playing had been tackled at some point.
While you’d usually start with a high schooler being it, it was never the biggest most athletic highschool kid. Not the jock, or what we had which passed doe a jock which was just Ben. It wouldn’t be much fun if you started with the fastest and strongest kid. Nobody would stand a chance.
The first person also never goes straight for the little kids. That wouldn’t be fun either. You’d tackle a few kids your own size to the ground. A few of the brave would try to get Ben but you’d always fail.
The you gotta get the little kids. The tactic is simple. A bigger highschool kid would pick them up, flip them over, and place them (relatively) gently on their backs and the go hunt more kids.
And then comes the best part. A gaggle of tiny kids all with ceaseless determination and zero fear of man or gods would all put their tiny little bodies to the sole persuit of bringing down the largest highschool kid there was. And while Ben had no issues pushing to to the ground anyone vaguely his own age, he could not harm a small child. His only options was to be faster. And to run away. Individually their grip strength was weak and his legs were strong. One small child he would just step to the side and get away from. Two small children and he had to be a bit careful where he stepped but he was only slowed and not stopped. But eight. Nine. Ten small children. It was like watching a pack of wolves bring down a full sized elk. If in this case the elk was concerned about not hurting the wolves. It was amazing. They only had to slow him enough to get enough tiny hands on him and down he’d go. These tiny children were always the only ones who could ever succeed.
I never played but damn no spectator sport has ever been as good.
These exercises help you to save time, but still benefit from muscle mass. By performing combination exercises you are safely building mass in half the time of a normal workout. Combination exercises are also beneficial for increasing intensity and burning body fat through post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC).
yes please. this would be a great day for this to come true
When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine how ‘May you live in interesting times’ could be a curse. But now I would so love to not have a year’s worth of news happen every week. PLEASE.
Yep, because baby formula is one of the most shoplifted things in America. Which should ALSO radicalize you.
Or… We stop shoplifting? 🤔 Are we demonizing acts to stop crimes now?
ill tear your head off your shoulders you dumb fuck
I’m all for radicalization like the government and society are fucked. But they put baby formula in locked cases because it is used to make meth. The store does this to keep an eye out if someone is buying way too much. Like waaaaay too much.
This is what imperialism and capitalism and the “war on drugs” does to people’s brains. You can see that people are so desperate to feed their babies that the people who rule your lives keep baby formula under lock and key but rather than that radicalizing you and making you want to fight for a world where no baby ever goes hungry, you justify this draconian bullshit because you’ve fallen for the propaganda that baby formula is used in some nebulous relation to “drugs” and drugs are bad so whatever inhuman monstrosity that occurs must be justifiable.
Sherlock fan. You might know me from LiveJournal or Twitter as KeitanKetsueki.
Waning NCIS and Harry Potter fan. Recovering Twihard.
Feminist fighter for equal rights for all.
Aspiring screenwriter, singer; occasional writer of fanworks and dabbler in HTML and CSS.
She/her pronouns please :3
The out-of-control list of my ships Go here Bex! (Or: the best of my blog)
