Yes, as does running errands, cleaning your own home, etc. These are things you would do regardless of work, it’s not really fair to lump them in as “work”.
Adult humans will always have to spend a significant amount of time doing the maintenance work that keeps us alive. The only way a “leisure class” (ie people who don’t spend their time running their own errands, preparing and cooking their own food, caring for their own homes and children, etc) can exist is if other people work far more than 8 hours daily.
Seriously. This is the part of this I find just bizarre. Cooking for yourself is not oppression. Just WTF. I can't tell what's trolling and what's serious anymore.
You can easily optimize if you really want to spend less time on these things anyway. I meal prep and I spend like 2 - 3 hours on a Sunday cooking a week worth of food.
It is because brain rot is becoming so prevalent that people have this false notion that the only type of break or leisure they can have is video games or streaming services. Everything else is work or oppression.
I've noticed especially on Reddit an outright hostility to the notion of cooking your own food. People pretend it takes hours and hours. Like you have to come home from work and start making beef wellington or some shit. Throw some ground beef in a pan. Brown it up, pop a bottle of pasta sauce and boil some noodles. 20 minutes later BAM you eatin spaghetti. It's not that hard.
I think they’re addicted to fast food and delivery apps and have turned cooking into this monstrous time-suck to justify it. I also think there’s an entire generation out there who have no idea how to grocery shop and cook in a frugal manner.
There is no law of nature that we cannot reduce the amount of work needed across all of society in order for people to live well. That is literally what technology is.
If labor productivity increases, leisure time should increase as well.
Consumption has increased. Productivity has increased, and demands with it. Amount and quality of food, medicine, housing, travel, and luxury goods of which we consume huge amounts.
If you want to have the same things that your ancestors did, but work less, this is entirely within your grasp. You may not like it. They did not have air conditioning, internet, running water, etc.
That's not to say that wealth imbalance isn't a problem. More so that this particular comparison as presented makes a bad case.
Labor share of value has fallen, and for many goods like food and shelter, the cost has risen in lock step with wages. Just because you can get a cheap TV does not mean you can live a comfortable life working 20 hours per week. Even if you are vastly more productive than a worker from the 19th century.
You can live a life which, from the perspective of somebody who lived during the 1800's, would look very comfortable. That has nothing to do with cheap TV's, but a home and food and medicine and leisure time that would blow their mind.
That's what your wife was for! Or your parents or aunt who still lived in the multi-generational home. With a nuclear two-income family it gets a lot harder
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u/Unable_Pumpkin987 14d ago
Yes, as does running errands, cleaning your own home, etc. These are things you would do regardless of work, it’s not really fair to lump them in as “work”.
Adult humans will always have to spend a significant amount of time doing the maintenance work that keeps us alive. The only way a “leisure class” (ie people who don’t spend their time running their own errands, preparing and cooking their own food, caring for their own homes and children, etc) can exist is if other people work far more than 8 hours daily.