Those are true, it’s the shift to capitalism. Before excess wealth could be gained through colonization. Once that was done it became about squeezing out as much as you can from your workers. However the good businessman would have squeezed everything they could out of their workers while colonizing. (Like the US in the Middle East since WW2 or more recently Venezuela)

A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.

A phrase that I’ve found really useful in understanding this is “cultural hegemony”. This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It’s a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don’t feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I’ll attempt to give the gist of it

The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it’s natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying “that’s just life”. They can’t imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say “wow, that’s so good, you should sell those” — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.

After I hit 40 hours I’m gone. I acknowledge there is a certain amount of privlege required to do that. It took me 20 years to get to that point but Im proud of it and I wanted to brag.

Back then all you had was the clothes on your back an half a sack of grain at the store. There’s more free time if you don’t produce anything.

1. Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.

2. Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of “how much do you need for living” and “how easily could you find another job”.

What other choice is there?

Companies need to make line go up. You could increase productivity by using more tech (computers, tools, etc), but you can also do it by working longer. So the people in charge said “why not both?!” And here we are.

I feel like some of it also is “work until you’re done” still. Hourly jobs pay per hour. But salary jobs typically pay you for work accomplishments, not time. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of tech improvements and processes have oversold their productivity improvements… example: AI will make you go code 10x as fast! So managers hear that (typically upper management, not middle/lower management who actually see it) and thus expect people to instantly do 10x the work. So you now have to bust your ass off working longer hours to meet that expectation. Good middle management will push back and reset expectations, but often the damage is done when they can half their work force with the assumption that they’re going to be so much more productive now that this new magical tool is in place.

We “live to work” because our corporate overlords demand that we be productive for production’s sake.

Regarding work before industrialization, it’s more complicated than that. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, so a lot of people, especially enslaved Africans, were literally worked to the death and received severe physical punishment if they didn’t work properly. For free people, they didn’t have to do the amount of work we do in order to afford food safety, though “worker rights” didn’t exist for them, either. Abusive boss? Shut up and fuck off. Stolen pay? Too bad.

One of the biggest differences, however, is that people tended to socialize a lot more, and having friends to watch your back when things get hard is one of the best survival mechanisms. Out of food? Good thing my neighbor is willing to spare some of his while I fix some boards on his home. Maybe he’s not asking for anything in return this time because he feels like this is paying back for a favor I did 3 months ago.

Interesting fact: the first indigenous tribes that the Spanish enslaved once they started colonizing Central America were completely unprepared to the European work brutality forced upon them and would often kill themselves if being captured for slave labor was inevitable. Before that, they had never needed to work so hard to sustain themselves.

Because we have always worked to live, living isn’t easy or cheap, but there’s also no reason to make it any harder than it has to be, well except to keep those with more in power. The farm was literally 24hrs of work. When you went home, which was still on the farm, was because you couldn’t see anymore because the sun went down or because you were too tired to keep going. Summer break from school was created so that kids and teachers could work the farms during summer.

No matter what your boss says, you are only required to work the hours that you’re contractually obligated to work. Your boss and peers might not like you very much and maybe resent you for it, but that’s your call to make. When you start a job you are signing a contract, it can be as simple as a single sentence or a full on novel. You and they are only required to fulfill the minimum requirements of the contract.

There’s more time off today and 8hr work days because of unions and farm life sucks, it’s straightforward and simple but it still sucks. Before unions there were no paid holidays, only the rich got time off.

Seems like someone is feeding you propaganda and glorifying the bad old days. It’s not great now but it beats what it was 100 years ago, which is not that far away.

Because we’re Germans, not Italians

It’s not like that everywhere in the world, but certainly heading in that direction

I would suspect entropy. Second Law of Thermodynamics states that total disorder is always increasing over time.

Because people stopped standing up for themselves.

Many societies need a massive overhaul. I have no doubt that the younger generations will create new ways of living that will systematically transform the ‘9 to 5’ drudgery. AI will merely be an asset in all communities, not a director of times to come.

The more productive we have become the greater the opportunity cost of not working has become.

People generally tend to choose to work the same hours to afford more stuff.