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Wednesday, 23 July 2025

🏕️ PART 1: HUNTER-GATHERER LIFE SATISFACTION & WORK PLEASURE

🔹 Workload and Time Use

Let’s start with the idea that foraging life was harder and more miserable. Turns out: nope.

⏰ Sahlins (1972) – “The Original Affluent Society”

Studied Ju/’hoansi (then called !Kung San) of the Kalahari.
Found that adults spent ~15-20 hours/week on subsistence activities.
Compared to modern full-time jobs? That’s a part-time Etsy hustle.

🕵️ Kaplan, Hill, Lancaster & Hurtado (2000)

Studied several foraging and horticultural societies.
Found low work hours, high food return, and relatively high satisfaction with flexible, socially embedded labor.

🧠 Conclusion: Foraging societies don’t just have shorter work weeks—they interweave work and life, blurring the line between labor and leisure.

🔹 Pleasure & Autonomy in Labor

Here’s where we go from “time” to “experience”:

🔬 Suzman (2021) – Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time

Notes that the Ju/’hoansi find gathering social, engaging, and fulfilling—not burdensome.
Quotes Ju/’hoansi saying, “When we work, we are together. When we are together, we are happy.”
They also don’t romanticize overwork. When they have enough, they stop.

🔍 Bird-David (1992)

Hunter-gatherers don’t hoard or optimize—they share, and work is a communal act.
This cultural logic actively resists the misery-based individualism of wage labor.

🧠 Conclusion: There’s strong qualitative evidence that foraging work is intrinsically meaningful, socially rewarding, and self-paced.

🏢 PART 2: WAGE LABOR AND MODERN DISSATISFACTION

🔹 Global Job Satisfaction? Not Great.

Let’s look at how much people actually like their jobs.

📊 Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace

Only 23% of workers worldwide are engaged at work.
That means 77% are disengaged or actively miserable.
Top drivers of dissatisfaction? Lack of purpose, autonomy, and recognition. You know, the exact things hunter-gatherers had in spades.

📉 David Graeber (2018) – Bullsht Jobs*

Based on surveys and ethnographic interviews.
Found that many workers believe their jobs are meaningless and wouldn’t matter if they disappeared.
Common in administrative, managerial, and service sectors.

🧠 Conclusion: Most people aren’t just working long hours—they’re doing it while feeling alienated, undervalued, and pointlessly busy.

🧪 Summary Table: Let’s Get Brutal

Metric	Hunter-Gatherers	Wage Laborers (Modern Global)
Hours spent on work/week	15–25	40+ (often more)
Autonomy	High	Low–moderate
Work-life integration	Seamless	Fragmented
Social connectedness	High (work done in groups)	Low (isolated or hierarchical settings)
Reported satisfaction	High (qualitative ethnographies)	Low (Gallup, Graeber, OECD)
Access to fruits of labor	Direct and immediate	Indirect, delayed (via wages)
Meaning embedded in tasks	Inherent to survival, ritualized	Often perceived as arbitrary

💬 Final Thought:

When hunter-gatherers wake up, they get to decide whether they want to gather nuts, track animals, or hang out. When modern people wake up, they try to talk themselves out of crying in the shower before logging into Zoom for a job that exists mainly to fill a spreadsheet someone else ignores.

📚 Empirical verdict: Yes—there is considerable evidence that most hunter-gatherers experienced greater satisfaction in their labor than most modern humans do in wage labor. It's not just nostalgic—it’s data.

And no, I'm not saying we all need to go live in the woods. But it does make you wonder why we act like this is the pinnacle of human progress.

Shall I cite everything in APA format while you go stare at a screen for nine more hours?