So many people today claim to be "soooo busy"...TOO busy, even. Could you imagine the reaction they'd get from our forefathers if they were to complain about how "busy" they were to these historic people?
Oh, you did 3 loads of laundry today? Well, I wash my clothes in a freezing creek BY HAND. But do go on...I'd LOVE to hear more....Oh, you're too busy to cook? Hmmm, I seem to find time, and I have to shoot it and skin it myself too.
How insulting!! We're not busy.
Oh, you did 3 loads of laundry today? Well, I wash my clothes in a freezing creek BY HAND. But do go on...I'd LOVE to hear more....Oh, you're too busy to cook? Hmmm, I seem to find time, and I have to shoot it and skin it myself too.
How insulting!! We're not busy.
But my point is that you're self-righteously criticising other people's life choices. Disagreeing with you does not mean I have missed your point.
Was it this whole bit:
"Oh, you did 3 loads of laundry today? Well, I wash my clothes in a freezing creek BY HAND. But do go on...I'd LOVE to hear more....Oh, you're too busy to cook? Hmmm, I seem to find time, and I have to shoot it and skin it myself too."
Well, that was not ME talking, that was an illustration of a person today talking to a historic person. I wasn't saying I do my laundry in a creek!! Notice I also never excluded myself from guilt here. I said "we're" not busy.
The point of the post was that people today complain about tasks we have to do that are SO simple now compared to even just 75 years ago. Laundry, cooking, being 2 huge examples. People today claim they don't have time to cook a meal, but look what making a meal entailed 100 years ago. Catch it, gut it, grow it yourself, build a fucking fire, cook it....EVERY DAY. That, on top of everything else you had to get done in a day-just to stay alive.
I think you just read it too quick and assumed you got the point, but didn't. Slow down.
I still disagree a little. We have more responsibilities to other people than they did back then. If you've got a job you're responsible to your employer to make deadlines, and your colleagues, and to society to pay your taxes. You might have to do less nowadays for yourself and your family, but you've got to do more for other people. In the end, you can't really compare two different eras because you can't have lived in both of them. Although I do understand what you're getting at now.
Also, the person from the past still sounds a little bit self-righteous to me. Even if the person isn't you :P
Did you really just answer this post with an example centered on a week's vacation? lol....
Those correspondences just sum UP if you're gone. But they still come in regardless of wether you do regular work, too.
So yeah, the intensity of the workload is quite a bit higher than that of pre-industrialization. Note that i refer to the intensity, not to the "hardships" of hard physical labor.
There's many more things wanting our attention and most of us have to do a lot of mental and social work, too, not merely pure physical labor(which has the advantage of not being a part of your life any longer at the end of your shift).
I know where you're coming from, but you fail to see that there's also a lot more "expectations" today than back then.
There's a pressure on us to shave our legs, wear SOME makeup, have hair that looks "nice" and clean, clothes that combine with each other and are perfectly clean, etc. etc.
If you go wash yourself once a week in the creek, and take your clothes with you every other week, and not care about body hair since you're only nude when it's dark, you will be seen rather...reserved by modern people. Back then: Normal, little time and it had to be distributed in an efficient way. Yeah, today, we have more "free time" but still a LOT of chores, work, or expectations permeating it and eating up huge chunks of it.
People back then still had time to go to church, play instruments, tell stories, celebrate, carve things, read books, travel, ...
It's not like they had OUR kind of freedom in deciding what to do WHEN, but yeah, we are almost as busy on the whole picture as they were.
Also, since you referred to washing and cooking: Back then, traditionally woman's chores...which were not to "work" in mans jobs. Most women were full-time-wifes and cared about the household. So yeah, you are mixing up stuff there.
I have to work a regular job AND care about my household, and there's no mum or grandmother or children to do chores while i'm off earning the rent.
I know it seems churlish to say it but work can arrive for me on a Sunday, while I'm asleep, on a week off, on Christmas Day even. Although I don't need to do it right then and there, I do still have to do it. I am never truly off duty.
I have to manage it myself and at any one time have upwards of a hundred jobs that need constant reassessment and reprioritising based on a complication matrix of interrelated (and opposing) criteria.
While I'd feel wasted if I was just beating horseshoes all day, it would be significantly less complicated.
But hey, if your 'forefathers' were alive today... It would be today wouldn't it? So that argument doesn't really work. They'd all be using mobile phones, driving in cars, playing World of Warcraft and trolling IIN.
And seeing as how you have eluded to your lifestyle, I must assume that you are in the same position as the lower class at that time, having to spend your time doing such chores and not having the time to attain an education, for if you did, you would know this of our founding fathers and would not use their names to condemn others for this purpose. In terms of having spare time, they were MASTERS, and they spent their spare time doing what they did.
Unless you are poverty stricken, you choose to spend your time rejecting the modern conveniences that modern people enjoy. That doesn't make you any busier than people who use their time to utilize modern conveniences so that they will have time to do things that they deem to be more important.