Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
This has been the root of a few arguments in my house. I support increased efficiency to enable more free time. My wife supports increased efficiency so she can get more done.
Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
This has been the root of a few arguments in my house. I support increased efficiency to enable more free time. My wife supports increased efficiency so she can get more done.