Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

Instead construction of it began around 11,600 years ago, more than a millennium earlier than the appearance of domesticated cereals or animal bones in the archaeological record.19

Göbekli Tepe will always cling to its deepest secrets. But at least its importance in the history of our species’ relationship with work is clear. For beyond being a monument to the first experiments with agriculture, it is the first evidence anywhere of people securing sufficient surplus energy to work over many consecutive generations to achieve a grand vision unrelated to the immediate challenge of securing more energy, and one that was intended to endure long beyond the lives of its builders.

Indeed, it would take several thousand years before any farming populations anywhere had the energy, resources, or inclination to devote much time to building grand monuments to either themselves or their gods.

This is firstly because foragers tended to live well within the natural limits imposed by their environments rather than skate perpetually on its dangerous verges, and secondly because where subsistence farmers typically relied on one or two staple crops, foragers in even the bleakest environments relied on dozens of different food sources and so were usually able to adjust their diets to align with an ecosystem’s own dynamic responses to changing conditions.

zoonotic pathogens (those passed on by animals) account for nearly 60 percent of all human diseases and three-quarters of all emerging diseases.

Even despite these challenges, farming was ultimately much more productive than foraging, and populations almost always recovered within a few generations, so sowing the seeds for a future collapse, amplifying their anxieties about scarcity, and encouraging their expansion into new space.

The majority of land under cultivation across the globe is used for the purposes of growing a limited number of high-energy-yielding crops.

It is also because when viewed through a contemporary lens his argument does a remarkable job of upsetting people across the political spectrum. Malthus’s insistence that there are clear limits to growth upsets those who support unbridled free markets and perpetual growth, and chimes favorably with those who are concerned about sustainability. But his insistence that the majority of people will always be poor because inequality and suffering are part of God’s divine plan pleases some religious conservatives, yet gravely offends many on the secular left.

Foragers focused almost all of their attention on the present or immediate future. They went foraging and hunting when they were hungry, and moved camps when water points dried up or when food resources within easy walking distance needed time to recover. They only thought of the distant future when trying to imagine how a child might be when they were an adult, what aches they might expect when they were old, or who among a group of peers would live the longest.

change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

Foragers, by contrast, did not distinguish between nature and culture, or between the wild and the tame. At least not in the same straightforward way that farming peoples and those of us who live in cities do now.

By investing labor into their land to produce the “necessaries of life,” farmers saw their relationships with their environments in far more transactional terms than foragers ever did.

Where foragers’ provident environments shared unconditionally with them and they, in turn, shared with others, farmers saw themselves as exchanging their labor with the environment for the promise of future food. In a sense, they considered the work they did to make land productive to mean that the land owed them a harvest and in effect was in their debt.

the first entitled human beings

Even so, it is increasingly hard for them to ignore the now overwhelming evidence that while money may be used principally as “store of value” and a medium of exchange, its origins do not lie in barter, but rather in the credit and debt arrangements that arose between farmers—who were, in effect, waiting for their land to pay them for the labor they invested in it and the people who depended on their surpluses.

foragers with immediate-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of the relationship they had with the environments that shared food with them, and farmers with their delayed-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of their relationship with the land that demanded work from them.

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Humans, though, have evolved the ability to be selective in deploying the empathy that underwrites our social natures.

For the four centuries between 200 BC and AD 200, it is thought that between a quarter and a third of the population of Rome and greater Italy were slaves.

In much the same way that some scientists speculate that entropy meant that the appearance of life on earth was almost inevitable, so history suggests that the creation of cities and towns wherever people became sufficiently productive food producers was inevitable too.

It was because in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar experiences, with the result that in cities people’s individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed.

For as long as people have congregated in cities, their ambitions have been molded by a different kind of scarcity from that which shapes those of subsistence farmers, a form of scarcity articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy, and desire rather than of absolute need. And for most, this kind of relative scarcity is the spur to work long hours, to climb the social ladder, and to keep up with the Joneses.

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in distinguishing between absolute and relative needs, he recognized the importance of social context and status in shaping people’s desires. In this respect, he was thinking more like social anthropologists who unlike economists are interested in understanding why in some contexts, such as cities, diamonds are more valuable than water,

The rapid expansion of the northern towns and cities that were to become the epicenter of Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century was not solely to meet the labor demands of new mills, foundries, mines, and factories. Nor was it the result of hordes of optimistic country folk moving into the cities with ambitions of either making or marrying into a fortune. Rather it was catalyzed by substantial and rapid improvements in agricultural productivity that were made possible by technological advances.

It also marked the beginning of many people viewing the work they did exclusively as a means to purchase more stuff, so closing the loop of production and consumption that now sustains so much of our contemporary economy. Indeed, for much of the following 200 years, labor movements and later trade unions would focus almost all of their resources on securing better pay for their members and more free time to spend it in, rather than trying to make their jobs interesting or fulfilling.

He contrasted this with life in modern urban societies, where people performed many, often very different roles and so developed very different perspectives of the world, and insisted that this not only made it harder to bind people together but also induced a potentially fatal and always debilitating social disease that he dubbed “anomie.”

But most were clear: they wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly upgraded consumer products coming on to the market during America’s affluent postwar era.10

His animosity was toward those he believed were manipulating people’s aspirations, exploiting their anxieties about status, and exalting their “relative needs.”

For Galbraith, advertising served another counterintuitive purpose beyond keeping the cycle of production and consumption rolling. He thought it made people worry less about inequality because, as long as they were able to purchase new consumer products once in a while, they felt that they were upwardly mobile and so closing the gap between themselves and others.

Cf metaverse

To future historians, the “war for talent” may appear to be one of the most elaborate corporate conspiracies of all time.

Indeed, like urban elites through history who justified their elevated status relative to others in terms of their noble blood, their heroism, or their proximity to the gods, these “masters of the universe” were convinced they were where they were because of merit.

For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.

But what makes the individual stories of karoshi and karo jisatsu different from these is the fact that what drove the likes of Miwa Sado to lose or take their lives was not the risk of hardship or poverty but their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.

Many people are now accustomed to life in big cities with mass-transit systems that allow us to move from one side of town to the other far quicker than Romans ever could. Many are now also accustomed to having a device at their fingertips that allows them to form dynamic, active communities regardless of geography. Even so, most modern city dwellers still tend to embed themselves into surprisingly small and often diffuse social networks, which become their individual communities.

But it is hard to account for the massive increase in service-sector professions as a response to actual deep need, or even the efforts of advertisers and influencers to persuade us of their importance.

In much the same way that masked weavers and bowerbirds use their surplus energy to build elaborate and often unnecessary structures, so humans, when gifted sustained energy surpluses, have always directed that energy into something purposeful.

the emergence of many ancient service-sector professions was simply a result of the fact that wherever and whenever there has been a large, sustained energy surplus, people (and other organisms) have found creative ways to put it to work. In the human case, this involved the development of a myriad of remarkable and very different skills, the learning and execution of which often brings us great satisfaction. This is why cities have always been crucibles of artistry, intrigue, curiosity, and discovery.

Alternatively, he may conclude that his optimism was unfounded and that our desire to keep solving the economic problem was so strong that even if our basic needs were met, we would continue to create often pointless emplacements that would nevertheless structure our lives and provide purposeful moneymakers with the opportunity to outdo their neighbors.

But it also reveals that when change is forced upon us we are astonishingly versatile. We are able to quickly adapt to new, often very different ways of doing and thinking about things and in a short time become as habituated to them as we were to those that preceded them.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.