Work Quotes

“The equation of taxation and theft is as old as extortion”
― James Suzman, Work: A History of How we spend our Time

“There are also many other species who, like us, seem to spend an awful lot of energy doing work that seems to serve no obvious purpose or who have evolved physical and behavioral traits that are hard to account for because they seem so ostentatiously inefficient. Traits like the tail of a male peacock.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“It is no coincidence that tension between chaos and order is a feature of the world’s mythologies. After all, science also insists that there is a universal relationship between disorder and work, one that was first revealed during the heady days of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“The archaeology of ancient Sumerian cities suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that among the most promising trades to take up for those with ambitions of climbing the social ladder was brewing and selling beer.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“In other words, how well or badly organisms cope during the toughest seasons is the primary and most brutal driver of natural selection.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“The recent rise in many countries of the toxic nationalism that the architects of the United Nations hoped would be banished after the horrors of the Second World War is a reflection of this, as is the trend to greater theological conservatism in many places, and the willingness of many to defer complicated choices back to the imagined teachings of ancient gods.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000 years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes. With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers.11 It is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate items. But the amount of”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“The vast majority of the energy-expensive tissue in our skulls is devoted to processing and organizing information. We are also almost certainly unique in terms of the amount of heat-generating work these otherwise immobile organs do, by generating electric pulses when mulling over the often trivial information our senses gather. Thus when we sleep we dream; when we are awake we constantly seek out stimulation and engagement; and when we are deprived of information we suffer.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“During the 1970s, a long-term research project on southern masked weavers was the first to suggest that there was perhaps something more to weavers building nests than feathered automata processing genetic code.7 This study revealed that in much the same way that an infant human will develop motor skills by manipulating and playing with objects, male weaver chicks will play and experiment with building materials soon after they emerge from their eggs and, through a process of trial and error, progressively master the threading, binding, and knot-making skills necessary to build nests.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“The missionary then told his congregation how after the Lord had instructed Adam and Eve to care for the Garden of Eden they were seduced by the serpent into committing mortal sin, as a result of which the Almighty “cursed the ground” and banished the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve to a life of toil in the fields. This particular Bible story made more sense to the Ju/’hoansi than many others the missionaries told them—and not just because they all knew what it meant to be tempted to sleep with people they knew they shouldn’t. In it they saw a parable of their own recent history. All the old Ju/’hoansi at Skoonheid remembered when this land was their sole domain and when they lived exclusively by hunting for wild animals and gathering wild fruits, tubers, and vegetables. They recalled that back then, like Eden, their desert environment was eternally (if temperamentally) provident and almost always gave them enough to eat on the basis of a few, often spontaneous, hours’ effort. Some now speculated that it must have been as a result of some similar mortal sin on their part that, starting in the 1920s, first a trickle then a flood of white farmers and colonial police arrived in the Kalahari with their horses, guns, water pumps, barbed wire, cattle, and strange laws, and claimed all this land for themselves.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“He reminded them that because humans were created in His image, they too were expected to toil for six days and on the seventh to rest, and offer gratitude for the uncountable blessings that the Lord had bestowed upon them.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots