In recent years, a significant amount of reporting and commentary seems to indicate a growing dissatisfaction with our current work-life model.
For example, prior to the pandemic, America was witnessing an increasing number of highly educated young professionals leaving office life to return to the land, developing and managing small-scale farms as a more autonomous and purposeful approach to work.
During the pandemic, terms such as the “Great Resignation”, the “Great Reshuffling”, and “Quiet Quitting” illustrated a deluge of workers seeking to take advantage of the disruption to the classic “nine to five”, forty-hour work week for something that felt more healthy, meaningful and empowering, or to pursue pet projects on the side while doing the bare minimum in their primary, salaried role.
And for the past ten to twenty years, both pre- and post-pandemic, we’ve watched a steady increase of young professionals rejecting the traditional “work-retire-die” life model of Western culture and instead living simply, saving smartly, and retiring early, all while adopting freely chosen, leisurely pursuits through the “FIRE” movement.
Companies all across America are attempting – and failing – to bring workers back to the office, while entrepreneurship, gig economies, self-employment, remote work, and artisanship/craftsmanship are on the rise.
What exactly is happening?
Though it may feel like we are taking some sort of progressive leap into the future, perhaps we are actually taking a few steps back, back to a place and time in which work was just one of the many aspects of our lives which blended seamlessly with the others, not the clocked, salaried, regimented, hallowed, and untouchable priority of life it has become.
This “place and time” was before the 19th century Market Revolution in America, before industrialization snatched our traditional reverence for freedom from labor and instead replaced it with a desire for freedom of labor. After the Market Revolution, the progress of civilization would no longer rest on the leisure of the educated to contemplate and philosophize life’s meaning. The epitome of freedom would no longer manifest itself in the ability to use leisure rightly. Labor in all its forms was now expected, required, and glorified, whereas leisure and idleness were now considered disreputable.
If you, your friends, or your family now devote the majority of your life on earth to work – getting ready for work, going to and from work, working for specific amounts of time, recovering from work, and then doing it all over again, day after day, year after year – you should give full credit to the Market Revolution.
“We are free, but not free enough. We want the liberty of living.”
-Peter Rödel, immigrant shoemaker
The first half of the 19th century, known as the Market Revolution, witnessed a confluence of innovation and technology like few other eras in American history.
In rapid succession, transportation and communication creations such as the steamboat, canal, railroad, and telegraph transformed our entire economy. The steamboat, for example, allowed for upstream transportation on American waterways, as well as navigation across large lakes and eventually oceans. The canal, such as the 363-mile Erie Canal across upstate New York, allowed for the affordable and efficient transportation of goods between existing waterways, such as the Great Lakes and Hudson River, for a fraction of existing costs. Railroads opened vast new interior areas to settlement and trade, whereas the telegraph allowed for the near instantaneous communication of inventory, shipping timelines and price.
Within a matter of years, the disconnected, agrarian, self-sufficient, homesteading American society, one in which small family farms and local craftsmen produced things mostly for themselves and their neighbors, was suddenly transformed into an interconnected national marketplace in which Americans could now produce things for sale to others, most of whom lived far away with prices determined by competition with other producers.
Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen sensed opportunity in this expanding marketplace and soon began devising methods to increase production while reducing labor costs. Soon after, innovations such as the workshop, factory and mill were born.
While these developments were influential in and of themselves, it was arguably their second- and third-order effects which fundamentally altered the nature of work in America, and our relationship with work as individual Americans.
For example, by gathering workers in one place outside of their homes, we physically separated work from the rest of our lives with the creation of the commute. To organize and expedite the movements of large groups of employees in these new shared workspaces, we introduced and became dependent upon clocks, bells and whistles to direct, unify and standardize one’s work hours. And to replace the concept of one’s “price”, or what an artisan, craftsman or farmer would previously earn in exchange for the quality of their work or products, we created the wage to compensate workers for increasingly standardized, extended blocks of their time, regardless of the quantity or quality of their contribution to the now subdivided production process.
While these changes may not seem significant within our modern work-life context, to a 19th century American, they were quite dramatic. In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself predicted that this dependency – on clocks, wages, factories, and employers rather than oneself – was inherently unfree, and an arrangement that was entirely unfit for the future of America.
Though many workers agreed, and modifications were made as a result of unionization and protest, we ultimately adopted this work-life model and never really looked back. At least not until now.
This entire model – eight-hour work days, timed lunch breaks, five-day work weeks, two-day weekends, and long commutes to and from shared work spaces – was not an American “way” begun upon settlement, nor a human lifestyle somehow ordained from above, but was the result of a revolutionary confluence of technology and innovation nearly two hundred years ago.
Like many revolutions, the Market Revolution was more of a process than an actual event. And like the “process” of boiling a frog, we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into until it was too late.
Where we work
Prior to the Market Revolution, Americans used to work from home. This wasn’t “remote” work, though, in the way it is today, as there was no centralized, common working location from which employees were at a distance. Work was something you simply incorporated into your daily routine for yourself and your family.
Farmers worked on their farms and ranchers on their ranches. Artisans worked in their workshops and shop owners in their shops, with living spaces often co-located at or very near these places of work. And small-scale production of clothes and other basic goods was done in homes, mostly by women.
In the early 1800’s, however, everything changed. Business opportunities created by the expanding national market incentivized entrepreneurial Americans to increase production, reduce labor costs, and achieve “scale” beyond the confines of one’s shop or home by co-locating employees into shared workspaces under one roof.
Creating the factory, one of the first truly centralized work spaces in American history, altered the role and meaning of work in American society from something that was done at or very close to home – at one’s own pace, independently and autonomously, often in the company of family and friends, with work and leisure organically mixed into the workspace and workday – into something that was now completely separate, standardized, supervised, and compulsory. This physical and mental separation was cemented by the advent of the “commute” to shared workspaces and factories located farther and farther away from one’s home, neighborhood, village or town.
From purely economic perspective, the pre-industrial model was certainly not the most efficient use of one’s time, nor the most efficient method to generate a profit.
Yet from the perspective of satisfaction and happiness, this movement placed our autonomous daily routine under the supervision of an employer, fundamentally altering our relationship with work into the foreseeable future.
It is no surprise, then, that workers with the ability to work from home or remotely are reluctant to return to a compulsory, supervised work environment. The opportunity to return to a modern version of our pre-industrial roots appears to be more valuable than most employers anticipated.
When we work
Work and leisure also used to be more indistinguishable. Prior to the 19th century, our work and daily routine was not tied to machines and clocks and other man-made, artificial organizing functions. Work and leisure blended seamlessly with the rising and setting of the sun and the lengthening and shortening of the days through the seasons. The “nine to five” was not a concept anyone would have understood.
For example, on farms, the natural ebb and flow of dawn and dusk, soil and seasons, and weather and water regulated our work time. Spring planting and fall harvest might require early mornings and long days, whereas cold winters with fallow fields allowed time for rest, recuperation and leisure.
And when urban occupations were co-located in the towns or villages in which they resided – prior to the advent of the commute – life and work co-existed naturally without artificial, time-based barriers to separate the two. When the shoe-maker had shoes to make or repair, he did so. When he didn’t, he had ale to drink, cards to play, and neighbors to greet in the street. Time, as we understand it now, had nothing to do with this arrangement.[1]
In 19th century centralized workshops and factories, however, “merchant capitalists” and “industrialists” began relying on the clock, along with bells and whistles and other time-based regulatory mechanisms, to organize and expedite the movements and tasks of large groups of employees. We began purchasing, carrying, and utilizing timepieces – which ironically were one of the first products to benefit from the new, factory-based American system of manufacturing – to track our days in increasingly detailed increments, inventing previously unspoken phrases like “come here this second” or “a quarter past ten” to tie our actions increasingly to the clock. We even sub-divided our growing continent into time-zones to manage the trans-continental railroad, a concept no other society had previously imagined.
While historians agree that the American Revolution largely succeeded in rejecting life under the “tyranny of man”, it was arguably the Market and Industrial Revolutions which placed us under the “tyranny of an idol.” By gearing machines to other machines, men to machines and other men, and both men and machines to the clock, we created a self-imposed “synchronization and inflexibility of schedule from which we never really looked back.”[2]
We seem to envy “free professionals” or “traditional” cultures spared from industrial influences for exactly this reason. Their time is not clocked off like those of us knowingly (and unknowingly) trapped in the 40-hour work week, and they don’t seek mindless, passive and digital consumption after the “work day” to recharge and recuperate for the next round of clocked, compulsory labor.
In fact, in many modern societies spared from industrialization altogether, such as those found in remote mountain valleys of Europe, it “could be said that they work sixteen hours a day each day, but then it could also be argued that they never work”, as their work and leisure is much more harmoniously integrated.[3] In other words, if given the choice to do anything, most would choose to do the “work” they do each day, as it is for the most part freely chosen and enjoyable.[4]
When we read about flexibility becoming the fastest-rising job priority in the U.S., more than half of Americans wanting their next job to be self-employed, or millennials seeking “net freedom” over “net worth” in the form of increased leisure and vacation time, we are really seeing a desire to return to our pre-industrial, pre-clocked existence.
As Sebastien de Grazia notes in Of Time, Work, and Leisure, “it is one thing to work to your own time, another to work to someone else’s time, and yet another to work to clock time,” and our current and future workforce seems to be taking note.[5]
Why we work
From settlement until as late at 1815, we worked primarily for ourselves through a system of self-sufficient handicraft, producing on our farms or in our homes most of what we consumed, used, or wore.[6] In fact, this was the exact reason many left the Old World and took such a large risk on creating a life in the new one. Rather than working for someone else, or being dependent on someone to scrape by a living, those relocating to the North America were seeking the freedom and independence that came with the ownership of productive property.
For those who succeeded and survived, the movement made sense. The New World offered access to property more widely distributed than anywhere else in Europe, a practical outlet for the public revulsion to economic dependence, and a genuine opportunity to live autonomously. As John Smith, recently arrived in Jamestown, once noted on America, “every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land.”[7]
Outside of what we produced for ourselves, pre-industrial artisans and farmers worked for their “price”, which linked what they earned to the quality of what they produced. There was a direct, tangible relationship between their craft, effort, and skill and their compensation, a relationship in which time, hours, and a “boss” played no role. These forms of livelihood embodied the Jeffersonian ideal of producers who “owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living,” which to him and others was the core of republicanism and true liberty.[8]
Unfortunately, the American economy did not develop and expand with this ideal in mind. In the market and industrial revolution factory, we were now paid a wage which corresponded with the number of increasingly extended, standardized and uninterrupted hourly blocks we worked, regardless of how much we produced, or the quality of said production. Wages were also controlled by the profits, losses, and desires of our employers, which in turn were influenced by the “invisible hand” of the new marketplace. Skilled craftsmen found themselves selling their time spent laboring instead of the products of their labor. We no longer worked for ourselves – we worked for someone else.
Given our current attachment to salaried, wage labor as an acceptable component of American society, this may not seem like a pivotal event. But to 19th century Americans, “wage labor was a form of dependency that seemed to contradict the republican principles on which the country had been founded.”[9] It robbed us of our independence and liberty and to many was no better than slave labor, with employer bosses no better than slave owners, giving rise to the term “wage slavery”.
It also pivoted the role and meaning of work away from something we did for the survival and comfort of ourselves and our families, something we took true ownership of and felt the direct, tangible benefits and value of in our everyday life, to something we did for sale to others in an increasingly distant “market” and for the benefit of our employer and “boss.”
There is, therefore, significant precedence to the modern desire for purpose and autonomy at work, for “quiet quitting”, self-employment and the gig economy which resembles the pre-19th century concept of working for one’s “price” – it just took the pandemic and the many workplace freedoms it unleashed for these ideas to return.
How we work
Prior to the Market Revolution, factories, and the desire for the “mass production of interchangeable parts”, artisans and craftsmen played an influential role in American society, producing all of the necessary goods for their villages, towns and neighborhoods. These skilled workers lived creative, autonomous lives which embodied the economic independence that had come to define the American version of freedom in this era.
For example, a shoemaker controlled every aspect of his product, from the creation and shaping of the leather from animal skins, to the arrangement of the sole, to the finishing and alignment of laces. In this regard, the shoemaker was a true artisan and craftsman, one who’s work required extensive skill, judgment, focus, and experience, and who’s product was his own and a trademark of his individual craft.
This sort of work, like many others in the pre-industrial period, was conducive to the “cognitive flow” experience which modern psychologists now link to “optimal experience” and overall happiness. It required clear goals and focused concentration, provided immediate feedback, allowed for individual autonomy and control, and offered a chance of completion. This sort of work also allowed workers to experience an “altered sense of time”, in which minutes seem like hours, or hours seem like minutes.[10]
The advent of water and steam power as well as the factory as a centralized, organizing work institution fundamentally shifted this arrangement. Complex crafts were no longer produced by independent artisans and merchants in quiet, customized workshops with hand-made tools, but were instead produced at scale in large, humming factories with power-driven machinery. Creative processes unique to individual craftsman were now broken down into minute, monotonous and repeatable steps, which could then be replicated and assigned to employees with far less skill, experience and training, and who required much less pay.
Even worse, these once autonomous craftsmen now found themselves under the constant supervision of employers and managers in new, shared workshops, facing relentless pressure for greater output within detailed work schedules.
While these new arrangements resulted in an economic expansion like no other period in modern history, for the individual American, it was accompanied by a complete debasement of our skills and a loss of control and independence in how we pursued our work. There are few things as depressing as unskilled work under compulsion, yet this exact labor arrangement is what industrialization offered most Americans.
Eventually, we unionized, negotiated, and allowed a basic agreement – 40-hour work weeks, 8-hour work days, 2-day weekends, timed lunch breaks – to exist and remain central to most of our lives for several generations. Yet clearly the pandemic finally granted many of us the opportunity to re-examine this previously untouchable aspect of our lives, one that for many just didn’t feel right.
In 1879, Ira Steward published A Second Declaration of Independence as a call for a standard, 8-hour work day. In 1932, Bertrand Russell wrote In Praise of Idleness to outline his case for the 4-hour work day and the benefits to society it would provide. More recently, we’ve heard the argument for as little as four hours of work per week, and how to make it work.
If the nature of work – and the tools we use to pursue it – have clearly changed, why has our approach to work remained stagnant for nearly two hundred years?
How we leisure
Lastly, though the market and industrial revolutions clearly impacted our time spent at work, one might argue the most significant impact was actually on our time away from it.
Prior to the 19th century, unoccupied time was simply a normal part of the day, week, season and year. For example, anthropologists argue that for more than 95% of human history, people enjoyed more leisure time than we do now, such as generations of hunter-gatherers subsisting on 15-hour “workweeks”.
When our world was not driven by machines, but by the natural order of things– when our days began and ended with the rising and setting of the sun, and our work lengthened, shortened, and disappeared altogether with the ebb and flow of the seasons – farmers, artisans and shopkeepers alike experienced work and leisure as natural shifts in their life without the need of terms like work and leisure to describe what they were doing. Unoccupied or “spare” time would simply appear now and then, sometimes as a surprise, “but as a surprise that one could expect occasionally without knowing just when it would come.”[11]
In many parts of the world, this dynamic still exists. One study, led by a team of Italian psychologists in the high Alpine villages of Europe, concluded that in many “traditional” communities spared by the Industrial Revolution, residents can hardly distinguish work from free time.
When asked to describe their work, their most cherished leisure activities, and what they’d do if they had all the time and money in the world, their answers were nearly identical for all three categories: milking the cows, cooking breakfast, moving the herd to the meadows, baling the hay, tending the orchard, carding the wool, playing music at night. In other words, their daily mixture of manual labor, complex chores, and skillful crafts may appear to an outsider as sixteen hours of “work”, yet to the residents, it is simply life, and an incredibly enjoyable one.
While many of the tasks are essential to daily life, others are freely chosen and engaged in for their own sake, or would be pursued and completed voluntarily if not bound by household or village necessity.
This arrangement – a state of being “free of everyday necessity”, a condition in which one is free from the necessity to labor, or in which one has access to a plethora of challenging, engaging, yet enjoyable daily activities one would voluntarily engage in for their own sake – is the true definition of leisure, and something we’ve lost in industrialized nations.
As described by one 74-year old member of the study: “I am free, free in my work, because I do whatever I want. If I don’t do something today I will do it tomorrow. I don’t have a boss, I am the boss of my own life. I have kept my freedom and fought for my freedom.”[12]
In contrast, the salaried or wage-earning industrial and post-industrial worker is assigned a compulsory eight hours of work for at least five days in a row, often in a static, indoor location under the supervision of a manager or many managers and with very little opportunity to incorporate challenging, personal hobbies or projects pursued for their own sake into their day. After these eight hours, not including the commute, the post-industrial worker is allotted several hours of “free time”.
Yet this time can hardly be considered free.
First, “free time”, by its very definition, implies a “negative” sense of freedom, or freedom from something, in our case mandatory, salaried or wage-providing work. Positive freedom, on the other hand – what is available to the residents of the high Alpine villages of Europe, for example – is the freedom to do or be, most often achieved when freed from the compulsion to work 40-60 hours a week. It is the homogenized state of work and leisure which existed prior to the industrial efficiencies of the 19th century and the advertised, material desires of the 20th, allowing one to seamlessly intermingle required tasks with activities or pursuits which are freely chosen, or completed for their own sake, rather than simply focusing on paid, compulsory work in order to fund advertised, material possessions and an increasingly expensive cost of living.
Second, the phrase “free time” is inherently opposed to the tenets of true leisure. Leisure, by its very definition, implies a condition or a state of being “free from necessity”, one on which time has no bearing. Free time, on the other hand, is in reality free “clocked” time, and clocked time cannot be truly free. When our “free time” activities must always be measured and quantified in relation to our eventual and mandatory return to clocked work (the dominant obligation), we can only break away in fragments – fragments of the day, fragments of the weekend, and so on.
To truly pursue new hobbies or skills or crafts, to “go off into something new and different,” becomes nearly impossible, as we must again report to the clock at a precise hour before any true momentum can be achieved. This might help explain why many Americans, when taking advantage of the limited vacation we provide ourselves, sometimes attempt to “get away from it all” in regions and countries with a “vaguer” sense of time than our own, or consider a good break to be one in which you forget the time of day, or day of the week.[13]
Third, modern work with compulsory hours, workdays, and machines is different than pre-industrial work in that it not only consumes more of our “work” time, but the nature of said work now also seeps into our time away from the job. For example, while one could argue that machinery brought the blessing of lighter labor, one could also argue that it actually brought the burden of increased focus and attentiveness over longer and more fixed periods of time.[14] After eight compulsory hours with a machine – such as modern computers – “a man’s fatigue is different from that after the same amount of work in a non-industrial age,” or a non-industrial society. Just compare three hours of gardening, or carpentry, to three hours of email, or budget analysis on a spreadsheet.
As a result, the nature of these eight hours produces a different kind of fatigue in comparison to the work of a non-industrial age or environment. This, on top of the advent of the commute to centralized workspaces and the increased connectivity between one’s workplace and home, imposes a need for a different form of rest and recuperation. Most Americans, after a standard eight-hour work day, now prefer the passive, mindless pleasures of the modern world and the “low-level” attention they require, such as television, video games and social media, over the more active, challenging, freely chosen pastimes of our pre-industrial lives, such as making music or craft. Our free time, in reality, has become simply the time permitted by our work schedule to recover from what our reaction to work increasingly creates, such as exhaustion, stress, or anxiety.
So what, then, are we to do to return to a more healthy, balanced, pre-industrial relationship with our work?
Luckily, as a result of the pandemic, there are many already answering that question:
- Remote work and working from home, for those industries which are capable of doing so, is already well-documented and on the rise, countering generations of commuting and traffic as an accepted part of our work and life experience.
- 4-day workweeks and compensation packages allowing salaried employees to trade money for time are increasingly common.
- The gig economy, self-employment, and entrepreneurship are rising, while devotion to “traditional”, salaried career paths are increasingly avoided.
- The surge in knowledge worker industries and related job applications, often leading to a lack of purpose and autonomy in the workplace, is now being countered by interest in vocational training, craft, and the manual trades.
- The “Financial Independence, Retire Early”, or FIRE movement, is on the rise, with increasing numbers of young professionals rejecting the “traditional” retirement age of 60, and instead committed to a lower cost of living in exchange for a higher value from life.
These trends, and others, indicate a fleeting yet powerful opportunity to challenge a work-life model we’ve accepted without question for nearly two hundred years. They illustrate that perhaps it is time to treat the American work ethic not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieve a condition of life in which it is no longer needed, or at least not needed as much. And they indicate that perhaps we can begin, again, to structure our work around our lives, rather than our lives entirely around our work, and explore which freedoms we value most.
- Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure. ↑
- Ibd ↑
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 145 ↑
- Ibd, 145 ↑
- Sebasian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure, 302 ↑
- James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 13 ↑
- Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom ↑
- James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom ↑
- Idb, 23 ↑
- Flow. Pg. 49. ↑
- Of Time, Work and Leisure 189 ↑
- Flow, pg. 147. ↑
- Of Time, Work and Leisure, 311 ↑
- Of Time, Work and Leisure 55 ↑