Do We Need to Work?

But it is the points where these two pathways converge that are most important in terms of making sense of our contemporary relationship with work. The first of these points of convergence comes when humans mastered fire possibly as long as a million years ago. In learning how to outsource some of their energy needs to flames, they acquired the gif... See more

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

As if to rub it in, some anthropologists tell us that thousands of years ago people had much more time available to them than their hunting, gathering and child-rearing required. Three or four hours of work a day paid the bills, so they had a lot of downtime. Then came agriculture, and eventually industrialization, and somehow these helpful develop... See more

Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more