Work is a fact of modern life. Children grow up knowing that one day they will have to earn a living. As adults we divide our waking hours into work and leisure, in the rueful knowledge that we have to submit to the former if we want to enjoy the latter. For most, work takes up five-sevenths of a week and about the same fraction of each lifetime. Our work is central to our sense of self, even at times when we are doing other things. Most, when asked who or what they are, will reply by stating their paid occupation: ‘I am a teacher … a doctor … a farmer …’
The first humans did not work in the way that we understand it today. Our distant ancestors spent much of their time searching for that day’s food and shelter, a short-term and endlessly repeated process that was necessary for survival. Work today means consciously striving now in order to accrue a benefit in the future, but is not as immediately urgent as hunter-gathering. The idea of the working day is a product of civilisation, and must have arisen at the same time as agriculture around 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For most of history – well into the 20th century in Russia and China – the majority of people were peasants who subsisted by working the fields. They sowed and tilled, knowing that they would reap a crop to see them through the next winter. These people were by definition ‘at work’ in a sense that pre-civilised hunters weren’t.
So work is a consequence of a settled society – and so too is the more refined concept of a ‘job’. Once a society reaches a certain level of sophistication, it finds it has need of specialists. Skilled people such as blacksmiths, carpenters, bakers, tailors, doctors and priests needed long years of training in order to perform their roles – and could not do that if they had to spend all their time growing vegetables and tilling fields. So civilised society allowed certain skilled individuals to opt out of the business of producing food. In exchange for the specialised services they provided, they were permitted to live off some of the surplus that the rest of the community produced.
- See more at: http://www.readersdigest.com.au/history-of-work#sthash.NH5QHdL2.dpuf
Work is a fact of modern life. Children grow up knowing that one day they will have to earn a living. As adults we divide our waking hours into work and leisure, in the rueful knowledge that we have to submit to the former if we want to enjoy the latter. For most, work takes up five-sevenths of a week and about the same fraction of each lifetime. Our work is central to our sense of self, even at times when we are doing other things. Most, when asked who or what they are, will reply by stating their paid occupation: ‘I am a teacher … a doctor … a farmer …’
The first humans did not work in the way that we understand it today. Our distant ancestors spent much of their time searching for that day’s food and shelter, a short-term and endlessly repeated process that was necessary for survival. Work today means consciously striving now in order to accrue a benefit in the future, but is not as immediately urgent as hunter-gathering. The idea of the working day is a product of civilisation, and must have arisen at the same time as agriculture around 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For most of history – well into the 20th century in Russia and China – the majority of people were peasants who subsisted by working the fields. They sowed and tilled, knowing that they would reap a crop to see them through the next winter. These people were by definition ‘at work’ in a sense that pre-civilised hunters weren’t.
So work is a consequence of a settled society – and so too is the more refined concept of a ‘job’. Once a society reaches a certain level of sophistication, it finds it has need of specialists. Skilled people such as blacksmiths, carpenters, bakers, tailors, doctors and priests needed long years of training in order to perform their roles – and could not do that if they had to spend all their time growing vegetables and tilling fields. So civilised society allowed certain skilled individuals to opt out of the business of producing food. In exchange for the specialised services they provided, they were permitted to live off some of the surplus that the rest of the community produced.
- See more at: http://www.readersdigest.com.au/history-of-work#sthash.NH5QHdL2.dpuf
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