Waterfall thoughts: Where did we take the wrong turn?

This morning I was watching a little waterfall in a stream. Listening to it's sound I realized, this waterfall is working all day and all night. 24/7, 365 days a year. It never takes a break. It never weakens, it just runs. Almost as if it found its purpose, it's favorite thing to do and now it is happy doing it.

I then thought of the cows we saw in the mountains. They live their day, traveling, eating, relaxing. They of course also play but it's part of their day they don't take a weekend in which they don't travel or go looking for food. They don't take vacation. They live their lives traveling, eating and playing and sleeping in between.

I then thought of a fellow predator. A lion. They hunt, they eat, they sleep. They travel to find prey, the hunt they eat they sleep. Day in day out. We also once had a life like that. As omnivores, we hunted, we gathered, we ate, we relaxed. We played, we fought, we prepared for hunts and on and on. Every day until we one day had a bad day and didn’t make it home. I once read that back in those days the average human worked 3 hours a day. Their work was of course directly linked to surviving and eating. Which is probably why our brains treat us with happy chemicals when we go out into nature, hiking, when we exercise, when we play.

These days organizing food works differently. We work 8 hours, 5 days a week (if you are lucky). Instead, of hunting we earn money and then use it to buy groceries. We work 8 hours for 5 days so we can use the rest of the time to exercise, to go out, to spend time with other humans in order to get our Dopamine. The work we do is not linked to our old life’s anymore, so we need to spend our spare time like in our old lives to get the Dopamine necessary for us to go on.

But somehow it feels like we took a wrong turn somewhere. We used to work for 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and lived happily.

Now we work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and it seems like people barely survive. Some swim in riches not needing to work while most fight for their survival with the little they get for working. Why and when did working get so inefficient? Is it agricultural that is inefficient? Did we trade safety for spare time & happiness? Is it my old nemesis capitalism, a few traded their 3 hours a day for no hours, and all others need to work those hours as there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done such that all humans can survive? Is it the price of progress? We trade spare time now for potential leisure time in the future. There will be a technical solution that will make us all have leisure time. Although if we look at history, our economy doesn’t work like that. Everytime someone came up with an invention that cuts the necessary work to produce a good in half the time we just start to produce double the amount and encourage people to consume more.

I don’t know what to take from this train of thought yet. But I thought I’d share it anyway. I hope you are having a good week and that your work is worth the time you spend there.

Cheers,

Kevin