A lot of good stuff in
this article from the Atlantic, reviewing James Suzman's book
Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots:
Several months ago, I got into a long discussion with a colleague about the origins of the “Sunday scaries,” the flood of anxiety that many of us feel as the weekend is winding down and the workweek approaches. He said that the culprit was clear, and pointed to late-stage capitalism’s corrosive blend of performance stress and job insecurity. But capitalism also exists Monday through Saturday, so why should Sunday be so uniquely anxiety-inducing?
According the book, time-use studies which track how people spend their day find that the happiest ones never feel either rushed or bored. They have enough meaningful activity to stay busy but not so much that it's overwhelming. Both overwork and boredom are destructive to happiness, and the worst case is both at once: feeling that you
should be doing something, anything, but not having anything meaningful to do.
The hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist today, living the way our pre-technological ancestors did, seem to get this balance exactly right. They spend a few hours a day finding food or doing other necessary tasks, but they have plenty of downtime to rest, make music, tell stories and play games. Also, they don't fixate on the future. When they have enough, they stop working. They trust that their environment will provide.
They also don't compete with each other the way we do, and in fact, they try to shut down any suggestion that one member of the tribe might be better or more valuable than another. This was a very amusing paragraph:
When a Ju/’hoan hunter returned with a big kill, the tribe perceived a danger that he might think his prowess elevated him above others. “We can’t accept this,” one tribesman said. “So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” This practice became known among researchers as “insulting the hunter’s meat.”
It was not the only custom that aimed to discourage a destabilizing competition for status and avoid a concentration of power. The tribe also “insisted that the actual owner of the meat, the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal,” Suzman writes. By rewarding the semi-random contributor of the arrow, the Ju/’hoansi kept their most talented hunters in check, in order to defend the group’s egalitarianism. A welcome result was that “the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted and the lazy got a chance to be the centre of attention once in a while.”
Of course, competition and forethought are necessary to build a technologically advanced society like ours, but you can have too much of a good thing. When you plan for the future to the degree that it consumes the present, or when you make it your life's mission to outdo everyone else at all costs, you end up overstressed, overscheduled, anxious, and unable to enjoy life. A good lesson to learn!
