Questioning the Concept of Work.

It seems to me that the human animal has gone through three phases in his approach to work.

First we were hunter/gatherers, in which there was no concept of ‘work’ as we understand the term today. There was activity, but it was little more than hunting and foraging as necessary to get food, and the making of clothes and fires to keep warm.

And then we started farming and things had to be organised, so the modern concept of work was born. But still the basic axiom was that you worked when it was light, and rested when it was dark. And along with farming came the occupations that serviced the new system – the blacksmiths, the metal smiths and the millers. They worked organically, too, according to supply and need, as did the other people who made things to sell purely for the sake of making an income.

But then along came the Industrial Revolution – very recently in the overall scale of things – and the age of technology and the factory system was born. So then we tied work to the clock. That was the big, big change. We even invented the ‘work ethic’ to justify our newly regimented labours. It suited the entrepreneurs very well, since it made the generation of wealth more regular and assured. And the Church, by then a close bedfellow of the secular Establishment, encouraged the notion.

And that’s the stage I’ve never been at all happy with.