> When did laundry and cooking and doing work at home cease to be a social function and instead move into the sphere of "work"?
Do you realize that you're basically implying that housewifes were chilling at home while their husbands were doing the real work? Home work has always been real work, but us men didn't really feel it before we had to do more of it due to gender equality.
housework is indeed real work, real labor. But post-industrialized societies have worked to strip joy from all chores. The idea of of a housewife is a good example of this — A woman alone in a house cooking for another person, cleaning a vast amount of things that endlessly collect dirt. So long as we don't reach the singularity there will be chores to do, mouths to feed and things to clean. Is it easier to spend all our waking hours devising "technologies" to "simplify" life or is it easier to re-evaluate what a simple life is and embrace that labor is a part of life.
Definitively devising technologies. I don't envy my great-grandparents lives in their pre-industrialized society. The idea that chores were generally a joyful activity sounds like rose-colored glasses to me. And the idea of the housewife is much, much older than industrialization.
And, now, we've traded that for an economic reality where having one person stay at home to mind the house/family/etc. is simply economically infeasible without significant compromises for most families (and one-income families, by extension, are pushed to make those compromises without option).
Don't confuse the two issues here – the ability to let one person stay home, in a traditional 2-parent household was a great thing. Expecting that to always be done and always be a woman was terrible and sexist.
But, now, are we really saying the "liberated housewives" are any more free? They're even more constrained by the need to earn a paycheck so that their families can remain at the same level as their parents or grandparents were able to achieve on one income. Yes, they're on closer (but not equal) footing with men, but I don't think I'd really say we've increased the freedom of anyone here.
Things that I am forced to do, I do not consider "free time", although for some reason anti-technologists like to consider at-home labor to be "free time", so they can make it look like pre-industrialization people had less work than we do today.
That said, with every passing year there is measurably less stuff that I have to waste time doing, mostly thanks to the power of the internet.
The question I'm trying to raise is why we consider all the little things necessary for living to be a "waste of time."
There's a sad irony in the image of first world citizen who can't waste time cooking so they consume large amounts highly processed ready-made food from places like trader joe's and sits down to watch Game of Thrones for three hours and browse pinterest.
>There's a sad irony in the image of first world citizen who can't waste time cooking so they consume large amounts highly processed ready-made food from places like trader joe's and sits down to watch Game of Thrones for three hours and browse pinterest.
Alternatively, I don't waste time cooking and instead spend that time eating with friends at a restaurant and not having anyone burdened by the cleanup afterwards (well except for the staff paid to do so).
strictly speaking, the only thing that's necessary is for me to have food in my stomach. A lot of people enjoy cooking (and I have the luxury of being able to do so with close friends sometimes), but there's little point in romanticizing me heating some water and pouring in pasta in a bowl when I'm by myself. As others have said, a lot of people don't have the luxury of being able to make i.e. cooking and cleaning a social activity.
Beyond the whole socio-economic "guy/gal working 2 jobs" thing (Why do we think working 2 full-time jobs solely to survive is OK?!) , there's even the "person who doesn't really have many friends at the moment". I know some people who find themselves in such situations after moving to a different country for example.
As for things like cleaning, I think the meta-solution to that is to live in a small place and not own many things. Gives me more time to watch game of thrones (or browse HN ;))
I'll ask you a simple question - Do you have to work to eat and have a shelter? Well technologically we are advanced enough to feed 10 billion people and provide free shelter to everyone on earth. The amount India's prime minister spend on his campaign could educate every Indian child for free!
Due to a broken governance model that the world uses, we have poverty; technology is already advanced enough that most of us don't even need a job. Humanity is producing enough for everyone's need (but not greed, like gandhi said) but we haven't a fair distribution. Getting a job is our way of distribution of wealth.
Some argue that the washing machine was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution[1], because it freed up the time traditionally spent by half the worlds population to do more productive tasks, such as learn to read.
Female literacy levels is a good leading indicator of social and economic development[2].
Doing laundry and cooking is life maintainance, it isn't life. I'd rather spend more time driving a car than lubing and fixing it, and I'd rather spend more time doing shit that I want to do than doing annoying stuff that is just necessary to keep me going.
The research and development of VR headsets requires a vast system of consumption from the mines required for precious metals to the logistics systems required for transporting components to refining petroleum products used in the manufacturing of these products.
It is precisely the post-industrialized culture of consumption, and economy of progress that is robbing individuals of our free time.
When did laundry and cooking and doing work at home cease to be a social function and instead move into the sphere of "work"?
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society