Work

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs. Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it. To an ancient forager, hunting an elk is work, but to many First World hunters it is an exhilarating and often very expensive leisure activity; to a commercial artist, drawing is work, but to millions of amateur artists it is a relaxing pleasure; and to a lobbyist, cultivating relationships with movers and shakers is work, but for most of the rest of us making friends is a joy. The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety— there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity. More than this, necessity often merges so imperceptibly with desire that it can be impossible to separate them. Thus some will insist that a breakfast of a croissant served alongside good coffee is a necessity while for others it is a luxury.

Abandoning the idea that the economic problem is the eternal condition of the human race does more than extend the definition of work beyond how we make a living. It provides us with a new lens through which to view our deep historical relationship with work from the very beginnings of life through to our busy present. It also raises a series of new questions. Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

The second crucial point of convergence was far more recent, and arguably far more transformative. It began some 12,000 years ago when some of our ancestors began to routinely store food and experiment with cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with each other, with scarcity, and with work. Exploring this point of convergence also reveals how much of the formal economic architecture around which we organize our working lives today had its origins in farming and how intimately our ideas about equality and status are bound into our attitudes to work.

Over and above the fact that “work” described exactly what steam engines were designed to do, the French word for work, travail, has a poetic quality that is absent in many other languages. It connotes not just effort but also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate—the lower classes—that had labored for so long under the yoke of wigged aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur. And in linking the potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labor, he invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land.

Before Schrödinger delivered his Dublin lectures, which were published a year later in the form of a short book called What Is Life?, biology was an orphan among the natural sciences. Up until then, most scientists were content to accept that life operated according to its own strange and distinctive rules. Schrödinger, however, was of the view that biology should be adopted as a fully fledged member of the scientific family.

Unlike almost everything else in the universe, which seemed to tend toward increasing disorder, life insolently gathered matter together and then organized it very precisely into astonishingly complex structures that gathered free energy and reproduced.

Nest-building-and-destroying weaver birds may seem unusually profligate with energy. But they are by no means the only species besides us inclined to spend energy on apparently pointless work. The avian kingdom alone is blessed with thousands of similar examples of expensive elaboration, from the grandiose plumage of birds of paradise to the over-elaborate nests of bowerbirds.

After all, many of the things humans expend energy on—from building ever grander, more ostentatious skyscrapers to running ultramarathons—are hard to reconcile with reproductive fitness or survival. Indeed, many of the things we do to expend energy risk reducing our lifespans rather than extending them. It may well be that the ultimate explanation for why weavers build with such profligacy is that, like us, when they have surplus energy, they expend it by doing work in compliance with the law of entropy.

How well individuals cope at this time of year determines who will live to see another season and who will not. In other words, how well or badly organisms cope during the toughest seasons is the primary and most brutal driver of natural selection. The problem is that the very traits that might benefit organisms at the toughest time of year, like being able to eat every scrap of food you find, can be problematic during times of the year when food is abundant.

What is perhaps most strange about the invocation of competition as the primary driver of our economies is that behind the masculine bluster of ruthlessness, most businesses and businesspeople operate in a manner far more similar to real ecosystems. This is why all big organizations, for instance, have ambitions to function with the cooperative efficiency of termite mounds; why most business leaders work to establish mutually beneficial, “win–win” relationships with their suppliers, service providers, and customers; and why, even in the countries that most enthusiastically embrace the theology of free markets, a whole battery of antitrust laws exist to prevent excessive cooperation in the form of collusion between businesses, the creation of cartels, and other “anti-competitive behaviors.

It is also clear, as the busy-building weavers remind us, that while success or failure in the energy quest will always shape the evolutionary trajectory of any species, many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal overabundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-profligate of all species, work so hard.

The Kathu Pan hand-ax maintains a stony silence about why it was made and what it was used for. But, as a praise-poem to its maker’s skill, it is eloquent. Each indentation in the hand-ax holds not just the memory of its maker’s fingers judging the symmetry of its curved, convex faces, but also the memory of each individual stone flake and the hammer blow which cleaved them from the banded ironstone core.

Mastering a skill sufficiently well for it to masquerade as an instinct takes time and energy, and lots of work. The rudiments of it must first be learned, usually by means of a combination of instruction, imitation, and experimentation. Then it must be practiced, often for years, before it becomes second nature. Acquiring skills also requires energy, dexterity, and cognitive processing power, as well as some less tangible qualities that scientists are far more wary of discussing than poets: perseverance, desire, determination, imagination, and ambition.

But when they are combined with traits associated with social learning, however, the advantages of plasticity are amplified many times over, because beneficial learned behaviors—like avoiding poisonous snakes or knowing what hand-axes are useful for—can be transmitted across generations with no cost and minimal risk.

George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

When it came to matters like hunting, some important knowledge could be transmitted using words—like where one might find some diamphidia larvae to poison an arrowhead, or which animal sinews made the best bowstrings. But the most important forms of knowledge could not. This kind of knowledge, they insisted, could not be taught because it resided not just in their minds but also in their bodies, and because it found expression in skills that could never be reduced to mere words.

Ju/’hoansi hunters experience the desert as a vast interactive canvas animated by the tales of different animals who inscribe their comings and goings in the sand. Like poetry, tracks have a grammar, a meter, and a vocabulary. But also like poetry, interpreting them is far more complex and nuanced than simply reading sequences of letters and following them where they lead. To unpack the layers of meaning in any individual set of tracks and establish who made it and when, what the animal was doing, where it was going and why, hunters must perceive the world from the perspective of the animal.

For some anthropologists, most notably Louis Liebenberg, an accomplished tracker himself, the tracks in the archaeological and fossil records are clear. He is of the view that Homo erectus must have hunted in this way and that this form of hunting must also have played a part in making us bipedal—in molding our bodies for long-distance running, in developing the ability to cool our bodies with sweat, and adapting our minds to the challenges of inferring meaning from this, the most ancient form of writing.

Our brains only constitute 2 percent of our total body weight but they consume around 20 percent of our energy resources. For chimpanzees, whose brains are roughly one-third the size of our own, the energy used is closer to 12 percent and for most other mammals it is between 5 and 10 percent.

As Nietzsche (who also credited boredom with breathing life into some of his most influential ideas) put it, “for thinkers and sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable windless calm of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.

Psychologists also remind us that boredom is a more fertile mother of invention than necessity, and that it can stimulate very un-Nietzschean pro-social thoughts as well as a heightened sense of self-awareness, a perspective that is theologized in Zen Buddhism.

And, taken together with research conducted by anthropologists among geographically isolated peoples who continued to make a living as foragers in the twentieth century, this data suggests that for 95 percent of our species’ history, work did not occupy anything like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it does now.

It is still an open question,” wrote Lee, “whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself” and whether “the efflorescence of technology” that followed the agricultural revolution would lead us to Utopia or “to extinction.

Sahlins concluded that in many hunter-gatherer societies, and potentially for most of human history, scarcity was not the organizing feature of human economic life and hence that “the fundamental economic problem,” at least as it was described by classical economics, was not the eternal struggle of our species.

On his return, he produced the mandatory academic and technical pieces. But his most important work, The Forest People: A Study of the People of the Congo, was anything but the studious tome the subtitle suggested. His lyrical description of BaMbuti life lifted the gloomy veil that Conrad had draped over the forest, struck a chord with the American and British reading public, and was, for a while, a runaway bestseller.

Turnbull’s descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First, they revealed how the “sharing” economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.

In the summer of 1957, James Woodburn scrambled up the Serengeti Plateau to reach the shores of Lake Eyasi, where he became the first social anthropologist to develop a long-term relationship with the Hadzabe. In the 1960s, he was also was one of the most influential among the cohort of young anthropologists who spearheaded the resurgence in hunter-gatherer studies. And just like Richard Lee, he was struck by how little effort it took for the bow-hunting Hadzabe to feed themselves. In the early 1960s, he described the Hadzabe as irrepressible small-stakes gamblers who were far more preoccupied with winning and losing arrows from one another in games of chance than with wondering about where their next meal would come from. He also noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, they met nutritional needs easily, “without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organization.

Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.” He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragers’ attitudes to work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them, one of the most important was “demand sharing.

They also quickly learned that in foraging societies anyone who had anything worth sharing was subject to similar demands and the only reason that they received so many requests was because, even with their meager research budgets, they were immeasurably wealthier in material terms than any of their forager hosts were. In other words, in these societies the obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others. As a result, in forager societies there were always some particularly productive people who contributed more than others, and also people who (in the language of finger-pointing politicians and perplexed economists) are often referred to as “freeloaders” or “scroungers.

Foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi also pose a problem for those who are convinced that material equality and individual freedom are at odds with one another and irreconcilable. This is because demand-sharing societies were simultaneously highly individualistic, where no one was subject to the coercive authority of anyone else, but at the same time were intensely egalitarian. By granting individuals the right to spontaneously tax everybody else, these societies ensured firstly that material wealth always ended up being spread pretty evenly; secondly that everyone got something to eat regardless of how productive they were; thirdly that scarce or valuable objects were circulated widely and were freely available for anyone to use; and finally that there was no reason for people to waste energy trying to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, as doing so served no practical purpose.

Their fisheries were so seasonally productive that for much of the year people in these societies spent most of their time and energy developing a rich artistic tradition, playing politics, holding elaborate ceremonies, and hosting sumptuous ritual feasts— potlatch ceremonies—in which the hosts attempted to outdo each other with acts of generosity. Reflecting their material affluence, these feasts were also often characterized by lavish displays of wealth and sometimes even the ritual destruction of property, including the burning of boats and the ceremonial murder of slaves. When the guests headed home in canoes heavy with gifts of fish oil, exquisite woven blankets, bentwood boxes, and copper plates, hosts would often begin to tally up the sometimes considerable debts they incurred to supply lavish enough gifts to merit the status they sought.

Busy minds would entertain and be distracted by stories, ceremonies, songs, and shamanic journeys. Agile fingers would have found purpose in developing and mastering new skills. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the efflorescence of artwork in Europe and Asia that archaeologists and anthropologists once assumed indicated Homo sapiens crossing a crucial cognitive threshold may well have been the progeny of long winter months. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that much of this art, like the 32,000-year-old frescoes of mammoths, wild horses, cave bears, rhinos, lions, and deer that decorate the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, was painted in the light of fires illuminating the interior of weatherproof caves, while most rock in places like Africa and Australia tended to be on more exposed surfaces.

But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000 years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes.

With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers. It is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate items. But the amount of time and skill involved in manufacturing the mammoth beads and other items suggests that, like the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, the annual work cycle for them was seasonal and that in the winter months people often focused their energies on more artistic, indoor pursuits.

After all, viewed against the span of a single human lifetime or even against that of several consecutive generations, the adoption of agriculture was a gradual transition during which people and a whole series of plants and animals slowly but inexorably bound their destinies ever closer to one another, and in doing so changed one another forever.

The Natufians are thought to be the first people anywhere to experiment systematically with farming. But we have no idea what languages they spoke, or what they called themselves. This population, who are associated with parts of the Middle East from 12,500 to 9,500 years ago, owe the suitably ancient-sounding name to the imagination of a far more recent pioneer in the world of work, Dorothy Garrod, an archaeologist and a contemporary of Vere Gordon Childe. She named the Natufians after one of the archaeological sites where she found evidence of this culture, the Wadi al Natuf, in what was then British Palestine.

And this took the form of what for now is thought to be the oldest example of monumental architecture in the ancient world: a complex of buildings, chambers, megaliths, and passageways discovered at Göbekli Tepe in the hills near Orencik in southeastern Turkey in 1994. With construction at Göbekli Tepe having begun during the tenth millennium , it is also by far the oldest evidence of large groups of people anywhere coming together to work on a very big project that had nothing obvious to do with the food quest.

Only a small proportion of the site has been excavated, but at over 22 acres in size it is many orders of magnitude larger than Stonehenge and three times larger than Athens’s Parthenon. So far, seven enclosures have been excavated, and geophysical surveys suggest that there are at least thirteen more buried in the hill.

Construction was also almost certainly seasonal and done in the winter months. And, given that people back then were lucky to live beyond forty years, it is unlikely that anyone who participated in the start of the construction on any one of the bigger enclosures would have still been alive to witness its completion.

Göbekli Tepe will always cling to its deepest secrets. But at least its importance in the history of our species’ relationship with work is clear. For beyond being a monument to the first experiments with agriculture, it is the first evidence anywhere of people securing sufficient surplus energy to work over many consecutive generations to achieve a grand vision unrelated to the immediate challenge of securing more energy, and one that was intended to endure long beyond the lives of its builders.

As farming societies grew more productive and captured more energy from their environments, energy appeared to be scarcer and people had to work harder to meet their basic needs. This was because, up until the Industrial Revolution, any gains in productivity farming peoples generated as a result of working harder, adopting new technologies, techniques, or crops, or acquiring new land were always soon gobbled up by populations that quickly grew to numbers that could not be sustained. As a result, while agricultural societies continued to expand, prosperity was usually only ever fleeting, and scarcity evolved from an occasional inconvenience that foragers stoically endured every once in a while to a near perennial problem. In many respects, the hundreds of generations of farmers who lived before the fossil-fuel revolution paid for our extended lifespans and expanded waistlines now by enduring lives that were mostly shorter, bleaker, and harder than ours, and almost certainly tougher than those of their foraging ancestors.

Thus, when the remains of the pampered elites are excluded from the equation, graveyards from all the world’s great agricultural civilizations through to the Industrial Revolution tell an enduring tale of systematic nutritional deficiencies, anemia, episodic famines, and bone deformations as a result of repetitive, arduous labor, in addition to an alarming array of horrendous and sometimes fatal work-induced injuries.

Foraging may be much less productive and generate far lower energy yields than farming but it is also much less risky. This is firstly because foragers tended to live well within the natural limits imposed by their environments rather than skate perpetually on its dangerous verges, and secondly because where subsistence farmers typically relied on one or two staple crops, foragers in even the bleakest environments relied on dozens of different food sources and so were usually able to adjust their diets to align with an ecosystem’s own dynamic responses to changing conditions. Typically, in complex ecosystems when weather one year proves unsuitable for one set of plant species, it almost inevitably suits others. But in farming societies when harvests fail as a result of, for example, a sustained drought, then catastrophe looms.

The economics of domestication are now shaped as much by anticipated necessity as they are by the vagaries of food faddism and the existence of elites prepared to pay a great deal of money for exotic products like truffles, which are hugely expensive to propagate. Historically, the economics of domestication hinged almost entirely on energy returns alone.

To help him stick to the path of righteousness, Franklin always carried on his person a list of thirteen “virtues” against which he logged his conduct every day. Among the most hallowed of these was “industry,” which he explained meant to “lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful.” He also stuck to a strict daily routine that began every morning at 5 a.m. with the making of “a resolution” for the day, followed by blocks of time allocated variously to work, meals, chores, and, toward the end of the day, some form of enjoyable “distraction.” At 10 p.m. every night, he took a few moments to reflect on the day’s achievements and give thanks to God before putting himself to bed.

But there was more to the relationship between time and work in early agricultural societies than the tedious reality of being tied to an inflexible seasonal cycle. One of the most profound legacies of the transition to farming was to transform the way people experienced and understood time.

To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

To produce food requires that you live at once in the past, present, and future. Almost every task on a farm is focused on achieving a future goal or managing a future risk based on past experience. A cultivator will clear land, prepare soils, plow, dig irrigation ditches, sow seeds, weed, prune, and nurture their crop so that, all being well, when the seasons change they will at the very least bring in a harvest adequate to support them through the next seasonal cycle, and provide sufficient seed stock for them to plant the following year.

But to focus most of your effort working for future rewards is also to dwell in a universe of endless possibilities—some good, some hard to call, and many bad. So when farmers imagined overflowing granaries, fresh-baked bread, meat curing in the shed, new-laid eggs on the table, and baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables ready to be eaten or preserved, these same cheerful visions simultaneously invoked images of droughts and floods, rats and weevils battling it out over the moldy remains of anemic harvests, disease-ridden livestock being hounded by predators, weed-infested vegetable gardens, and orchards producing rotten fruit.

Where foragers stoically accepted occasional hardships, farmers persuaded themselves that things could always be better if they worked a little harder. Farmers who put in the extra hours would, over time, usually do better than lazier ones who only ever made contingency for the one or two risks they considered to be the most likely. Thus among the Ju/’hoansi’s farming neighbors along the Kavango River the wealthiest ones were usually the most risk-averse—those who worked hardest to build good enclosures to protect their cattle and goats from predators at night; who spent long summer days diligently chasing birds, monkeys, and others drawn to their fields; who planted their seeds a little deeper; who went to the trouble of dragging bucketloads of water from the river to irrigate their crops just in case, as occasionally happened, the rains arrived late.

The Wealth of Nations has a biblical quality to it, not least because Smith had a particular genius for presenting complex ideas in the form of neat parables similar in structure to those that were issued from church pulpits across the land every Sunday.

In other words, foragers with immediate-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of the relationship they had with the environments that shared food with them, and farmers with their delayed-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of their relationship with the land that demanded work from them.

As a result of this and the appropriation of other mammalian habitats for agriculture and human settlement, people and their domestic animals now comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we nurture, nourish, and then send to the slaughterhouse—mainly in the form of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats—account for 60 percent. The remaining 4 percent are the ever-diminishing populations of wild animals who now cower in our hedgerows, pose for tourists, and dodge poachers in our nature reserves, national parks, and a dwindling number of wild refuges. Wild avifauna have not fared that much better. With around 66 billion chickens being produced and destroyed for human consumption every year, the total living biomass of domesticated fowl at any one time is estimated to now be triple that of wild birds.

Almost all societies that depended on hunting for meat considered animals to have souls of a sort, even if they weren’t always exactly the same as human souls. Many also considered the fact that hunters were in effect harvesters of souls to be morally troubling and came up with a different way to rationalize the killing. This is why for instance Inuit and Siberian foragers like the Yukhagir insisted that the animals they hunted often gifted themselves to humans for food and other animal products, while hunters like the Ju/’hoansi took the view that most of the animals they pursued were complex thinking creatures and so also afforded them the dignity of a soul or at least, as the Ju/’hoansi put it, a kind of life force.

The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One of these was wealth inequality.

Those with lots of capital and lots of slaves were able to amass wealth many orders of magnitude larger than poorer Roman citizens, who had to work for a living in a labor marketplace in which competent slaves would always be the economic choice. It also made it difficult for small-scale farmers to compete with larger ones. As a result, many sold their farms to large landowners and set off to the city in the hope of making a living there. Indeed, by some calculations, during the final century of the Roman Empire, three families “may have been the richest private landowners of all time.

As powerful as the artisan collegia were, though, they were rarely able to do more than fight over the scraps falling from the tables of the wealthy patricians on whose patronage they depended. Rome’s eventual collapse was ultimately hastened by the corrosive inequality at its heart.

It was because in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar experiences, with the result that in cities people’s individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed.

Of these myriad new professions that emerged when people congregated in cities, two entirely new classes of work were especially important. The first was a by-product of the invention of writing, and the second of the emergence and increasing power of the merchants who controlled the allocation and distribution of energy and other resources procured from the countryside.

In cities, material security was not based on producing food energy or other raw materials but on controlling its distribution and use. All ancient cities had marketplaces, from Athens’s sprawling agora to Rome’s somewhat more orderly forum with its boutiquelike shops.

In this sense, Windhoek is the same as every other city in the world. For as long as people have congregated in cities, their ambitions have been molded by a different kind of scarcity from that which shapes those of subsistence farmers, a form of scarcity articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy, and desire rather than of absolute need. And for most, this kind of relative scarcity is the spur to work long hours, to climb the social ladder, and to keep up with the Joneses.

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over.

Interestingly, the oldest almost-urban settlement discovered so far, Çatalhöyük in Turkey, was probably similarly materially egalitarian too. But it was not like any of the other ancient towns and cities that followed. Its ruins are made up of hundreds of similar-sized domestic dwellings clustered tightly together, almost like cells in a beehive, suggesting no one was measurably richer than anyone else. There were also no obvious public spaces like markets, squares, temples, or plazas and no public thoroughfares, paths, or roads, leaving archaeologists to conclude that people got from one place to the next by scrambling across rooftops and entering their and others’ homes through the ceilings.

The archaeology of ancient Sumerian cities suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that among the most promising trades to take up for those with ambitions of climbing the social ladder was brewing and selling beer. In part this was because beer, like wheat and silver, was a form of currency. It was also because beer houses provided loans to hard-up farmers who probably agreed to interest rates and default penalties that they would never have dreamed of accepting when sober.

Between 1550 and 1850, net yields in wheat and oats per acre farmed in Britain nearly quadrupled, yields in rye and barley tripled, and yields in peas and beans doubled. This increase in productivity catalyzed a surge in population growth. In 1750, the population of Great Britain was around 5.7 million people. But thanks to the surge in agricultural productivity it tripled to 16.6 million by 1850, and by 1871, double that again. And where roughly half of Britain’s workforce were farmers in 1650, by 1850 that had dropped to one in five.

But perhaps even more importantly, where farmers found at least some immediate satisfaction from applying the skills they accumulated over a lifetime to creatively solve problems on the farm each day, most factory workers had to endure endless hours of mind-numbing, repetitive labor.

The embrace of conspicuous consumption was at first confined to the aristocratic and well-to-do merchant classes, but as more and more people became dependent on cash wages rather than the product of their own labors, consumption became more influential in shaping both the fortunes and the aspirations of what would later be referred to as the working classes.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels. Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britain’s economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.

Durkheim introduced the idea of anomie in his first book, The Division of Labour in Society, but developed it much further in his second monograph Suicide: A Study in Sociology, in which he aimed to show that suicide, which at the time was widely thought to be a reflection of profound individual failings, often had social causes and so presumably could also have social solutions. He used the term to describe the feelings of intense dislocation, anxiety, and even anger that drove people to behave antisocially and, when desperate, perhaps take their own lives.

Durkheim believed that there was more to anomie than the sense of profound individual dislocation arising out of the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. He insisted that anomie was characterized by what he called the “malady of infinite aspiration,” a condition arising when there are “no limits to men’s aspirations” because they “no longer know what is possible and what is not, what is just and what is unjust, which claims and expectations are legitimate and which are immoderate.

Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.

He was also the first to realize that in the modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products, and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things.

For Galbraith, advertising served another counterintuitive purpose beyond keeping the cycle of production and consumption rolling. He thought it made people worry less about inequality because, as long as they were able to purchase new consumer products once in a while, they felt that they were upwardly mobile and so closing the gap between themselves and others.

“It has become evident to conservatives and liberals alike,” he noted drily, “that increasing aggregate output is an alternative to redistribution or even to the reduction of inequality.

In 1965, chief executives in the top 350 U.S. firms took home roughly twenty times the pay of an “average worker.” By 1980, CEOs in the same top bracket of firms took home thirty times the annual salary of an average worker, and by 2015, that number had surged to just shy of three hundred times. Adjusted for inflation, most U.S. workers gained a modest 11.7 percent rise in real wages between 1978 and 2016, while CEOs typically enjoyed a 937 percent increase in remuneration.

But the bubble didn’t burst. The talent narrative was by then so deeply embedded in the institutional fabric of even the most vulnerable businesses that, as they started retrenching staff and closing operations to cut costs, many simultaneously dipped into their meager cash reserves to allocate large retention bonuses to their senior leadership team on the assumption that only they would be able to navigate a way through the newly treacherous waters.

The only disciplined message put out by the impromptu coalition of dreamers and discontents who “occupied” Wall Street and other global financial capitals in the wake of the financial crisis was something along the lines of “burn the rich.” But their efforts to highlight inequality didn’t do much to change public perceptions. Numerous subsequent research projects have revealed that people in the most unequal countries routinely underestimate the levels of inequality, while those in countries where the bulk of national wealth is in the hands of large middle classes tend to be more accurate and occasionally even overestimate inequality.

Thus, while those who are very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards they have accrued, many poorer people don’t want to mess with the dream that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.

But political polarization is by no means the only growing pain exacerbated by anxieties about the future in urban, industrialized economies, where for many the boundaries between our professional and personal lives have all but disappeared.

Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor, the official cause of her death was changed to “karoshi”: death by overwork. In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period. Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that. In the weeks following her death, her grieving father trawled through her phone and computer records. He calculated that she had worked at least 209 hours of overtime in the month preceding her death.

It was added to an already growing vocabulary of work-related ailments specific to Japan, most notably “kacho-byo,” which translates to “manager’s disease” and was coined to describe the overwhelming stress felt by middle managers over promotions, letting down their team, shaming themselves and their families, or, worse still, disappointing their bosses and weakening the company. But where kacho-byo is a problem that only afflicts white-collar workers, karoshi is an equal-opportunity killer that preys as eagerly on blue-collar workers as it does on managers, teachers, healthcare workers, and CEOs.

Nothing perhaps reveals this better than the fact that despite a well-funded government campaign in Japan to persuade people to go on holiday once in a while, since the turn of the millennium most Japanese workers still take fewer than half the total days of fully paid leave offered them.

But what makes the individual stories of karoshi and karo jisatsu different from these is the fact that what drove the likes of Miwa Sado to lose or take their lives was not the risk of hardship or poverty but their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.

Even so, occasionally the problem has generated some profile. Over the course of the last decade, for instance, the CEO of France Telecom was forced to step down and several senior managers were put on trial charged with “moral harassment,” as a consequence of the toxic working culture they instilled at the company and that prosecutors insisted contributed to thirty-five suicides among staff members over the course of 2008 and 2009.

In Britain, the Health and Safety Executive reported in 2018 that close to 15 million work days were lost as a result of workplace-related stress, depression, and anxiety, and that among a total workforce of 26.5 million, nearly 600,000 individuals self-reported suffering from work-related mental health issues that year.

Indeed, one of the solutions he proposed for dealing with problems of social alienation in cities was the formation of workers’ guilds similar to the hundreds of collegia that were formed in ancient Rome.

For much of human history, these immediate social networks took the form of multi-generational communities that were rooted in shared geography, expressed through the intimacy of kinship, shared religious beliefs, rituals, practices, and values, and were nourished by working and living in the same environments and experiencing similar things. But in densely packed cities, most individuals’ extended social networks take the form of complex intersecting mosaics of relationships cobbled together from our involvement in a whole series of sometimes very different interests and hobbies. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for many of us our regular social networks are made up of people we have worked with or encountered at work.

But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing nature of employment and work in the industrial era.

One is to recognize that many (but by no means all) services are responsive to fundamental human needs, which are also part of our evolutionary inheritance and are not easily met in cities when people are removed from small close-knit social communities. Doctors exist because we like to live and because we dislike pain; artists and entertainers exist to bring us pleasure; hairstylists exist because some of us like to look good or need a sympathetic ear to listen; DJs exist because we like to dance; and bureaucrats exist because even the most passionate anarchists want the buses to run on schedule. Demand for these kinds of services did not increase as a result of improvements in manufacturing. They always existed. Instead, once agriculture and manufacturing were sufficiently productive to enable many people not to focus the bulk of their time and energy producing or making things, these other fundamental needs were amplified.

In the United States, where the oldest university, Harvard, was established in 1736, student tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, are now on average between two and three times what they were in 1990. In the United Kingdom, where the oldest universities date from the twelfth century, tertiary education was not only free for British residents until 1998, but most students were provided with means-tested maintenance grants by their local authorities that were generous enough for them to be able to live in relative comfort without having to seek paid work during term times to make ends meet. Since their introduction in 1998, tuition fees have risen 900 percent. In both the the United States and United Kingdom, all but the wealthiest prospective students recognize that on graduation they will likely be saddled with debts that will take decades to settle.

This is certainly the view of many academics. Rather than freeing them up to spend more time doing research and teaching, they now almost universally report spending a considerably higher proportion of their workweek doing administration than was the case two decades ago. They also note that while many administrative roles are less specialized than academic ones, and considerably less competitive, they often merit much higher salaries. In the UK, for example, four in ten academics in 2016 were reported to be contemplating quitting the jobs they consider to be vocational and that they had worked for years to secure.

In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.

By taking labor ever more out of the equation, automation removes any advantage countries with lower wage demands might have, because the costs of technology, unlike labor, are pretty much the same everywhere.

However, automation is not only likely to entrench further structural inequality between countries. Without a fundamental shift in the way economies are organized, it will dramatically exacerbate inequality within many countries as well. It will do this firstly by diminishing opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled people to find decent employment, while simultaneously inflating the incomes of those few who continue to manage what are largely automated businesses. As importantly, it will increase returns on capital rather than labor, so expanding the wealth of those who have cash invested in businesses, rather than those who depend on taking cash from them in exchange for labor. This means straightforwardly that automation will generate further wealth for the already wealthy, while further disadvantaging those who do not have the means to purchase stakes in companies and so free-ride off the work done by automata. Of course, this would not be as much of a challenge were it not the case that since the Great Decoupling, the wealthiest 1 percent of people globally has captured twice as much of the new wealth generated by economic growth as the rest of us. The richest 10 percent of people on earth now own an estimated 85 percent of all global assets, and the richest 1 percent own 45 percent of all global assets.

The results of this ambitious exercise were first presented to the Club of Rome in private and then published, in 1972, in a book, The Limits to Growth. The conclusions Meadows and his team reached were very different from Keynes’s utopian dream. They were also not what the Club of Rome, nor anyone else for that matter, wanted to hear.

Aggregating the outcomes of the various scenarios they fed into their mainframes showed unequivocally that if there were no significant changes to historical economic and population growth trends—if business continued as usual—then the world would witness a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” within a century. In other words, their data showed that our continued preoccupation with solving the economic problem was the starkest problem facing humankind and that the likeliest outcome if things continued was catastrophe.

In 2002, Meadows and two other members of the original team revisited their original projections. They also ran a series of new simulations in which they included data from the intervening period. They showed that despite the antiquated computer hardware they used in 1972, their algorithms had done a remarkably good job of anticipating the changes that had occurred over the preceding thirty years. They also showed that updated simulations based on the new data only reaffirmed their initial conclusions that our preoccupation with growth might lead us to oblivion. The only real difference, they explained, was that in the intervening period, a critical threshold had passed. Dialing down economic growth was no longer enough. It needed to be dialed back.

Where history is a better guide to the future is on the nature of change. It reminds us that we are a stubborn species: one that is deeply resistant to making profound changes in our behavior and habits, even when it is clear that we need to do so. But it also reveals that when change is forced upon us we are astonishingly versatile. We are able to quickly adapt to new, often very different ways of doing and thinking about things and in a short time become as habituated to them as we were to those that preceded them. This being so, while automation and AI have made it possible for us to embrace a profoundly different future, it is unlikely that it will be the catalyst that causes the dramatic changes in “social customs and economic practices” that Keynes envisaged. Far more likely catalysts take the form of a rapidly changing climate, like that which spurred the invention of agriculture; anger ignited by systematic inequalities like those that stirred the Russian revolution; or perhaps even a viral pandemic that exposes the obsolescence of our economic institutions and working culture, causing us to ask what jobs are truly valuable and question why we are content to let our markets reward those in often pointless or parasitic roles so much more than those we recognize as essential.

One aim is to reveal how our relationship to work —in the broadest sense—is more fundamental than that imagined by the likes of Keynes. The relationship between energy, life, and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.

R. W. Shumaker, K. R. Walkup, and B. B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011.

S. Mann and R. Cadman, “Does being bored make us more creative?,” Creativity Research Journal 26 (2), 2014, 165–73; J. D. Eastwood, C. Cavaliere, S. A. Fahlman, and A. E. Eastwood, “A desire for desires: Boredom and its relation to alexithymia,” Personality and Individual Differences 42, 2007, 1035–45; K. Gasper and B. L. Middlewood, “Approaching novel thoughts: Understanding why elation and boredom promote associative thought more than distress and relaxation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 52, 2014, 50–7; M. F. Kets de Vries, “Doing nothing and nothing to do: The hidden value of empty time and boredom,” INSEAD, Faculty and Research Working Paper, 2014.

Malcolm Gladwell, “The Myth of Talent,” New Yorker, July 22, 2002, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth.