The problem with the 40 hour work week is it actually was progress, which is annoying, because if you complain about working 40 hours a week, someone always shows up to remind you of how factory workers in the 1800s had it worse.
And they're right, a lot of factory workers were putting in 16 hour days, six, sometimes seven days a week. Compared to that, eight hours a day with weekends off was a huge improvement.
So yes, the 40 hour week was progress, but progress compared to what?
That's where the argument gets a little awkward. We usually compare modern work to the industrial revolution, or feudalism, or slavery. Basically, we compare today's system to the worst working conditions civilization has ever produced. And then congratulate ourselves for being less insane.
But if you really stop and think about it, that's a bizarre baseline, because human beings have been around for roughly 300,000 years. Agricultural civilization has only been around for about 10,000, and large centralized states are even newer.
So if we're asking what kind of life human beings are adapted for, the factory is not the baseline. Neither is the office or a 40 hour a week.
For most of human existence, we lived as hunter gatherers. And this is where the story gets uncomfortable, because many hunter gatherers societies did not spend all day grinding for survival.
Anthropologists Marshall Sahlins famously called them the original affluent society, not because they had luxury goods, but because many of them met their needs with far less labor than we imagine. Some estimates put subsistence work around two to four hours a day.
Now, that doesn't mean life was easy.
No antibiotics, no modern dentistry, no grocery stores, or air condition. You get a tooth infection and the simpler life suddenly looks a lot less romantic.
So this is not some fantasy where everyone was barefoot, spiritually enlightened, and eating berries under a rainbow.
But it does raise a serious question.
If human beings once met their basic needs without spending most of their waking lives working, what changed?
The standard answer is agriculture.
We settled. We grew food. We produced surplus, built cities. We created hierarchy, ownership, taxes, armies, and states. And once land and food were controlled, access to survival changed.
You were no longer just living from the land. You were living inside a system.
That's when work starts to become something entirely different. Not just effort, not just contribution, obligation, and coercion.
The work no one wanted to do still had to get done. So civilization found ways to make people do it.
Sometimes through slavery, sometimes through debt, sometimes they used class. Other times it was wages.
And no, those are not all morally equivalent, but they do belong under the same uncomfortable family tree.
A system that controls access to survival and then tells people they're free because they can choose how to earn their way back into it.
That's the part we all often choose to ignore.
Because today, most people are not enslaved. Most people are not legally owned. Most people can just quit their jobs, but quit into what?
You still need money to access food, money to access shelter, money to access healthcare, money to exist with any dignity at all.
So when people say nobody is forcing you to work, technically sure, no one's standing there with a whip.
But the grocery store doesn't accept your philosophical objections, which is the real reason why the widespread adoption of AI today feels so disruptive.
It's started to expose a fault line in our system.
For thousands of years, civilization had a labor problem. There was work that needed to be done, and people had to be compelled, pressured, paid, threatened, or trained into doing it.
But now, we're building machines that can do more and more of that work.
The work nobody wants to do. The work people endure because they have bills. The work that keeps the whole system running.
And at first, that can sound like liberation.
If machines do the unwanted work, maybe humans can finally stop spending their lives earning the right to survive.
But there's a problem.
The system wasn't designed to feed people who are no longer economically useful. It was designed to feed people through wages.
So what happens when the work disappears, but the food is still behind a paywall.
That's the uncomfortable question.
Not whether AI will take jobs.
The deeper question is, what happens when our civilization, built on coerced labor, no longer needs as much labor to coerce?
Will people be freed or just discarded?
