It's Not Easy, Being Green

Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!

Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.

The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.

Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.

How about Orangutans?

Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.

Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-

How about Stone Age people in Europe?

They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)

Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.

Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.

But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?

6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.

Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!

During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.

So what changed?

The industrial revolution, baybe~~

New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.

The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!

THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”

(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)

Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.

Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.

Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.

We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.

Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!

Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”

Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.

In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.

Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.

Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.

In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.

“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.

Listen to me.

You do not want this future to happen to you I promise you. Because the minute you enter into a subscription existence you allow for a possibility of losing everything. Why?

Well, because when you stop paying then you stop having.

I buy my cars outright for this reason.

I have not thrown away my DVD collection for this reason.

I still have my old-school ipod for this reason.

I buy songs I really like direct from the artist on top of my subscription for this reason.

I back shit up on to my external hard drives rather than depending on a cloud only for this reason (which reminds me that I need to do taht this weekend).

If someone ELSE is holding the physical source of what you're paying for? YOU DON'T OWN IT. You're just giving someone your energy and time for permission to access it.

You're leasing your existence.

Don't fucking fall for it, do you hear me?

It's bad enough we have to lease our water, our heat, our internet and our entertainment.

Buy what you want outright WHENEVER YOU CAN. Then do anything you can to maintain it in the face of planned obsolescence. I promise you, there will be a moment when you will be glad you did

highlight quotes;

“… she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment.“

“When we first opened, people were surprised at the prices,” he said. “But our costs are much higher than what a giant company pays. We are paying to have control over the quality of our animals, what they are being fed, how they are being treated, transported, slaughtered and cut up. Once people understood that, the business took off.”

“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”

“You can’t be healthy unless the animals you eat are healthy,”

Instead of trying to poise this as “haha vegans look even y’all can’t do it” express it for what it truly is.

Fixing it means not fighting about who’s identity is better, but fighting against the business practices that allow companies to torture animals and produce unethically grown and unsustainably harvested foods.

And as a reminder of the past, the US meat packing industry and food production industry have often tried to cut corners and serve filth in order to make a profit. That changed after the release of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which portrayed the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry in such stark relief that it lead directly to the creation of the FDA and the wide scale adoption of food safety regulations.

So much this. This is why I post so much about food. We’re so dependent on a massively destructive and wasteful food production system, no matter our dietary choices or needs. Our very lives are tangled up with food miles, monoculture, deforestation, food waste, pesticides, exploitation, slavery, and the reality is not everyone has a choice of what to eat or where to shop, and frankly most people don’t have the option not to participate. Any amount of food that you can produce for yourself is a piece of your own liberation.

Any amount.