Not completely opposite. Trying to stay healthy is probably a good thing. But tricking yourself psychologically into a hard working employee is as crazy as it gets. You are not supposed to feel happy for being an employee and making money for someone else, because you are not in control of your own life.
No one has ever had more control over their life than the privileged few enjoying the 9-5.
In contemporary society, things are nice enough that people typically trade a fraction of their time in exchange for work, income, and reduced risk exposure. This is a nice comfy abstraction over the cold reality that you need resources to live and you need to work and fight to keep living.
The alternatives to this are:
a) socialism/communism type deal where the government controls your work output and resource provision; even if it works out (it usually doesn't), you have far less control than you do now.
b) unspecialized agriculture-based society; every second of every day is spent producing just enough food and material goods long enough for you to raise children that take over when you die. Your options are limited; you are perilously exposed to acts of God (what happens if the crop fails?). You are not in control.
c) hunter-gatherer setup; you are still not in control of your own life. You have no option than to spend the vast majority of your day seeking food (without agriculture you really do need to spend almost all of your time on that work). Ask one of these people what a 'weekend' or 'vacation' looks like.
The reality is, modern society gives you many more options than were possible even 100 years ago. International (and even local) travel is commonplace; you can choose to start a startup or work for yourself; you can choose to buy or not buy hundreds of thousands of products, many of which were not existing or even possible in the recent past; etc. You can even choose to leave it all behind and live on the land.
Don't confuse dissatisfaction with your own life choices with lack of control.
An average peasant in the feudalism had more free time than an average 9-5 office worker now.
In fact, the 8 hour work day is a recent feature. When capitalism arrived initially, it was much worse.
The rest of your post shows that you had an easy life, and I'm happy for you. But don't assume everybody can start a startup, travel etc. That's just not the reality out there.
Working in an organization beneficial for the world while doing a job you enjoy makes it easy to work for long hours and little wages.
But if organization acts immorally and increases profit through unethical methods, it drains motivation and makes employees a lot less inclined to put effort into 9-5 jobs.
I mean, presumably, we could get "good enough" at agro-tech and then return everyone to option B, but with everyone just spending 5% of their time maintaining robots to grow themselves food and the rest doing whatever they like.
Hunter gatherers did not spend the vast majority of their time seeking food. That's a myth that greatly perpetuates this nonsense that technology/progress have benefited mankind. They haven't. Things being better than 200 years ago doesn't mean they're better than 20 000 years ago.
Disagree. I think tribal warfare and fighting predators are things we are built for and desire to do on a base level, hence why we have (poor) substitutes in team sports, modern hunting, and the action movie. The lack of these things is a loss not a gain.
So would I but I think it's important to avoid just using what our current selves want/would do in discussions on what would make happy humans. We're products of our environment. Modern humans would be fucked (and unhappy) if magically transported back 20 000 years myself included, as I believe humans 20 000 years ago would be if transported to now. What's more is that there's an issue of extrapolating what is best for a society as a whole from the wants of the individual even without the differing time period. I or any other person may want a billion dollars but if everyone was suddenly given a billion dollars that wouldn't be a net gain, it'd be an economic catastrophe.
I'm not even 100% on this theory and it's one of my least researched so there's plenty of room for someone to come and slay me with data but I think the discussion definitely needs to come from a place of "pre-agricultural humans living their pre-agricultural life while ignorant of modern life" compared to "modern humans living their modern lives", rather than one of "well why don't you just go live in a forrest if you like it so much!?"
Everyone dies. Savage humans at least had the benefit of a lesser ability to ponder and comprehend the permanence and inevitability of ceasing to exist.
AFAIK most aboriginal tribes are quite peaceful. Rivalry with other tribes around territory and food sources lead to fights that look closer sparring and rarely lead to any wounded.
> But tricking yourself psychologically into a hard working employee is as crazy as it gets. You are not supposed to feel happy for being an employee and making money for someone else, because you are not in control of your own life.
Fortunately there are no rules for what you are supposed to feel happy about. If you are convinced that being an employee means you should not be happy, then that's a (painful) psychological trick as well. Even if you run your own business, you still have customers to satisfy, so are they in control of your life? Regardless if you work for yourself or not, you are always working to provide value to someone else. You are always selling yourself; your abilities & time.
Or, to put in a different thought, we are all subject to the physical realities of the world we live in, and we barter and trade what we each have with one another to better control the world itself, while being controlled by it simultaneously.
I recommend following some of the things mentioned in the article (like taking care of physical and mental health), but not for your own sake, not for the sake of being a good employee. And if you can't handle it at some point -- you are not a bad person, neither have you failed at anything. Self-determination is what matters; and sometimes, you need any help you can get, and not the shame for what you can't do right now.
