"Work"

(A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots)

-by james suzman, 2020

This book doesn't crack the list of "16 books every humyn should read".

But maybe it should.

A sweeping study of homo sapiens' relationship to labor, from forager to hunter to farmer to factory to information age and beyond. The not-so-secret revelation is that we were much happier before our cleverness got cooking. Foragers work only two to three hours a day, have deeply satisfying community relationships, and no ulcers/suicide/income inequality.

The central thesis of suzman's work is that we need to return to some form of that reality, if we would save our sanity. For the thousands of years since the agricultural revolution, our lives have been a crucible of overwork (which is already an official cause of death in some countries, notably Japan). This may have been necessary when we didn't have enough resources for everyone, but around fifty years ago, our food-producing brilliance surpassed even our exponentially-expanding population. We now have enough food and resources for everyone.

More than enough.

It's time to stop pretending we don't.

Suzman's eye scans every "advancement" that changed how we work, from the rise of cities to the paradigm of scarcity to the birth of the service economy (and what that represents, a shift to an era when most workers don't produce anything tangible, because we don't NEED to - yes, i'm looking at you, you feckless financial advisers), to automation and the incipient age of robots.

He looks at the economists and philosophers who have commented on our progress, or predicted what's next.

He pulls it all together, with a plea to reclaim our lost humynity. A wonderful work.