Why Do We Work So Damn Much?
About this episode
Anthropologist James Suzman, drawing on his book Work and three decades with the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa, asks why we work so much despite enormous productivity gains. He revisits Keynes's 1930 prediction of 15-hour workweeks, contrasts forager societies — egalitarian, with demand sharing and customs like insulting the hunter's meat to check pride — with farming's long hours and hierarchy, and argues our era of endless aspiration, debt, and consumerism (in Durkheim's sense) keeps us laboring. They discuss how advertising manufactures scarcity, what distinguishes meaningful from merely lucrative work, and whether automation will finally free us or deepen inequality.