Olivia: Alright, Jackson, I have a number for you: fifteen. What does that number mean to you in a work context? Jackson: Fifteen? Huh. That's the number of unread emails I have... from the last hour. Or maybe the number of years until I can retire, if I'm lucky and the economy doesn't implode. Fifteen minutes is my ideal meeting length. Why? Olivia: What if I told you that for about 95% of human history, fifteen was the total number of hours people worked... in an entire week? Jackson: Come on. No. That's impossible. That’s my Tuesday. You're telling me our ancestors worked a two-day work week and then just... chilled for the other five days? What were they doing, perfecting their sourdough starters? Olivia: Pretty much, minus the sourdough! And that's the bombshell at the heart of the book we're diving into today: Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman. Jackson: Okay, a title like that has my attention. But is this just another one of those pop-history books with a catchy premise? Olivia: That's the fascinating part. The author, James Suzman, isn't just an armchair historian. He's a social anthropologist from Cambridge who spent nearly three decades living with and studying one of the last hunter-gatherer groups on Earth, the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert. He saw this 15-hour work week with his own eyes. Jackson: Whoa, okay. So he has receipts. This isn't theoretical; it's based on real, lived experience. That changes things. So what did life actually look like for these people who had so much... free time?

Olivia: Well, your first reaction is the same one that dominated anthropology for a century. The prevailing view, borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, was that their life was "nasty, brutish, and short." A constant, desperate struggle for survival. Jackson: Right, that’s what I was taught. You wake up, you hunt a mammoth, you hope the mammoth doesn't hunt you back, you find a few berries, and you try not to die before you're thirty. Olivia: Exactly. And in the 1960s, an anthropologist named Richard Borshay Lee went to the Kalahari to document this struggle. He wanted to measure just how hard the Ju/'hoansi had to work to eke out a living. He was meticulous. For months, he followed them, weighing every single morsel of food they gathered, timing their "work" activities with a stopwatch. Jackson: That sounds incredibly tedious. He was basically auditing their entire existence. What did he find? Olivia: He found the exact opposite of what he expected. He discovered that the average adult spent only about seventeen hours a week on what we'd call subsistence work—hunting, gathering, finding food. And they weren't starving. Their daily caloric intake was well over 2,100 calories, perfectly adequate. They were healthier, taller, and lived longer than people in many neighboring farming societies. Jackson: Wait a minute. Seventeen hours? That’s it? And they were healthy? So the whole "nasty, brutish, and short" thing was a complete myth? Olivia: A profound one. Lee’s research was so revolutionary it helped inspire a new term for these societies, coined by the great anthropologist Marshall Sahlins: "the original affluent society." Jackson: 'Original affluent society.' I love that phrase. But how can you be affluent if you have... nothing? No cars, no houses, no 401(k)s. Olivia: Sahlins had a brilliant line on this. He said there are two paths to affluence. One is to produce much, which is our path. The other is to desire little. The Ju/'hoansi were affluent because their material wants were modest and easily met by their environment. They didn't see the world as a place of scarcity, but of abundance. The forest was their parent, always providing. Jackson: Okay, but this still feels a bit... romanticized. I mean, human nature is human nature. Surely there was jealousy. What happened when one hunter was way better than everyone else? Didn't he become the big shot, the CEO of the tribe? Olivia: That's a fantastic question, because they had a powerful social technology to prevent exactly that. It’s a practice called "insulting the meat." Jackson: Insulting the meat? What, like, "This wildebeest tastes a bit gamey, Grog"? Olivia: Precisely. When a hunter makes a big kill, a huge eland, for example, he's expected to be extremely humble about it. When he gets back to camp, no one congratulates him. Instead, they complain. They'll say things like, "What is this? A bag of bones? I suppose we'll have to eat it since there's nothing else." Jackson: That's hilarious! It's the complete opposite of our culture. It's like getting a huge promotion and your coworkers just go, "Oh, Senior Vice President? That title sounds a little flimsy. Are you sure it's a real promotion?" Olivia: Exactly! The goal is to "cool his heart," to prevent any one person from accumulating too much pride or social capital. It ensures that the meat, the most valuable resource, is seen as a collective good, not a result of individual genius. It's a powerful leveling mechanism to maintain their radical egalitarianism. They worked hard to keep everyone equal. Jackson: Wow. So their "work" wasn't just hunting and gathering; a lot of it was social work, actively maintaining the community's health by managing ego. That's a kind of labor we don't even measure. Olivia: And it was all based on an immediate-return system. You get food, you eat it. There was no concept of hoarding or accumulating wealth for a distant future. Which leads to the big question... Jackson: Yeah, if this system was so successful it lasted for hundreds of thousands of years—basically all of human history—what on earth happened to us? Why am I sitting here with a mortgage and an overflowing inbox, feeling like I never have enough?

Olivia: That's the pivot point of the entire book. Suzman argues that our modern work anxiety, our entire economic system, can be traced back to a single, world-altering invention that happened about 10,000 years ago: farming. Jackson: Farming. I always thought of agriculture as humanity's greatest step forward. It let us build civilizations, create art, develop science. Olivia: It did all of those things. But it came at a staggering cost to our relationship with work and time. Hunter-gatherers lived in an "immediate return" economy. You pick a berry, you eat it. The reward is instant. Farming introduced what's called a "delayed return" economy. Jackson: Let me see if I get this. That's the difference between grabbing a snack from the fridge and planting a seed, then spending the next six months watering it, weeding it, worrying about pests, drought, and floods, all in the hope that you'll eventually get a crop. Olivia: You've nailed it. For the first time, humans had to labor for a future reward they couldn't guarantee. This created a cascade of changes. It created the concept of property—this is my land, my crop. It created the need for surplus—we have to store grain in case of famine. And with surplus and property came hierarchy. Some people had more land and more grain than others. Jackson: And suddenly, you have the first rich people and the first poor people. Olivia: Exactly. And this new way of life led to the rise of cities. Suzman uses the example of Uruk, one of the first cities in Mesopotamia. In a city, you're surrounded by strangers. You're no longer just meeting your needs; you're comparing yourself to others. You see a merchant with finer clothes, a priest with a bigger house. Scarcity is no longer just about a lack of food; it becomes aspirational. Jackson: It's a manufactured scarcity. There might be enough for everyone to live, but there isn't enough for everyone to be at the top of the pyramid. Olivia: And that, Suzman argues, gave rise to what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called "the malady of infinite aspiration." In a simple society, your desires are finite. In a complex, urban society, your desires become infinite because you can always see someone with more. The goalposts are constantly moving. Jackson: That is the most perfect description of the internet I've ever heard. That's social media in a nutshell. You're not just keeping up with the Joneses next door; you're trying to keep up with every curated, perfect life you see on your feed, from everywhere in the world, all at once. The malady of infinite aspiration is the engine of Instagram. Olivia: It truly is. And this isn't just a feeling; it has real economic consequences. Look at the data on CEO pay. In the 1960s, a CEO in the US earned about 20 times the average worker. By 2015, that number had surged to nearly 300 times. The aspirational gap isn't just in our heads; it's baked into our economic structure. Jackson: So we've built a global system that's designed to make us feel perpetually dissatisfied. And that dissatisfaction is what powers the whole machine. It makes us work harder, produce more, consume more, all in a race that has no finish line. That's... deeply unsettling. Olivia: It is. And it leads to some dark places. The book touches on the phenomenon of karoshi in Japan—literally "death from overwork." People working themselves to death, not for survival, but to meet the relentless demands of this modern work culture. It's the ultimate, tragic expression of this system we've built. Jackson: Wow. From a 15-hour work week to literally dying at your desk. That's the journey of the last 10,000 years. So where does this leave us? We can't just abandon our cities and go back to the Kalahari. Are we just doomed to this anxiety loop forever?

Olivia: Well, Suzman is clear that he's not advocating for a return to the past. That's impossible. His point is more profound. He wants us to recognize that our current relationship with work—the 40-hour week, the hustle culture, the constant low-grade anxiety—is not a law of nature. It's not the default human condition. Jackson: It's a cultural choice. A path we took. Olivia: Exactly. It's a piece of software we installed in our brains about 10,000 years ago, and it's getting buggy. The "economic problem" of scarcity, which we treat as the fundamental, unsolvable problem of humanity, was, for most of our species' history, a non-issue. Realizing that gives us permission to question it. Jackson: So it's about understanding the history so we can have more agency in writing the future. Olivia: Precisely. And this has never been more relevant. We're on the cusp of another massive transformation with AI and automation. Keynes famously predicted back in the 1930s that by now, technology would have solved the economic problem and we'd all be working 15-hour weeks. Jackson: And he was half right! The technology is here. We have the productivity. But we're still working longer and harder than ever. Olivia: Which leaves us with a powerful, open question that the book forces you to confront. As machines become capable of doing all the "necessary" work, what will we do? Will we finally achieve Keynes's vision, a world of cultivated leisure where we "prefer the good to the useful"? Or will we just invent new, more elaborate, and ultimately pointless jobs to keep ourselves busy and maintain the hierarchy? Jackson: That is the question, isn't it? Will we use this opportunity to free ourselves, or will we double down on the malady of infinite aspiration? That's a heavy thought to end on. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. If you suddenly had a 25-hour-a-week "leisure surplus," what would you actually do with it? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. Olivia: It’s a future we’re all building together, whether we realize it or not. This is Aibrary, signing off.