Sahlins had already remarked upon the superior “quality of working life” enjoyed by primitive producers, to borrow a catchphrase from the pseudo-humanist experts in job redesign and job enrichment. In addition to shorter hours, “flextime” and the more reliable “safety net” afforded by general food sharing, forager’s work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great utopians called for. Our “commute” is dead time, and unpaid to boot; they cannot even leave the campsite without “reading” the landscape in a potentially productive way. Our children are subject to compulsory school attendance laws; their unsupervised offspring play at adult activities until almost imperceptibly they take their place doing them. They are the makers and masters of their simple yet effective toolkits; we work for our machines, and this will soon be no metaphor, according to an expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “In general, robots will work for men, but there may be exceptions in which some robots are higher in the hierarchy than some humans.” The last word in equal employment opportunity.

— Primitive Affluence: A Postscript to Sahlins

I thought this did an ok job of discussing (or rehashing) the ridiculous amounts of extraneous/unenjoyable/fairly unnecessary work that we do (in comparison to subsistence work) without engaging in too much fetishization of the ‘primitive’.

I have had a couple bad weeks at work and Bob Black is really speaking to me as a result.