You’re likely familiar with the anxious pull of productivity. Maybe you’re sensing it right now, thinking about the unread emails or Slack messages that are piling up as you read this, instead of doing whatever it is you're paid to do. For many of us, that sense that we have to be constantly “on” drones in the background of our brains, the ambient hum of our professional lives (and, let’s be honest, our personal ones too). It has become such a given that we don’t often stop to think where and how it started. Was it with the smartphone, when we first began carrying our inboxes around in our pockets? Maybe the invention of the internet, which connected—and allowed us to work—across time and space?
In his newest book, Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, James Suzman, Ph.D., goes back much, much further than that. Ten thousand years, in fact, to the agricultural revolution, and to the beginning of food insecurity. In the case of drought or pests, farms would be destroyed and famine would ensue. Effectively, this was the beginning of the complementary notions of scarcity and productivity: You can never have enough, and so you should always be working to produce more. Sound familiar?
To explain why and how this happened, Suzman draws heavily on the decades-long work he has done studying the Bushmen of southern Africa. In particular, the Ju/’hoansi, a tribe whose members, up until the latter half of the 20th century, were still hunting and gathering like their ancestors some 200,000 years before. (To pronounce Ju/’hoansi without the click they use, Suzman advises combining the French “jus” with “waahsi.”)
By juxtaposing this anomalous foraging community—where members worked only 15 hours a week—with the farming societies that followed, Suzman highlights the shifts that ushered in the ideas that now define modern work. It’s not just that we became obsessed with productivity, but that we fundamentally changed our relationship to things like time, history, the land, and one another. During a pandemic, when we’ve all been forced to reconsider the givens of our work-crazed culture, and to reckon with the economic inequality and environmental degradation it has wrought, Suzman isn’t just showing what life was like before. He’s also putting forth an idea of what it could still be.
GQ: This idea that we have to always be working, and always be productive, seems to start with farming and agricultural societies, right?
James Suzman: This is kind of the root of it. Before agricultural people, hunter-gatherers had work that, in a sense, fed them. People found the work very satisfying.
People now say, "How is it that they worked 15 hours a week? Weren't they bored afterward?" Hunting captured the heart, the soul, the mind, and it was this extraordinary fusion of everything—your intelligence and your nerves. People were really satisfied after. It's the same as us. If you play a sport, or do some kind of work, or go for a hike, you feel this satisfaction. It's much easier to relax and unwind.
What happened with the transition to farming was that suddenly the work day just got extended, massively, because people were hostage to a whole set of new risks. Suddenly, scarcity became a real thing, and work became this all-encompassing, virtuous thing. “Laziness is bad, work is good.”
Because if you weren't working, you were losing time that could be spent producing something, and creating value and a surplus of energy.
Part of the reason hunter-gatherers could get away with working so little was because they actually had such a well-adapted system for provisioning themselves. They were always confident that they could meet their needs in a few spontaneous hours of effort.
As soon as people got sucked into farming, they suddenly were dependent on a couple of high-producing crops. A farmer's job is basically to try and mimic the ideal environmental conditions for whatever crop it is. When the rain isn't enough, you try to get water to it. When there are too many bugs, you take the bugs away. It's this constant cycle of trying to mimic control over landscape, and effectively working against the grain of the landscape. It demanded a huge amount of work, and the risk of not doing that work was that every year, you could get hit with a catastrophic famine.
The whole thing with farming is that there are just so many vulnerabilities that people began to really fetishize scarcity. How do you mitigate that risk? Create surpluses. So there's never enough. You can never have too much in reserve, which underwrites, in many ways, our thinking about money. People are prepared to acquire more money than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime. It all comes down to the psychosis of scarcity.
So before farmers, how did the hunter-gatherers think about security? Is that not even a notion to them?
No, it wasn't. For the Bushmen, and I think pretty much all small-scale hunter-gatherers—obviously, though, you’re dealing with huge periods of history, 300,000 years of hunter-gatherers—all the evidence suggests that probably most of these cultures thought about this in the same way. The Kalahari [Desert, in Botswana] is a rough place. It's basically a desert, it's dry. If I were to dump a random person there, they would die within three or four days.
For the Bushmen, in that environment, they were all utterly capable, and it was almost second nature because it was so familiar. They had roughly 100 different plant species that they could make use of. They could hunt a huge number of things, and understand where they were, why they were there, simply because it was what you lived and experienced every day.
As a result of that, they didn't really experience the kind of vulnerability farmers experienced. When you farm one or two crops, you're effectively putting all your eggs in one basket. Whereas if you're depending on 100 wild plants, each of which responds slightly differently to slightly different environmental circumstances, you're able to adapt with your environment's own dynamic responses. A year with poor rainfall, or a year with too much rain.
Really bad droughts can, of course, be difficult for everybody. But in really bad droughts, some things thrive at the expense of others. In the Kalahari, in a really bad drought, lots of the animals get less forage and they stay closer to water points, so it means that people can eat more meat during a drought year. So they're able to respond dynamically to the environment. Even in the worst times of the year, generally people were confident that they could always meet their daily energy needs on the basis of a few hours of basically spontaneous efforts. This seems to be pretty much the norm for all small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.
I write about a place in the Cape Coast in South Africa, where there's evidence of people living in some caves called Blombos, 100,000 years ago, where there's the first evidence of art. These guys were able to exploit the surf-and-turf environment, picking cockles on the beach, foraging, fishing inland. They were able to meet their basic needs very quickly and far easier than the Kalahari. They basically had this confidence in the providence of their environment. I suppose it's not quite as ostentatious, but in terms of their needs and ambitions, it was a bit like living inside a massive Walmart, where you just took whatever you wanted from the shelves.
Suppose people could do that. If you’re in a Walmart and everything's free, then everything in a sense loses the value. There's no value in accumulating. There's no value in trying to control the flow of resources. That’s why, in turn, they were so hugely egalitarian. As far as they were concerned, the environment shared with them, so they shared with each other. It was a fundamentally different way of engaging with the world around them.
The word that stands out to me is spontaneous, because it seems like a totally different relationship with time. They seem oriented very much to the present. You bring up Walmart, and I'm thinking of Americans in the beginning of the pandemic hoarding toilet paper. That's an orientation toward the future. It’s interesting to think that our obsession with productivity and scarcity is almost about our relationship with time.
Living with the Bushmen, it was one of the first strange things that I struggled to get my head around. It was 30 years ago, and things have changed a lot since then, but when I started I was like, “I want to get your historical story,” and people would say, "Actually, we don't have any." They just didn't care about the past, and they didn't think a great deal about the future either. Life was incredibly present-focused. It was a very different way of engaging with the world, and incredibly refreshing.
In terms of how they described history, there was yesterday, the day before yesterday, long ago, and then there were first times, which was this kind of mythological space where animals were people and people were animals. There just really wasn't this kind of obsession with time.
As soon as you get cultures of ownership and property accumulation, suddenly things like lineages become really important, history becomes really important. People talk to the past to justify the present. For the Ju/’hoansi, they almost viewed time in this fourth-dimensional space, as if it was something people existed in, rather than through. And the world just didn't really change a great deal. Sometimes I'd be talking with a group of old men and women, and I'd ask who was older than the other. They'd say, "I actually don't remember.” They just didn't really care. There was this extraordinary disengagement with time.
I've written about it a little bit in the context of things like meditation, and this aspiration we have in the West—or many of us do—to somehow exit from time, to be fully present. To an extraordinary sense, foraging cultures were utterly present because life was life. Nobody was hostage to outlandish ambitions. If you're a good hunter and you got pleasure from hunting, you hunted. If you're a good artist and you got pleasure from doing art, you made art. But there wasn't this "I want to be," or "I have to get to this point or that." Nobody was hostage to ambition, hostage to predictions of the future, hostage to aspirations that they hadn't yet met.
In a culture like that, does laziness not exist?
No, laziness definitely exists. People can be hard workers or lazy workers. There is work to do. It's just not viewed as a massive deal. In post-agricultural societies, we have the obsession with freeloading. The freeloaders are a universal villain. If you're left-wing, the freeloaders are the idle rich. If you're on the right wing, the freeloaders are the idle poor. But everybody agrees the freeloader is a baddie.
Freeloading in hunter-gatherer societies wasn't a big deal. For example, meat was by far the most important thing. Distributing the meat, because it was viewed as the most valuable thing, caused people endless grief. The way they organized things was that the owner of the meat was whoever made the arrow that was used to kill it. That meant that the club-footed, the lazy, and the elderly could all actually be the owner of an animal killed by the best hunter in the village, who'd go and hunt every day while the others didn't want to.
Again, using that extended Walmart analogy, if there's somebody who just can't be asked to get up and pull their bag of cookies off the shelf, eventually it was like, "Oh, you lazy sod," and somebody else would go and do it. But the costs are not so big.
In a sense this was, I think, the key to humanity's success. The fact is that most of us aren't intrinsically that lazy. We actually feel a bit lost and listless if we don't have anything to do. So most of us work anyway. But our ability to look after others who aren't particularly good at doing something was the success. This was what enabled our species to eventually colonize all the earth, the fact that we could support people who weren't equal contributors.
And true to form, people weren't lazy! You didn't need to sanction people to make them not lazy. We are, in a fundamental sense, born to work. We miss it when we don't have that purpose. But for Ju/’hoansi, doing two or three hours of really intense, purposeful activity in a day is hugely satisfying. Then take it easy.
Right now, with the pandemic, people are beginning to think about work a lot differently. What do you think might change about work in the future?
We're on a much tougher lockdown [in England] than you guys are, but we've had these endless furlough schemes. We haven't had stimulus checks. We've got furlough schemes. The government’s effectively picking up salaries for everybody. There's a lot of talk about, if we'd known a year ago where we'd be now, would we have done experiments on something like universal basic income? Everybody gets a lump sum of money, and that's a way of beginning to break out of this productivity-obsessed cycle that we're in.
For me there's a single big issue. Twenty-first-century capitalism has issues about inequality and all the rest. But the main reason to move beyond it is that our productivity-at-all-costs mindset—our determination to keep everybody in work, to keep the growth cycle going—has huge environmental consequences. The honest truth is, scarcity just doesn't exist anymore, for some—certainly not in the industrialized world. In agricultural economies, you had 85% of people working the land, including children, and scarcity was real and visceral. Not working, you died. Now, in the United States, 1% of people are involved in food production, and they produce so much food that as much food ends up in landfills as it does in everybody's bellies every year.
In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist, wrote "The Affluent Society.” He wrote that he was terrified that the U.S. was beginning to squander the wealth it had won. He talks about how scarcity had become manufactured, in the form of products that people buy. In an agricultural civilization, scarcity was real. Now we manufacture scarcity. The vast advertising industry is trying to persuade us that there’s something we need, even though we'd never heard of it a week ago. We do that, in a sense, to keep the world economy grinding on. It’s not about renewal, it's about replacement. We're living in a fundamental contradiction. We've organized our economy on the principles of scarcity, yet the reality is that our economy is one of astonishing abundance, to the point that we have to manufacture scarcity.
It's interesting that it goes back to that idea about time: We're always chasing to be somewhere that we're not already.
This is also where the whole interesting thing about inequality comes in as well. Often, we're chasing our neighbor. We measure ourselves, in a sense, not by what we need, but by what we aspire to, and what we aspire to is often shaped by the person next door. You get this avariceness amplified.
There is this section in the book about cities. Countryside people are focused on producing. In the cities, it was all about monopolizing and controlling the expenditure of energy. Money is a proxy for energy. In cities, you got confronted by the gold-plated ostentation of the riches down the road. It's all about this iconography of wealth, success, power, having more. The Trump Tower psychosis. Who needs a gold-plated shitter? You just don't.
This interviewed has been edited and condensed.
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