How Much We Must Work Depends on Physical Reality and Human Nature
We shouldn’t have to work more than necessary.
Specifically, not more than required to be in good health — and if we are, then we aren’t as free as we could be.¹ This begs the question: What is really necessary? And what are the limits to how little we can work? The physical universe forms the ultimate barrier, which determines what we need and how much we must work to produce it.
The rest depends on us — and the limits of our behaviors.
Physical reality forms the lowest limit. The physical minimum depends on 1) the choices we make, 2) our infrastructure and technology, and 3) the skills of those who do the work.
We can’t work less than physics demands.
What is needed for our bodies to work properly depends on our biology, and what we must do to care for them depends on our physical surroundings. The time it takes to farm, clean, gather water, and build shelters depends on natural laws and systems.
However, the time required is not set in stone. For starters, it varies with our choices: both a big and a small house can keep us warm but require different amounts of labor to heat and maintain. It also changes with our technology and skill: an excavator can dig faster than a shovel, and a trained operator can do it quicker than a five-year-old. Consequently, the time required to care for our health depends on how we choose to do it and the means at our disposal. Technology is arguably the most important of these parameters: no matter how skilled a person is with a shovel, they can never out-compete an excavator. At the extreme, we make robots do everything on our behalf.
Fundamentally, the universe determines what is necessary for human health. The time required to care for it depends on our choices, productivity, and the people who do the work. However, once these parameters are fixed, it is physically impossible to work less.
It forms the ultimate barrier to how little we can work.
There are human factors that limit how little we can work. Some labor is likely required to make us do what’s necessary and avoid harmful behaviors.
There are behavioral limits to how little we can work.
We must manage not only the physical world — but also ourselves. We don’t always do what we ought to and can quickly turn violent, which is especially true on a societal level.
Making large numbers of humans cooperate is a lot of work. Today, we rely on unrelated strangers for our survival — we get our food from supermarkets, our water through taps, and our homes heated by electricity produced in power plants.² However, strangers won’t help out of the goodness of their hearts — they require money in return. We collectively play a game where we agree that pieces of paper can be exchanged for goods and services. Even though such fictions would be meaningless to a chimp — we humans use it, and other notions such as corporations and governments, to collaborate in large numbers.
Playing games, however, comes at a cost.
For example, in our current system, someone must manage the flow of money: employees must be paid, transactions must be processed, and taxes must be calculated. Keeping track of the game state and managing the rules requires work. And once the rules are in place, additional work is required to prevent cheating, which, today, is handled through law enforcement and courts.
As such, it is unclear how close we can get to the physical limit. Some work is is likely socially required to make us do what’s necessary and manage conflicts — which requires more work than is physically needed.
In other words, we can’t work less than physics demands.
But, we must also do some work to manage ourselves.
Footnotes
¹For the connection between freedom, health, and work, see Why you are less free if you have to work more than necessary to care for your needs.
²Seabright observes that most modern humans get large portions of their goods from unrelated strangers.(p.4, Seabright, 2010) Likewise, Powers et al., argue that the satisfaction of vital human needs is today dependent on the exchange of resources between unrelated and unfamiliar strangers.(p. 280, Powers et al., 2021)
Bibliography
[1] Seabright, Paul. _The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life_. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2010.
[2] Powers, Simon T., Carel P. van Schaik, and Laurent Lehmann. “Cooperation in Large-Scale Human Societies — What, If Anything, Makes It Unique, and How Did It Evolve?” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 30, no. 4 (2021): 280–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21909.
