09/07/2026
Are we actually working more than people used to?
You may have seen the claim that medieval peasants worked only 150 days a year, while modern workers spend most of the year on the job. It makes for a compelling story about what we’ve lost to economic progress.
But we’re not counting the same things.
Those estimates often refer to the labor peasants owed to the lords whose land they occupied. They still had their own crops to grow, animals to tend, firewood and water to collect, food to preserve, bread to bake, cloth to make, and homes and tools to maintain.
A great deal of life was labor.
Today, much of that work has disappeared so completely from our lives that we hardly think about it.
That may be one of the easiest things to miss about economic progress: the better it works, the easier it is to forget what it replaced.
This Labor Day, it’s worth appreciating not only the work people do, but all the work we no longer have to do.
One of the things that irks my choler, yanks my goat if you like, is this idea that the medieval peasant led a life of incredible leisure, had to work vastly less than we poor saps ground down under capitalism have to. It's entirely nonsense of course : Plowing and harvesting were backbre
