Downtime

First, I guess, people figured out that they don’t have to spend all day gathering plants to eat. They can bring the seeds home, then plant stuff nearby. That”ll save time.

But then, they really didn’t need everyone to help gather the food anymore. It was all nearby. Still took a lot of work, but definitely there was less for everyone to do simply to get food on the table.

So they started to specialize. Whatever free time they had, they gave up in order to do other stuff. Basket-weaver, hole-digger, stone-sharpener, lawyer, priest, electrician, and even writer.

Stone-sharpeners might not have to raise the food. They’d get food by sharpening stones for people who raised the food. Or they’d give sharp stones to someone who did something for someone who did something for someone who raised the food. And so on.

One guy can now raise food for lots and lots of people, who can do all kinds of other things. If it weren’t for those first seeds growing near the cave in the old days, then we’d never have mold-inspectors, or rayon manufacturers, or aestheticians. And we’d never have bloggers.

So someone else built my house and grew my food, which is great. And someone made an iPod, so that I can listen to someone else discuss science while I do the dishes.

With the radio, then the TV, and even more so with the iPod, we can fill up time when we’re already doing something else. Magazine racks in the bathroom, TVs in the kitchen, and iPods everywhere. If you wanted, you could never have dead time.

6 Responses to Downtime

  1. JB May 6, 2009 at 3:51 pm #

    Hmmm, I’ve thought about this too and I think it went a little differently, and. When I ponder this, here’s how I ponder it.

    First everybody fended for themselves, gathering nuts and berries and killing the odd squirrel, slapping some branches over a fallen log to make a lean-to. But that still didn’t take all day and all night every day. Some surplus food accumulated, allowing individuals time to do whatever attracted them.

    Some of those individuals got good at doing other items that helped in life. Like making shoes. Other individuals found out about the awesome shoes the one guy made and offered to trade shoes for food, freeing that guy up to make more shoes.

    Eventually that guy had to do little else other than make shoes in order to make a living.

    In this way the economy was born and people began to specialize, growing more and more complex. The shoemaker found a guy who made awesome leather and eventually that leather guy didn’t have to do anything other than make leather. The leather guy supported that guy who had really good cows until that guy got to spend all his time figuring out how to raise the best leather cows.

    And they all got stressed out and liked to relax, and that one guy at the camp fire who had the best stories, well, one day he said “I can’t tell any more stories, I have to go gather some nuts ’cause I’m hungry” and all the folks around the campfire said “nono, we want another story! here’s some food!” and eventually all he had to do was come up with stories.

    And now I get paid to “product manage” software that “helps” people connect to the Internet.

  2. weeklyrob May 6, 2009 at 10:18 pm #

    Could’ve been, I guess. We don’t really know exactly how it happened, of course.

    I’m guessing that we don’t want to take this question very seriously, so I really do hesitate to say the following… but, for the sake of weeklyrob’s reputation as the #1 go-to blog for all information about everything:

    The idea that agriculture and excess food led to specialization and therefore modern society is pretty widely accepted.

    It’s sometimes called The Neolithic Revolution.

    Again, I can’t swear that it’s true (rather than the “Creative Revolution” that you describe). But in my post, I was paraphrasing some stuff that I’d heard many times over back in the days that I was DEFINITELY going to be an anthropologist.

  3. jb May 7, 2009 at 6:52 am #

    Yes, while I was speculating based on my experience as a musician, which of course should modify the gravitas with which my commentary on the subject is taken. šŸ™‚

    I think it might be one of those subjects that I like thinking about but don’t want to have my daydreaming ruined by actual scholarly thought or investigation.

    I like my version better. Maybe somebdoy I’ll take anthropology 101 and write a paper on it for a prof to scoff at and rip apart. But I’d probably still get an A, ’cause that kind of prof always was a sucker for my last-minute paper writing.

  4. weeklyrob May 7, 2009 at 7:24 pm #

    “That kind of prof” was always a sucker for your wily ways.

  5. Kevin May 11, 2009 at 9:31 am #

    Yeah, except we didn’t figure out we could bring the seeds back and plant them nearby, right? We ate the food, and then went to someplace nearby and pooped out the seeds, and thus we invented “locally grown produce”. It’s all about high-quality poop, which is pretty much always true. Y’see, evolution found a way!

  6. weeklyrob May 11, 2009 at 4:17 pm #

    I suggest to you that back when they were simply pooping it out, or carrying seeds back by accident (some are sticky, some are prickly), there wasn’t real agriculture or specialization.

    They needed to figure it out to do it on a serious scale.

    And I’m NOT addressing the evolution comment. šŸ˜‰

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