I don’t know about you, but for me, work is the side-quest.

We? Sucks to be you but that doesn’t apply everywhere.

Companies need to make line go up. You could increase productivity by using more tech (computers, tools, etc), but you can also do it by working longer. So the people in charge said “why not both?!” And here we are.

I feel like some of it also is “work until you’re done” still. Hourly jobs pay per hour. But salary jobs typically pay you for work accomplishments, not time. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of tech improvements and processes have oversold their productivity improvements… example: AI will make you go code 10x as fast! So managers hear that (typically upper management, not middle/lower management who actually see it) and thus expect people to instantly do 10x the work. So you now have to bust your ass off working longer hours to meet that expectation. Good middle management will push back and reset expectations, but often the damage is done when they can half their work force with the assumption that they’re going to be so much more productive now that this new magical tool is in place.

Because we allow things to be this way.

Farms had a lot more work than just 9-5. Labor unions fought very hard, and many paid with their lives, to get work hours restricted to 9-5.

Yeah, but the trade off was that you were bound to the land and social hierarchy was much more rigidly enforced. Your pay was mostly in food and accommodations unless you were in a trade, nobility, or the clergy.

Why do people work more? Because in an industrial setting, the methods of compensation and employer responsibilities are vastly different. Employers are incentivized to treat labor as any other good and will try to lower that cost where possible. In contrast, if you’re a form of bondage, your employer is more likely to treat you like capital.

I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work).

Yup. In the ancient world, ascetics and monks would practice “having daily schedules” alongside various other harsh forms of penitence, like self-flagellation. One of the ancient Greek authors (Plato?) spoke about it unfavourably even in that context.

The flip side of that, is that if your animals or crops need something now, they need it now. There’s no maximum hours or work-life balance, either. Still, it’s fair to say most people that have experienced that much prefer it, if you put aside how uncomfortable the work itself is.

Because it’s kind of crazy, it’s also worth mentioning that people slept twice in a day, with some time spent up during the night.

There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true?

Kind of.

Confining ourselves to Europe, there were a lot of public holidays in ancient Rome, and to a lesser extent lots of religious days and festivals in medieval Europe. The medieval holy days were more about fasting or similar than time off of work, though. And, in Rome, there were no weekends yet, so holidays basically served the same role.

Plus, most holidays were optional in both, so a deeply poor person or a slave with a tough master might work fairly continuously.

If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?

When industialisation came in, 12 hour days were fairly standard. Arguably, working hours have gone down.

As to why we work on schedules now, you basically just have to in a complex, highly specialised society. If you’re using tools you made and maybe a couple your friend the blacksmith made, and using them to produce food and housing from “your own” land, sure, it just all has to get done sometime. If you’re having a formal meeting or vote and show up 2 days late, like is recorded becoming a problem in medieval republics, it’s a bit disruptive.

Capitalism

I work to live and everyone I know does. No one controls their work gig outside of finding it.

I would suspect entropy. Second Law of Thermodynamics states that total disorder is always increasing over time.

1. Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.

2. Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of “how much do you need for living” and “how easily could you find another job”.

Subsistence farming is a lot of work. Apart from that, the wealthy have always acquired their wealth by theft, usually from the less wealthy. So we’ve always been living to work, because the ruling class needs us to steal from.

Not quite sure what you’re taking about. The number of vacation days has been increasing over the last few decades while work hours have gone down. At least in most developed countries. Hell, even having the weekend off has only been around for a hundred years or so. I sure as shit wouldn’t want to go back to work on some medieval farm …

The more productive we have become the greater the opportunity cost of not working has become.

People generally tend to choose to work the same hours to afford more stuff.

Because we’re Germans, not Italians