I’ve been reading some oral histories from early/mid-20th century, midcoast Maine in the last month.
One theme is scarcity (and the ingenuity borne of it). People didn’t have a lot, so they needed to be clever with what they had. They worked incredibly hard, and invented/sought out tools to make their lives physically easier. They toiled for most of their lives, but they saw their known tool get easier as time went on (upgrading from jute to nylon netting, hydraulic winches instead of manual cranks, sonar instead of trial and error).
The people who worked (what seemed to me to be) the worst jobs had a common refrain: “the best thing about X is nobody tells me to do <hard thing> at <unreasonable time> in <unreasonable conditions>. I’m my own boss, make my own decisions, and it keeps me happy.” They owned all the highs, lows, and war stories of business ownership.
Also, a fun anecdote. They asked one guy “what would you tell somebody young who’s new into fishing?” He thought hard, then said “I would tell them to study hard and become a doctor or a lawyer or something, if they’re interested in money”. Made me chuckle!
Anyways, this is to say that it’s always been hard to seek out self employment or total self sufficiency. Generally, you could always trade off comfort for autonomy [1]. Nowadays, we as a society have made inhabiting that material discomfort nearly illegal, as you imply. We raised the floor of material suffering, but the emotional and psychological floor is only elastically attached to that material floor, with an elasticity coefficient that seems to vary widely from person to person. It seems to have been a monotonic transformation so far, but time will tell.
One theme is scarcity (and the ingenuity borne of it). People didn’t have a lot, so they needed to be clever with what they had. They worked incredibly hard, and invented/sought out tools to make their lives physically easier. They toiled for most of their lives, but they saw their known tool get easier as time went on (upgrading from jute to nylon netting, hydraulic winches instead of manual cranks, sonar instead of trial and error).
The people who worked (what seemed to me to be) the worst jobs had a common refrain: “the best thing about X is nobody tells me to do <hard thing> at <unreasonable time> in <unreasonable conditions>. I’m my own boss, make my own decisions, and it keeps me happy.” They owned all the highs, lows, and war stories of business ownership.
Also, a fun anecdote. They asked one guy “what would you tell somebody young who’s new into fishing?” He thought hard, then said “I would tell them to study hard and become a doctor or a lawyer or something, if they’re interested in money”. Made me chuckle!
Anyways, this is to say that it’s always been hard to seek out self employment or total self sufficiency. Generally, you could always trade off comfort for autonomy [1]. Nowadays, we as a society have made inhabiting that material discomfort nearly illegal, as you imply. We raised the floor of material suffering, but the emotional and psychological floor is only elastically attached to that material floor, with an elasticity coefficient that seems to vary widely from person to person. It seems to have been a monotonic transformation so far, but time will tell.
[1]: https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/hp5pmb0n95u...