I think it is also important to be aware of simple living movements that we ideologically oppose. For example, many overworked people have been "romanticizing" hunter-gatherers since they can supposedly survive on much fewer labor hours than Westerners and are apparently much happier.
The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in 1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little."[1] Given a culture characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs.
[...]
Sahlins' argument partly relies on studies undertaken by McCarthy and McArthur in Arnhem Land, and by Richard Borshay Lee among the !Kung.[5][6] These studies show that hunter-gatherers need only work about fifteen to twenty hours a week in order to survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure.[4] Lee did not include food preparation time in his study, arguing that "work" should be defined as the time spent gathering enough food for sustenance. When total time spent on food acquisition, processing, and cooking was added together, the estimate per week was 44.5 hours for men and 40.1 hours for women, but Lee added that this is still less than the total hours spent on work and housework in many modern Western households.
[...]
Sahlins concludes that the hunter-gatherer only works three to five hours per adult worker each day in food production.[7][8] Using data gathered from various foraging societies and quantitative surveys done among the Arnhem Landers of Australia and quantitative materials cataloged by Richard Lee on the Dobe Bushmen of the Kalahari, Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer tribes are able to meet their needs through working roughly 15-20 hours per week or less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_societyhttps://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earthhttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-playThese attitudes have been commercialized over the past decade by a variety of primitive survivalist TV shows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs._Wildhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Survivalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivormanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Woman,_Wildhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_and_Afraidhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_with_Ed_StaffordOf course, primitive survivalism is just a fantasy that is far too extreme for 99.99% of people to actually try themselves, so there are also plenty of TV shows, Youtube channels, blogs, etc. about "homesteading". In a nutshell, homesteading involves self-sufficiency, minimizing luxuries, living rurally and "off the grid" since that is cheaper than living in a densely-populated area, etc. Although homesteading can theoretically consist of a noble life of subsistence agriculture, most of the portrayals in the media and in blogs involve ranching (e.g. raising chickens and cows) and hunting (for food and fur/clothing). Things such as selling eggs or fur are also recommended as a way to make a small amount of income (since true 100% one-person or one-family self-sufficiency isn't really possible unless you want to live like an actual caveman).
Here are some of the popular homesteading TV shows. You can find hundreds of blogs and Youtube channels as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Bush_Peoplehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%3A_The_Last_Frontierhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Alaskanshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Men_(TV_series)
https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/homestead-rescuehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon_Menhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Below_ZeroI think there is room for entryism into the homesteading movement to make it more ethical. There are some vegan homesteading blogs and forums, but they aren't nearly as prevalent as ranching/hunting homesteaders.
https://old.reddit.com/r/veganhomesteading/Considering that pre-industrial subsistence farmers also toiled for far fewer hours (and far fewer total workdays) than post-industrial laborers, it shouldn't be too difficult to replace the idolization of hunter-gatherers with romanticism surrounding subsistence farmers:
One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
Therefore, we must take a longer view and look back not just one hundred years, but three or four, even six or seven hundred. Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks.
[...]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year [...] A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.htmlhttps://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-moreA communist take on how the wealthy elite believed the self-sufficiency of the peasantry made them too "lazy", and how the emerging industrialists saw a necessity for the peasantry to be forced into wage slavery so they would work longer hours in much worse conditions:
https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/I am not well-read on Marxism, but I believe one of the important concepts is that laborers in the post-industrial era are "alienated" from the products their labor produces. This is even more prevalent today in "paper-pushing" jobs where people file pointless paperwork all day to make a billionaire richer. What's the purpose in that? Where's the value in that? It is very easy to get burned out from doing that and want to escape to something more meaningful.
Subsistence agricultural labor may be difficult:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/aryan-labour/However, it is not alienating and soul-sucking, because the purpose of the labor is apparent. It also means you
only need to do enough work to procure the necessary amount of resources to live (i.e. simple living!). This is in contrast to the Western drudgery of having to work literally every single week ,without any purpose, just to live paycheck to paycheck.
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Some forums of interest:
This one seems to have a lot of communist/anarchist people who think robots should do all the work while they lazily sit at home all day and watch TV or something. But it's one of the more active forums revolving around discontent for Western labor conditions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/A more general forum for young people disillusioned with the Western narrative of "go to college so you can get a good job and buy consumer products".
https://old.reddit.com/r/lostgeneration/https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/https://old.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/https://old.reddit.com/r/Degrowth/Although accumulating enough wealth to retire early and live off of the accumulated wealth doesn't fundamentally challenge the system, it's at least an option I suppose. Although, I imagine the types of people who make enough money to do such a thing are considered "skilled professionals", and if enough of them remove themselves from the workforce, it may end up having adverse effects for business elites?
https://old.reddit.com/r/leanfire/
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