According to the South African anthropologist James Suzman, we should draw inspiration from our hunter-gatherer ancestors and radically rethink our relationship to professional activity. By emancipating ourselves from our “strange cult” of work.
Few are those who are satisfied with the work and who do not devote too much time to it, says James Suzman. The anthropologist [sud-africain] who studies our Stone Age ancestors has long lived alongside the Ju/’hoansi [de la communauté des Bushmen] in the Kalahari Desert, Southern Africa. They are doing better than us, says the researcher at the University of Cambridge [au Royaume-Uni].
DIE ZEIT In your book [“Travailler : la grande affaire de l’humanité”, éd. Flammarion, 2021], you explain that our ancestors worked less than us but were happier. How did you come to such a conclusion ?
JAMES SUZMAN Our hunter-gatherer ancestors only worked to satisfy their needs, no more. Archaeological research establishes that they spent only fifteen to seventeen hours a week in search of food. The rest of the time they were not working. They didn’t stock up and stopped hunting as soon as they gathered what they needed for the day. The term “work” that we know today did not even exist for them. Conversely, we spend insane time at work, even when there is nothing useful to do. And even when we no longer need to work to satisfy our needs. In our society, people who can’t find a job are even punished, it’s absurd! But I’m not saying that we have to embellish the past and that everything is dreadful today. Rather, I want to learn from the past.
Let’s try to learn some lessons, then. Does working less really make you happier? ?
It depends on how you spend the rest of your time. For most of history, people didn’t have jobs, but they had things to do. The idea of having less work makes us moderns panic. But that’s an aberration, because our ancestors did very well for millennia. They were also much more relaxed than us, in a way that is almost inaccessible to us today. We fear that idleness is the mother of all vices. We are unable to disconnect for good: we have a bad conscience, we can’t help but think regarding the next file. Our ancestors were much more free once their search for food was over than we are at the end of a day’s work.
What did they do following the hunting and gathering was over ?
They were doing rock painting, playing music or tinkering: they were just doing what they liked. Today, we are so used to being delegated work that we forget to look for other occupations. It is enough to think back to the first confinement to see that we are not made to remain inactive. The
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David Gutensohn
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