…towards better mental health and in trying to prioritise ourselves, it’s very easy to lose touch with empathy.
kindness is essential. both towards yourself and others. put yourself first but make sure you’re not hurting your supporters in the process. you and your loved ones, both deserve love and care ✨
… remember that time changes. circumstances change. life isn’t constant.
all the efforts you’re making. all the tiny steps you’re taking. all the healing that you’re allowing yourself to go through. it’s all going to come together.
it’s going to give you a new, brighter and happier you. keep going. keep trying ✨
make sure you know what to fight for. let go of all the rest. now is not the time to pay attention to what doesn’t bring you peace, growth, and healing.
I don’t have food stamps but I need to know how to eat well for $4/day. Thank you for this.
I love this cookbook!
Tips and tricks on how to survive being working class.
I’ve seen this kind of thing before and a lot of them are full of random weird shit you’d never make…because of time constraints or like, it just sounds super gross.
But this one had a whole section that’s just “Things on Toast”. Another that was all about putting crap in your oatmeal to make it better. Those are fairly pedestrian and don’t take forever.
I haven’t looked through the whole thing yet but so far it’s actually pretty practical. Also if you’re broke like me and don’t know how to make Dal, you should get on that.
I also liked that there’s this at the beginning:
This book isn’t challenging you to live on so little; it’s a resource in case that’s your reality. In May 2014, there were 46 million Americans on food stamps. Untold millions more—in particular, retirees and students—live under similar constraints.
Been there. Done that. Advice on this art is always welcome.
The link above seems to be broken; here’s one that still works.
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Rememberlions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
id: the original post shares a tweet reading, “reminder that you are an omnivore, a predator, and a pretty big one at that. You are not a bee or an ant. It is, in fact, normal for you to just want to lay around not producing anything. You’re a mammal. Stop judging yourself for not being a hive insect.” / end id
@natalunasans: here’s more of that science you were hoping for.
