Seamless

We discussed this excerpt from a facebook post by this guy on the porch this afternoon.

"Komlosy argues from a world-historical perspective that the meaning of "work" has changed since the thirteenth century so that it now refers only to those things that produce exchange values or, at best, directly support the production of exchange values through reproducing labor. The exertion of energies in ways that do not directly support the production of exchange values, by being redefined as *not* work, are thus devalued, not simply made worthless or even invisible, but even *negatively valued* as "time wasting." Moreover, it was only under capitalism and colonialism that work became associated with pain (disutility). According to the *work ethic*, expenditures of energy in ways that are fun cannot be work. By contrast, indigenous people have specific terms for each activity they engage in but no general term to denote work and differentiate it from *non*work...
Yet, "civilized" people stereotyped indigenous people as "lazy" and were incense by "easy" crops that enabled natives to expend efforts on cultural rituals rather than "work." They launched a "global campaign against festivities and ecstatic rituals"...
After that, festivals were "occupied" by the lower classes and the dispossessed as ways of exercising discontent and making voice. At the upper end, behavior was governed by the "civilizing" requirements of court manners. Along with the end of public joy came an "epidemic of melancholy," first in seventeenth-century England, then eighteenth-century Germany, and then, by the nineteenth-century, through the Western world...
Outside of capitalism, once subsistence is achieved, the center of economy/value is the production of people and community, often through collective joy. "Development" may be seen as the attempted replacement of public joy by commodity production."

In the forest garden, we are engaged in a largely futile effort to kick against this.  To  be less reliant on a sick society. I say futile, because, though we want freedom from wage slavery like everyone else, we are bound to a society that funnels us into a life of  that leaves little time for much else. Even finding time for a bit of craft or creative hobbies on your day off, is no easy task.  Yet, we all seem to accept this as a given of modern life.  In the forest garden, we would like for the boundaries between work and "not work" to be a little more seamless. Like  before colonization, when indigenous cultures lived in a way that was more seamless and as the above quote mentions, there in fact was no delineation bewtween work and non work.  Art and culture thrived. Food was plentiful and easily obtained. And we look at their way of life with misty nostalgia. Our society tells us implicitly by its social norms  that that way of life is gone. It is archaic. Primitive. But is it? Why is picking apples on the side of the road, drying or preserving them not work, but slaving for eight or ten hours in the healthcare industrial complex is? Because one does not feed the monetary economy, and the other does.