Stupidest article of the year!

Medieval peasants had 7 TIMES more holiday than YOUR average American

Written by a doe eyed naif.

Ok, reality check peasants were poor, really poor, they didn't even have iPhones! Or WIFI, or computers, or . . . The list is endless, because they had nothing, but crappy home spun wool jerkins, ill fitting breeches, and ragamuffin shoes. But they had 150 days of vacation.

Perhaps the reason we have less vacation is we actually don't want to live without running water, or indoor toilets, furnaces, or any of the other things which make life comfortable, and nice. Trading some vacation time for the huge mass of amenities of modern life seems a minor trade off.  Unless you are a breathless naif of a writer, or a sociology professor.  

"According to Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, before capitalism was invented in the 19th century people mainly worked very leisurely days."

Huh? Either the professor, the writer, or both are idiots. Capitalism was not invented. It is a word made up by socialists to make the free market system which has capital formation features seem like it is a human made system like socialism. It isn't. It is a completely organic system. 

"In a paper titled The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Schor said: 'A typical working day in the medieval period stretched from dawn to dusk work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner."

Drivel from a Sociology professor. Americans are overworked to the extent they wish to be overworked. Americans want things, and want the money to buy those things, so tend to work enough hours to get paid enough money to fulfill those wants. This is purely a self motivated desire. But this wanker of a professor seems to misunderstand this. No one is holding a gun to the heads of these workers forcing them to work the house they work. There is little doubt the workers could work far fewer hours, but that would require living less amenity rich lives, and that is the one thing they do not want.

So, let the kvetching begin. Let's hear how Americans can no longer live without both parents working, like we could in the 1960s. But the problem there is not capitalism, or corporations, or other evil henchmen of some ilk, it is the desire of American families to have two, or more powerful, and amenity laden cars, and a home 50% bigger than in the 1960s, an endless array of gadgets, and gizmos, endless services, and the freedom to vacation in Bora Bora, or Europe, or other far flung destinations. 

"Compare that  to the fact that American workers took an average of 16.2 days of vacation in 2015, according to Project: Time Off, and suddenly medieval England doesn't seem so bad after all."

Yes, the past is always so much more attractive to the progressive. It looks so great in retrospective, mostly because all of the shit, open sewers, filth, mud, hard manual labor, and other ugly things modern people would never stoop to do have been whitewashed out of the myopically tiny picture. Everything else being equal, except vacation time, and, yes, we would all love to have 150 vacation days per year. But how many of those days required specific and elaborate religious observances? Most. It wasn't vacation, it was service to another master, the Church. But since we can't have the amenities of modern life and 150 days of vacation, what to do? Americans choose to work more, attain more, and focus their time off on family, and friends, the two things in addition to work which give life purpose. 

We really have reached peak Sociology.