Quality of Quality of Life

One of the social indicators that many wish to extol about modern life is that life expectancy has increased. Indeed it has. By about 20 – 25 years since the Industrial Revolution.

If we consider an even longer timeframe, say back to Palaeolithic times then there has been a significant increase in the quantity of life that we now live. Although estimates vary, the consensus of archaeologists tends towards recognising that once a hunter/gatherer reached about 15 years of age then he/she could expect to live a further 35 to 40 years. That is, an adult living in the Palaeolithic would be likely to reach an age of 50 – 55 years.

So, yes indeed, the quantity of years that has been added to human life has increased markedly.

But – has the quality of life increased?

During the 1970s, I recall, there was much discussion about quality of life and how that should be the goal of personal life and that governments could play a role in facilitating that. However, in recent years I find that I rarely hear the phrase. It is as though something else has grabbed our attention and we have forgotten that quality of life may be a worthwhile goal.

Or, is it that we have conflated quality of life with quantity of life?

Let’s find out.

First though, how is quality of life defined? Philosophers, sociologists, poets, politicians, and spiritual leaders have all proposed definitions over many centuries. Herein, I am using a simple metric as a proxy for quality of life. That metric is the amount of leisure time we have, once we have accounted for work hours, sleep, and education. None of this is rigorous, and the arithmetic involved is very much back of a napkin computation.

The next thing that must be considered is how much leisure time do we have today compared to previous times. There are 8,766 hours in a year. Sleep (at 8 hours per night) takes up 2,922 of those hours. In the OECD (the richer nations of the world) the average working year consists of 1,900 hours. That leaves 3,944 hours for eating, commuting, and human activities that contribute towards quality of life.

We can factor in education. In the OECD most children go to school between the ages of 5 – 15 years, for 40 weeks per year. That is about 670 hours per year.

If all these numbers are crunched (I won’t bore you with the arithmetic details) then leisure time (quality of life) for people living today to the age of 75 is around 227,000 – 230,000 hours over the course of their lifetime.

Now, let us consider the quality of life enjoyed by our ancestors, both those who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution and those living much earlier as hunter/gatherers in Palaeolithic times.

These next figures may surprise you, yet they are the considered opinion of experts in the field. A peasant working before the Industrial Revolution is likely to have worked only some 1,440 hours per year – less than half the OECD average of today.¹

In 1968 Marshall Sahlins (an American cultural anthropologist) wrote an influential essay titled The Original Affluent Society, in which he claimed that hunter/gatherers “worked” far fewer hour per week than we tend to think. He termed this approach to life/work balance as ‘the Zen road to affluence.’ Sahlin’s essay has been much quoted, verified, and expanded upon by many researchers since then.² Sahlins and others show that for many modern-day nomadic tribespeople and hunter/gatherers of yore, work took up between 2 and 4 hours per day.

Now, for the interesting bit.

If we calculate leisure time per year with the lifespan of hunter/gatherers and modern-day nomadic people, then the total hours of leisure (quality of life) equates to around 202,000 to 205,000 hours over their lifetime.

That is not much less than the 227,000 hours of leisure that modern-day humans in rich societies obtain. Further calculation shows that the difference is only 2.5 – 3.2 years!

Is that all? Three years or less? Just that for all our vaunted increase in quantity of life.

And, what have we done with this extra three years of leisure time?

Wasted it!

Modern humans spend much of leisure time sitting watching television, or glued to the mini-screen of an iPhone, or playing computer games, or other mindless, and ultimately self-comatosing, pastimes. Statistics from both Australia and the USA show that well over 60% of leisure time is spent in front of the TV or a computer. Not much quality in this quantity of life.

Contrast this with the use of leisure time by hunter/gatherers and pre-Industrial Revolution peasants. Their time was taken up with dancing, storytelling, humour, music making, communal gatherings, feasts, arts, crafts, playing, ritual, and similar activities.

Let us then ask: Who has/had the greater quality of life?

Notes:

1. See for example, Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, New York, 1992

2. Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 1994. Graeber, David & Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, UK, 2021. Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct, Prometheus Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.