I've known people who have constructed working lives for themselves that try and achieve this balance, but it is a difficult thing to do. I expect that it usually has an economic penalty of some sort, but if at least some of the work pays well it's not crazy.

One way to manage it would be to find lucrative work roughly 1/2 time (i.e. "knowledge work" contracts) and then very intentionally spend the rest of your time outside and doing something active. If you've ever tried to negotiate a short week for less pay you'll probably realize this is difficult to arrange.

Presumably you mean "better for the individual", but I don't believe this is an assumption we can make. It seems clear that agriculture was better in a competitive sense than other ways of life at the time, though likely worse for many of the individuals involved.

There’s no evidence it was necessarily better for any particular insividual’s quality of life.

That is a spectacularly impractical idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

Compared to modern mass-scale industrial stock-farming killing the planet? Nothing really...

Depends on where you live (and most of current living where one can't make food and wouldn't survive a shortage has been enabled by "industrial farming" and other developments - e.g. enabling deserts cities in Nevada).

In my case, we have had hens, pigs, turkeys, olives, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, oranges, figs, corn, berries, potatoes, and several other fruits and vegetables besides at the house at home. And this wasn't uncommon in my between ~150K strong place of birth (now I live in a much larger city), almost every family had such.

>In the good old days there would be a bad harvest every so many years and a substantial fraction of the population would starve to death in the ensuing famine.

We've had techniques to survive bad harvests, including long term storage, canned goods, saline storage, dried goods (from nuts to figs and salami), and so on, for millennia, and I don't remember any famines in my here parts (much less a "substantial fraction of the population starving to death"). Then there's always trade, which we also have had for quite a while.

The worst famines are not caused by bad harvests, they are either due to political reasons (from the Irish potato famine, to the 80s Ethiopian one, both caused by bad policies) or poor distribution/inequality (while food exists).

That's more about water than food per se, though they go hand in hand.

It indeed does help that nearly all major Nevadan cities (and the vast majority of Nevadans, in turn) happen to be near the border between Nevada and one of the world's primary agricultural powerhouses, though.

i was responding to someone who is very skilled (presumably) wishing they didn't need to be so specialized.

edit: lots of people willfully misconstrue things. the same goes for Marx. if you've read any of the volumes of capital you'd understand that marxist positions aren't as asinine as "everyone needs to be a farmer in order for socialism to be viable".

Today it's just silly. You can't decide to review medical papers today, write them tomorrow, farm the next day, then be a lawyer, then go commercial crab fishing, then be a surveyer, then design an interstate highway bridge, then perhaps a concert pianist performance, and then perhaps start it all over again in a cycle. Or, to the extent you can, you can't generate any value that way.

Of course you can still "recreate" with hunting, fishing, and "criticizing after dinner" (note how, coincidentally, all his cited examples tend to gracefully fail; I can "go hunting" and come back with nothing and I have accomplished "going hunting"). Observing that recreation in the form of unevaluated, low-barrier-of-entry tasks that nobody cares if you produce no value with are available is a pointless statement, so I assume that's not the point of the quote. But there's a whackload of magic in that "society will regulate production" if everybody operates like this. "Society regulating production" is why we end up specialized. You end up specialized because it takes years of training and experience in any field to be worth a darn, which means that's by necessity the cost of switching too. You can certainly get to a hobbyist level in a couple of fields beyond your profession, too, but even then you're unlikely to just switch that to your profession one day in the general case.

you're repeating yourself. here is the quotation in context

"Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest", but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Th...

In his day (and in the modern world) people pretty freely move between roles within the intelligentsia but for legal constraints (which while notionally justified by consumer/public protection are often in no small part protectionist measures to maximize income of incumbents and restrict competing supply) and often hack around the legal constraints, too, (hanging out shingles in various “wellness” or un-/less-regulated alternative fields to evade regulation of health/medical work, for instance.)

That is, I think experience has shown that Marx’s description was correct at least as to the direction of effect of the politico-economic system, though probably hyperbolic about the degree of practical freedom from path-dependent career constraints attainable in even the ideal situation.

I know many manual laborers who have far better physique, strength, and health than the average sedentary programmer, so there's that...

The key is to be an independent craftsman, and not e.g. lay carpets as an employee (at the businesses pace and mercy), or stand all day, etc...

The ratio of independents to employees suggest a lot of people aren't in the situation you describe

I think most work is -- at the very least -- bearable given enough independence/autonomy. Programming can certainly be pretty joyful given a reasonably open-ended project and a quiet spot to sit. It's getting the autonomy that's the tricky bit.