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We "live to work" because our corporate overlords demand that we be productive for production's sake.
Regarding work before industrialization, it's more complicated than that. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, so a lot of people, especially enslaved Africans, were literally worked to the death and received severe physical punishment if they didn't work properly. For free people, they didn't have to do the amount of work we do in order to afford food safety, though "worker rights" didn't exist for them, either. Abusive boss? Shut up and fuck off. Stolen pay? Too bad.
One of the biggest differences, however, is that people tended to socialize a lot more, and having friends to watch your back when things get hard is one of the best survival mechanisms. Out of food? Good thing my neighbor is willing to spare some of his while I fix some boards on his home. Maybe he's not asking for anything in return this time because he feels like this is paying back for a favor I did 3 months ago.
Interesting fact: the first indigenous tribes that the Spanish enslaved once they started colonizing Central America were completely unprepared to the European work brutality forced upon them and would often kill themselves if being captured for slave labor was inevitable. Before that, they had never needed to work so hard to sustain themselves.
Cute that you think that. Try reading the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution sometime. You'll find that the USA did not abolish slavery. We just institutionalized it into the penal system. Look up some of the jobs performed by the inmates of the Louisiana state correctional system and then tell me slavery has been abolished.
This guy has tons of good videos about actual chattel slavery,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AhHedVRe3IY
for instance. And there's a reason so many are being criminalized, right now, and mega-wealthy and mega-corps don't want to pay their fair share, let alone without loopholes and offshore accounts.
Some people say that we are slaves too in modern day and age. And even when British came to colonize India, they came under the name of East India Company. And for old day and age, I don't know if that was a thing in west, but here we still have shrines where food and drink is distributed for free regardless of who you are (on some occasions or all day, I am not exactly sure). Charity was encouraged a lot.