During the at most 7% of humanity’s time on Earth, or to put it another way, in the 10,000 years since the Neolithic Revolution, we have acquired two things we never had before: income inequality and gender inequality.

As you may remember from the beginning* of the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Bushmen, some of whom are modern-day hunter-gatherers, don’t work very hard and share everything equally. Farmers work very hard, and store surplus for the rest of the year as well as to cover disasters. Imagine a fellow Andy, who is sort of clumsy and skittish, an unreliable worker. Honestly, sometimes it seems the fieldwork goes better when he doesn’t show up! During the winter, he’s hungry, but you’re the one with the food. You have a family of your own, and you all worked hard for those precious stores. Why should you share? You deserve the product of your labor. Andy doesn’t. In fact, Andy is not as good of a person as you are, is he?

That’s the basis of the meritocracy. Some of us are more successful, and instead of sharing, we deserve to wallow in it. Those who don’t do as much deserve to suffer.

It’s not just an unpleasant attitude, it’s dangerous and counterproductive. The person who generates the most lines of code is fast-tracked, even if his code later causes fatal medical radiation overdoes or a helicopter crash (both real examples), while the person who is designing, coding, and testing methodically is merely tolerated. People doing valueless work like marketing and hedge fund management are compensated over people who care for our elderly and pick our crops. If your house burns down, do you get help? Only until the next headline, and good luck getting your job back after you miss a couple of weeks. Someone else managed, where were you?

Farming led to objectifying women also. A lot of farm work requires upper body strength, and all of it requires lots of labor, so big families became an advantage. Women’s role on the farm was mostly to produce and care for children, and since women were indoors anyway, they took on the housework. Being mostly indoors removed the women from other public work, such as participation in community decisions, and eventually let to many becoming protected chattel. All modern societies have an echo of this, and some still practice fairly extreme versions.

As a parent of millennials, I know that most of them are strivers trying to find their place in an economy in which unpaid internships and wages divorced from productivity are embarrassingly touted by slavering corporation managers and  university faculty, automation is claiming entire industries that once provided human employment, and the  24/7 work ethic has only increased inequality, accumulation, and churlishness. As a group, these young people tend to want to find meaningful, beneficial work, and to truly balance the time spent on work and non-work. And honestly, with fewer jobs in our future, we will all need to work less. The way humans used to live.

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* The beginning of the movie was more or less accurate, at least the part about the Bushmen.