Living in a rural area forces one to come to terms with various realities which are only grasped vaguely and separately by the various sectors of society which account for our bare survival.
This is due in part to the lower density and isolation of a given rural community. There is less of a dense material of mutual support, a mutual support which is generated by specialized labor operating under a central market. This lack of social density places a greater emphasis on procuring all of one's basic needs for the rural individual.
So you begin to see what it takes to build a house, or produce food, or produce waste, or consume electricity. The global industrial society begins to appear quite incredible - and quite horrible - in this regard.
This realization places the modern stick-built house into stark relief for its wasteful nature. Its design depends on a constant flow of linear waste, as one has to cut various standardized materials to make a certain fit, and then cast the rest away into the dump, and its design is wholly dependent on active methods of heating and cooling, as well as maintenance, all of which require a constant and sustained input of disposable energy. I'm aware this has been observed for some time, just not talked about as much.
The stick-built design then is a product of great social volume, cheap energy, and abundant resources, and the historical conditions of its emergence will make this clear. This design allows for a quick build-out, fed from standardized, factory-produced materials, and then maintained and regulated with a constant flow of cheap energy.
Another consequence of rural living - which is another old observation I'm aware of - is that labor tends to synchronize more tightly with natural cycles, that is if one is not exploiting oneself and one's land to enter the market.
Labor cycles conform to the necessity of work: what does one need, and what is to be done, and how long will it take? These cycles also conform to weather, available light (day and night cycles) and the body's physical capacity.
This results in more haphazard cycles in which a burst of labor in a 12 hour day may shorten to 4 hours the next day due to fatigue, or be cut short by bad weather. These patterns may slowly crystallize with regularity, repetition, and success, but not nearly in the systematic fashion of the industrial machine.
Once again, it is social mass that seems to generate this incredible driving industrial force, a force which takes its direction from the nature of the mass, but which obliterates anything which does not conform to the aggregate-character of the mass.
And so the 8 hour workday is systematized to conform both with human capacity, assisted energy inputs, and constraints introduced by the labor struggle, among others. This is a model born of volume and the expression of an aggregate, but it readily steamrolls over anyone who is unable or unwilling to work such days.
As Marx observed, the discrepancy between this city-based and industrial lifestyle, and the rural lifestyle separated from the market - let's keep in mind the rural lifestyle alone does not decouple one from the market, as capital was born in the countryside - is due in part to the difference in the social aims of labor: one aim is to sustain oneself and procure one's needs. Another aim is to constantly increase value in competition with other value increasers, which is an aim that owes its shape and its drive to historical and social circumstances.
