Before you could just work from home to make money how would a person live as a recluse or shut in unless you came from a family with money? Every time I see a show with a mysterious shut in that hasn’t come out of their house in years I just wonder how someone could manage to pay for basic necessities like food.
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Work from home generally used to be the standard, rather than the exception. As the world industrialized, places of work being outside the house became more and more common, especially when newer manufacturing requires much more specialized equipment and assembly lines.
It really depends on what time period and culture you’re discussing, as I don’t want to make overly-broad statements, but a good broad example is craftsman.
Especially in areas of low population density, a specialized craftsman wouldn’t have any need to open a store. People would just come to buy from their house. This kind of thing was the norm for quite a lot of human history. It was a skills-based economy rather than a company-based economy, just because low population areas cannot support that kind of infrastructure.
As for being a complete shut-in: nowadays consumerism is a big part of our culture, but it used to be people would make a lot of their own things. Women sewing and making cloth is common across many cultures, as it was a daily necessity that paired well with women who were pregnant and therefore had less mobility to do other forms of work. Gathering herbs, having a garden, and even raising livestock (raising a pig in China especially was extremely common) were all considered fairly normal activities.
Gathering food, hunting, and fishing in the wild is a lot less realistic in the modern era, where most of the land is owned by someone, but it used to be a lot more reasonable means of survival for someone living on their own.
It also depends on what you consider a shut in. Most people cannot survive without some level of human contact, so sending kind neighbors or family out to get things they couldn’t make themself would have been likely.
My main historical focus of study is the Tang Dynasty of China. One of the laws passed during that time was that marketplaces could only exist in cities. This was a way to control revenues and taxes. However, they had plenty of trouble enforcing this just because a lot of exchange of goods was done locally. Especially when you factor in remote areas, this kind of organized commercialized trade was not sustainable. Other than local specialized craftsman or apothecaries, many people would have made nearly everything they own in situations like that.
The kind of life we live now, where we completely rely on stores for daily necessities, would have been unimaginable to all but the extremely wealthy.