We work harder than our predecessors (8+ hours workday, 5 days a week, both men and women), so I'd say we aren't really as smart as them.
Most of the time in human history people were struggling to even stay alive. You had to work until you got enough food to feed your family, or you'd die. Live was not great, it was very stressful and inefficient (but people were used to it). This is still the case in most of the world, although overall not as bad as it once was, it is improving constantly.
We're the lucky ones who can sustain ourselve with 8 hours of work, food is cheap and abundant, we can afford luxury items like iphones even if a 300$ android smartphone would do the same job.
No, at average, people are not working harder now, because we don't have to. We managed to improve efficiency so much already and quality of life continues to rise.
Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.
Also, People like farming and hard physical labour. In the suburbs every household has a little miniature hobby farm that yields a useless crop, and people farm it for fun over and above their regular job. When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.
All this inefficiency is destroying the planet, which is the dumbest thing of all.
We very much have. We couldn't support our population with 14th century levels of efficiency. We wouldn't have enough farm land, fresh water, etc, etc.
Life expectancy in the most typical manufacturing hotspots is actually better than Western standards of 1900. Even poorer countries today have much better healthcare than Queen Victoria used to have. Middle Ages is right out in this comparison.
> It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce.
This obviously depends on profession. On the contrary, you no longer need to go to college or trade school since everything is online. Seriously, it's amazing how proficient some of these children can get just from YouTube videos.
> Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.
Hey at least you have a choice now. Before, raising lots of children was almost a necessity in order to help around the farm. Now things are so efficient that you really don't need to raise children at all.
> Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.
Can you provide evidence on this?
> People like farming and hard physical labour
Most people would probably disagree with you on this. There is a big difference between occasional hard labor and doing hard labor every single day. It takes an enormous toll on the body.
> When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.
Isn't the purpose to be healthy or look better?
Peasants (over 90% of the society) were usually working less hours but much harder than we do. And they were living in much worse conditions of course.
Farming (especially without modern technology) is very cyclical, most of the time you have too much labour and too little land/food. Then for a few months you have too few people to do everything that needs to be done.
And there was no easy way for vast majority of people to store surplus for more than a few years. And there was a real possibility of starvation if a few factors independent of you happen at the same time.
So the whole society and economy was structured around these constraints - that's why it doesn't follow our intuitions. It made no sense to increase gains by 10% if you had to increase risk by 1% to do that. It made no sense to work harder if you have enough and it's gonna spoil anyway. You're just risking injury to throw it all away later.
There was a great series of articles about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Good case are miners areas - men work hard like 12 hours a day under ground and die young. Women have to earn for themselves and for kids once they are dead however possible.
1950 middle class household is not all there is to be about how historical families existed. Most of the time, the amount of work to do was basically infinite. And the more "anyone" could do, the better. That includes 6-7 years old kids who were already expected to be useful. (Here the kids started to work at 5, they would pasture gooses, which is super easy but was to large extend unsupervised).
Also, origin of kindergarten are German cities where both parents worked 12 hours a day in factory and small kids were left to own devices whole day. Obviously we are talking about poorer people here, but poor were large part of society.
Also, asshole.
Construction, for example, is incredibly hard work even with modern tools, and they had none of those.
That we can live comfortably with all the modern amenities on 40 hours a week, which for many is just sitting in a chair, typing text, is really good. I'm not bashing office workers here, btw.
Could definitely work less, maybe the push for shorter work days will gain traction.
With exception of very rich people in few periods (idle aristocracy, middle class 1950 household), majority of people needed to work a lot. That includes both women and men.