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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but one could argue that it's a time of more headaches because we have it so well that we have plenty of time to think about our lives. While people of old were busy working and were more exhausted than we are today.

Of course this is the very definition of a 1st world problem but I think it holds some water in modern western society.

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Ancient humans worked like 3 hours a day

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...

The article talks about hunter-gatherers. I'm not sure the word "work" applies in the same way.

Maybe they only hunted for 3 hours on average in the good time. ... But they had other more existential threats. There is a reason they all switched to agricultural societies.

Seeing your babies die of starvation will do that.

I highly doubt that, first because you can just look back in time 100 years and observe people living in the country to see how hard they worked.

Secondly, ancient humans did everything themselves. Their clothes, food, bedding, house, roof, EVERYTHING. There was no global supply chain, there was no clothing industry, there was just you, your farm, and your two hands.

What's ancient? There were continental supply chains in the Bronze Age and earlier.

Of course there were but that's still a weak argument for a 15 hour work week.

For the vast majority of people most of what they needed was around them and it required a lot of work.

There were local supply chains too. For example you could have a guy who just collects wattle all day, or someone who just spins wool all day.

But that doesn't take away that it's still a lot of work. Just to get water is work.

Skimming the inc.com article and the linked ft.com article, they both mention "rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week", but what "work" isn't well defined. I heard someone counter this narrative by saying that the definition of "work" used only included time spent gather food, and doesn't include other chores (eg. cleaning stuff, fixing clothes/shelter, preserving food).

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