Having worked both "grueling" manual labor jobs and "stressful" white collar work: I would rather be an ape living in some rain-forest.

I don't want to have complex thought. I don't want to have to perform feats of self-flagellation everyday in order to survive. I don't want to be forced to spend the entirety of my very short life in relative isolation, making some other ape filthy rich so he can escape the absurdity and emptiness of existence.

Let me hunt for other small animals with my tribe -- and then spend the rest of my time loafing about. I don't feel like contorting my body and mind as a glorified circus animal in order to get that metaphorical bread.

No, but I can't help but think of what my grandmother said to me around age 95 - "Your generation may have more money, but we had less stress." That's saying something considering the dirt-floor shack type existence that she faced as a child and young woman. She said to me on more than one occasion that she saw modern life as worse than what she experienced where they were poor, but worked together as a family and enjoyed the natural rhythm of the seasons.

Highly highly recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks for this question.

Someone already suggested this book before I replied so I'll add some more information.

The comparison of "intuitive tasks" is one that sticks with me. So much of what we do currently isn't intuitive like it potentially would have been for farmers. We don't know who benefits. We go somewhere for an abstract amount of time, we "work", we go back home so we can afford to spend time with our family, but not too much time we have work to do to complete before the next sprint.

We have layers of people telling each other what they should be working on who in turn tell people "lower" than them what they should be working on. No intuition here!

I don’t have time to give a super in depth answer as I’m mobile - remind me tomorrow and I can - but the novel Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkenan I believe addresses this. They, in a sense, did actually as they relied more on natural clocks that started and stopped the day. I don’t remember the fine details, so I will try to edit with an elaboration tomorrow.

I spent three years in rural Africa in 35 countries. I spent most of my time where tourists don’t go. I met tons of people that had never seen a white person, border guards that had never seen a foreigner, etc.

Categorically, without question the vast majority of people told me they work hard for a few months a year during planting and harvest, otherwise they party, spend time with family and do whatever the hell they want. They don’t have Netflix or iPhones, but they have a huge amount of leisure time

David Graeber, citing other researchers in his recent book The Origin of Everything, certainly believes this was true. I think the answer was that while subsistence farming was a lot of work, it also left much of the day and the year to wait / hunt / do other tasks, while the crops grew. They certainly didn't work 40 hour weeks every week, year round.