[slphil]

To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us.

Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...

[gambiting]

Women particularly spent almost all spare time making clothing - because a pair of pants could take a month to make. Sure it wasn't backbreaking work in the fields, but it wasn't spare leisure time either.

[pharke]

You're right, it wasn't either but it was a bit of both. Our perspective often misses many aspects of home life in the past because we are living in such a radically different environment than even our grand parents and great grand parents. When we think of "spare time" we imagine the few hours we can snatch before bed when we zone out and watch netflix or browse social media. Spare time for people living a subsistence lifestyle on a farm before the modern era often meant the entire winter or at the least every moment after the sun went down when you were limited to staying in doors with a lamp or fire as your only light source.

It's only after you remove every modern convenience and distraction that you begin to appreciate how important these slow, repetitive, indoor tasks were to human psychology. They allowed one to make good use of their time indoors while distracting from the crushing boredom of having nothing to do and affording time to socialize with family and neighbours.

Now, I'm not saying this is an idyllic lifestyle. It was certainly one of the factors that drove so many people to the squalor of early industrial cities where they might be poor, filthy, and poisoned but at least they had light, drink, and entertainment. But I think it's important to point out that our ancestors managed to get by with a great deal less than we do today while still finding comfort and fulfillment and potentially expending much less effort and suffering a great deal less stress than we experience. It's something to think about at least.

[majormajor]

> potentially expending much less effort and suffering a great deal less stress than we experience

How do we measure this? I've been less well off in the past, having to spend more time doing chores like that, and not having a 9-5 job filling up that part of my day. Compared to now - working more, but with more money - I was more stressed and less fulfilled and very aware of all the effort I was expending because I couldn't afford all the conveniences I would've wanted.

[watwut]

> You're right, it wasn't either but it was a bit of both.

It was not a bit of both. It was work. Yes, they could chat while doing some easy repetitive tasks, the same way as worker in work now chat while doing repetitive tasks. However, this was not low effort hobby you do whenever you feel like and can take random amount of time. It was work that needed to be done whether you feel like it or not. And preferably fast while keeping quality, because there was a lot of work like that. It also had to be done whether you are nine month pregnant or not and whether baby wake you up at night or not.

I don't know why you think it was supposed to be slow work. That makes sense only insofar you see and treat it as a hobby instead of as actual task that needs to be done, because you need result of it.

Fun fact: washing cloth without washing machine took whole day once a week. It was physically hard tiring work that required you to beat the thing to beat the mess out of it in cold water. If you want meat (which they definitely did not ate often), you gotta kill chicken. And clean it. Again, messy work that takes a lot of time.

[Daishiman]

Yes, and that physical exhaustion is what we were made for. Not sitting in a chair 10 hours a day. Your body is far healthier doing a few hours of demanding physical activity every day. It follows that our minds are adapted to that rhythm as well.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually study then is through archeological records from before the birth of cities, which are unfortunately limited in what they can say.

[slphil]

Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.)

Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).

[pharke]

I wouldn't say it's the only way. You could certainly gather data from experimental archaeology. True, you couldn't duplicate the lives of early hunter gatherer's precisely since you would have to take certain precautions to protect the well being of the researchers and you would be limited in your choice of locations but you could certainly perform experiments that would tell you how much time was necessary for gathering food, hunting, preparing food, making clothing and tools, building and repairing shelters, etc.