[sky-kedge0749]

I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general but if we think about prehistory a lot of work was doing stuff that had deadlines but you could easily understand what needed to be done. You have to go out and collect a bunch of nuts and berries, and there's a deadline because you'll starve if you don't get the food, but you know the food is out there and it's just a matter of getting it. Your ancestors have lived off food from this land for thousands of years, you know you will too. Similarly for simple crafting, you need to make the clothing or the clay pot but there's no barrier to doing it, you just have to do it. In these cases you could also have a boss, that is, some person with authority directing and judging you, but it's someone you know and someone whose role you will inevitably fill.

I think the key difference in the modern world is that success is not guaranteed, for reasons that may be well out of your control, and failure is scary with unknown consequences. We can imagine a world with pretty much the same jobs and the same work, but with more security removing the intense stress people feel.

[indigochill]

Success wasn't guaranteed in the ancient world either. Even if you were cultivating crops, a drought you couldn't control could wipe out your crops. Or baddies could invade and steal your stuff and kill your people en masse.

Overall, we have way more security than the ancient world did. Droughts are still a problem as the western US has been seeing, but at least we're at a point today where it just means food prices go up rather than food vanishing entirely and requiring migration to other countries or something.

As for stress, largely European workers don't seem to feel the pressures that American workers do, which probably boils down to in part a mix of higher taxes leading to better safety nets as well as generally much more vacation time from work. Also politics in European countries generally isn't as polarized, though by no means is it perfect.

[sky-kedge0749]

Farming as a necessity didn't happen until late prehistory and early history. Before that people hunted, fished or foraged for their daily food. They had nothing worth stealing or killing for or that couldn't be rebuilt quickly after an earthquake or other disaster. In the worst case they could just move a few miles away. Dying from a drought wiping out your crops or from being attacked by raiders from the mountains or from a warlord or pharaoh that claimed to rule over you didn't happen until later. Even then your own life was still simple to understand: being a farmer or shepherd or what have you.

I don't mean to say this was all perfect, but instead that when we talk about the stress of modern jobs, we should go beyond saying no one likes deadlines or bosses, because the real problem is the, for some people literally daily, uncertainty.