The title refers to a completely different lifestyle, not an added day of leisure. It directly contrasts “hunter-gatherers” and “wealthy westerners.” This is not a trivial distinction.
What was his stance on email?
It made me discover how much stuff has added sugar. Things that I would assume would be fine to eat all had added sugar. Most bread was a write off, practically every sauce, and more or less every packaged food contained sugar.
To be honest, the sugar cravings weren't hard to work through, I've never really eaten much sugar, but the sheer amount of food that I wasn't able to eat because of added sugar was staggering.
At least drinking was easy, I could still drink most wines, beers, and spirits.
I depends on what is "edible stuff" to you. Carrots, meat, cabage, fish, etc. have no added sugar in them. Why not simply cook your food, like most people in the world do?
From what I read here and there, Americans have completely lost foot with food, for them having a meal means to take some boxed thing out of the fridge and put it in the microwave owen for 10 mn. This is /not/ a normal meal, it's a lazy way to get one's belly filled. The normal meal for normal people is prepared at home from raw ingredients and some spices.
The problem is that I ended up having to make practically everything from scratch. I couldn't use pasta sauces, since they all have added sugar. Most bread has added sugar as well, so no bread for me.
I don't think it's unfair to say that I would benefit from one less day of using my computer per week and exchange it for going outside and reading at the park or going on a hike or biking. Or that abstaining from social media but still having access to online content would benefit my brain.
To me, it's not like M&M Peanuts, where I can either have no M&M Peanuts because none exist in the house, or can consume entire bag in one sitting because some are in the cabinet. Instead, I think it's fair to say I should be more open about being discriminating on the technology we use instead of naively accepting every new hot thing as being good for us as long as we have the discipline to moderate.
I know of people who basically lost years of their lives to World of Warcraft, which is entirely why I never ever touched that game with a ten foot pole because I know my susceptibility to those games. It's also why I deleted Facebook/Twitter, because I know I easily get hooked onto news and that hundreds of designers/engineers are working on captivating my brain in the name of ad revenue.
In a sense, I feel like we just all need to be honest about our own limits and acknowledge that technology has a drawback that is not insignificant. Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized.