This statement is at best grossly incomplete. There is plenty of research to suggest that hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than civilized people. E.g: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0614-6

> There was not time in which a common person did not have to do drudgery to get on with life.

Is hunting drudgery? Are epic food-gathering missions? Creating new towns and villages?

Okay so do it? Get a group of your friends and go become hunter gathers on the Yukon frontier.

Exactly. There are vast quantities of uninhabited areas of Yakutia. People could return to being hunter-gatherers and enjoy all its, uhhhm, trappings and live a happy, fulfilling life! But you know what, except for a very few, no one else will want to do it. Ask any random American, or ask any random want-to-be immigrant, hey there, there is this great big opportunity for you and your family to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle; are you up for that, it'll free you from the chains of modernity; Believe me, it's very leisurely!

Can I please have the abundant Moroccan coast of 300,000 BC, with all the best real estate available for squatting?

Yes, but you have to defend it from other tribes who want to take it from you through violence. Same deal as everyone else.

Since the dawn of Agrarian society anyways.

So what you're saying is that before the invention of the lamp, people had respite from work. Worker productivity has increased enormously in the last 100 years. My job entails putting good people out of work through analysis and design of more efficient (read: automated) workflows. At what point do we realize that we have to let go the "work hard every day until you die because that's the way may grandparents lived" ethic?

Why do we have to keep chained to them though? Why shouldn’t the goal be to liberate people so they can do what they wish with their time?

There may be some who disgree with your view, but let's assume most people want the 'ultimate' goal of being 'liberated' from work in order to 'live more'.

However, that's a wildly simplistic view of things.

You can't just say this without realizing that there are severe drawbacks to this. We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living, all the benefits of our times, maintain scientific progress, maintain national security and many, many others.

The ultimate goal should maybe be productivity, and if 4h is better than 8h for whatever reason, then let's do that. But it's definitely not so simple.

> We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living

Do you really think we are using our resources and technology efficiently? Because that’s the implication here. I think that’s frankly absurd.

Absolutely not. Do you think we’d use resources more effectively by cutting our hours?

Maybe the global maxima is not the standard 9-5 work day, that’s almost a given, but to claim that working dramatically less will yield better results is absurd.

I somewhat agree with you, but if anything, the pandemic has highlighted that people need purpose, else they while away their time and do unproductive stuff. They don't pursue their passions and become a maker or artist or artisan, no, they get on TikTok or some MMORPG or whatever strikes their LARPing fancy. Very few take the opportunity to "cultivate' themselves.

If I have no passion to be a marker or an artist or an artisan, is any luxury time I have wasted because I'm not 'cultivating' myself? Isn't that what I get to decide? Also, can we considering the middle of a pandemic a valid test case? We were all told to stay home - most people weren't about to go take a pottery class.

If you give a starving person a three-star michelin dinner, I don't think they would appreciate it properly. You need to be well-fed to appreciate the subtlety and the beauty of the meal. Similarly, people who don't have much free time may waste what little free time they get -- only when they have enough might they be able to figure out how to "properly" enjoy it.

Cynically, people don't want to be liberated, people want to be better than the neighbor they don't like, to have what they have, and to have what they don't have, and that gets them through day to day