I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.

Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.

Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...

Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.

"Free time" for a medieval peasant is a very misleading statistic, because it's only counting the amount of time that the peasants worked for their feudal lord - which was about as high as it could be, because of the amount of work that the peasants would have to do beyond that. Without modern technology, they had to gather firewood (I did this on the weekend and it's hard enough with chainsaws, a 4WD ute, a hydraulic log splitter - would take forever with an axe and mule cart), tend their own crops and livestock, mend and hand-wash their own clothes, work on their houses etc, which is all counted as time off work even though the peasant would die if they didn't do it.

The first couple of google results just seem to say your view is a very common mistake/misunderstanding people make when confusion "not working" with leisure time.

>Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.

Depeds on if they were the ones who had arrived in the land of abundance or not :)

On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities

> ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces

For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.

I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)

Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year.

In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.

All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".

FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it.

“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...

As for many things, there's a synthesis that seems more realistic here:

https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-peasant/

Hint: it's not 150 days.

However, what the work time estimates are missing in this discussion is that you maintained relationships with all your neighbors and most of the village.

Exactly the opposite of the modern world, your work was solitary and your leisure time was social.

> In an attempt to provide a definitive verdict on the veracity of the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year, Snopes spoke with multiple scholars including Gregory Clark, the economist most frequently credited with originating the 150-day-a-year estimate, and Juliet Schor, the economist who first popularized the claim in her 1991 book "The Overworked American."

> We also spoke with Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, two economic historians who currently study the question of the length of the medieval working year and have recently published work supporting a 150-day estimate, at least for certain decades in medieval England.

> In addition to speaking to these scholars, Snopes also conducted extensive research into the online life of the claim in order to determine when it first began to spread online and how it has changed over time. We additionally examined a number of popular debunkings of the claim, with special attention to the evidence cited as proof against the claim.

> Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.

~ 2024 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...

Irrelevant comparison. Completely apples to oranges existence. Its almost as if is a different species if you take in education, culture, health, food, society, knowledge etc.