> a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses.

It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all).

On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out.

I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :)

The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement.

And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.