> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market
Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.
We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
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 :)
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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.
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.