Honestly, for people who work more than 40 hours a week, how many of them are actually working more than 40 hours a week? Sometimes it feels like half my day is spent reading HN and the like. If I could focus much more, I'm sure I wouldn't need to spend more than 40 hours a week to get my stuff done.
having grown up on a farm, forty hours came and went usually mid week. In the business world its not the hours I work that wear on me, its the non productive hours during that do.
I guess the difference between the farm and business is that the former doesn't have non productive work. It is amazing how much energy I lose in meetings or similar.
A farmer working a 40 (60... 70... 80...) hour week can produce enough food to feed hundreds of people, freeing them up to do other things. If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.
It's not about quality of life. It's about fitness, in the evolutionary sense.
Agricultural lifestyles support an order of magnitude more people per unit land, and therefore are more fit, even if they're "worse" in subjective terms.
Also, the "mistake" didn't happen immediately. It's not like hunter-gatherer nomads immediately decided, "yep, we're doing this farming thing" and started domesticating crops and animals. It happened gradually, over thousands of years, with various intermediate shades where a group would do some of both. Over time, human societies got to a point where abandoning agriculture would be impossible, while hunting and foraging became more discretionary.
Yes, the worst thing about HN is that it's work related enough that you can sort of justify counting checking it as "work", indeed I've read things in HN comments and articles that have been very useful to my work.
On the flipside, I'm sure in practise it is a net time waster.
Someone I know all they do is draw/paint until their hand hurts every day. It's all work related for them. Yes... some people do work for real long hours and are not wasting most of their time. I think it's more the people who are not doing work chasing rewards but doing the work because they genuinely love it.
Use https://www.rescuetime.com/ and you can track your time spent working and easily block distractions so you can focus.
