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.
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.