> 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.
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.
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.)