Nobody told us to work this much. There’s no rule, no law, no biological imperative. And yet, if you are a typical adult in the modern world, you have probably spent much of your adult life doing it — eight hours or more a day, five days a week, with a couple of weeks off if you’re lucky, for decades. We have made it the shape of a life. What I’m not sure we’ve done is ask whether that shape makes sense.

What the research found

In 1966, at a symposium called Man the Hunter, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins presented an argument that quietly upended a long-held assumption. Drawing on fieldwork by Richard Lee among the !Kung of southern Africa, and studies in Arnhem Land, Sahlins concluded that direct food-getting — hunting, foraging, the actual work of keeping yourself fed — occupied roughly three to five hours per adult per day. He argued they could meet their needs in 15 to 20 hours a week, or less.

The obvious objection is that data didn’t include food preparation. Add cooking, processing, and firewood collection and the weekly estimate rises to around 40 to 44 hours — not far from a modern work week. That’s fair. But it cuts both ways. When we talk about a 40-hour week, we mean paid work. We are not counting cooking, commuting, admin, or any of the other demands modern life stacks on top of the job. Factor those in, and the comparison shifts again.

Why we keep

Gallup found that full-time US employees reported an average of 42.9 hours of work per week in 2024, down from 44.1 hours in 2019. The day is shorter than it was five years ago but it’s still the better part of every working day.

I work roughly the hours I worked in finance, possibly a little more. The difference is that they are my own hours — I choose when to start, where to sit, what to tackle first. That matters more than I can easily explain. But the number? About the same.

When I’m honest about why, two things come up. The first is the obvious, financial. The second is harder to name — something closer to habit, or identity. The feeling that stopping early is a kind of failure, even on the days when the real work is clearly done. I’ve mentioned this before but my actual ceiling for deep writing is around three hours. After that the screen is still on, but the meaningful output isn’t. I know this. I keep going anyway.

I suspect I’m not unusual. The pull to keep going isn’t purely economic. Somewhere along the way, hours became a proxy for seriousness — evidence that you’re trying, that you’re committed, that you’re not someone who quits at noon while others push through. We’ve built an identity around the long day, and identities are hard to argue with.

What would five hours actually look like?

Some of it is easy to picture: golf on an evening, more time outdoors, the leatherwork I don’t get to as often as I’d like. A longer gap between the morning and the afternoon. Less of the low-grade guilt that follows a day when the productive hours ran out by noon.

But some of it is genuinely blank. And I think that blankness is the more interesting answer. Many of us have spent so long filling the day that we’re not entirely sure what we’d do if we stopped. The question isn’t really hypothetical — it’s a test of whether we know ourselves outside of work, or whether the work has done the knowing for us.

Hunter-gatherers, as far as we can tell, didn’t experience that problem. They had plenty of time they weren’t working, and they probably used it — for music, for storytelling, for rest, for the ordinary texture of a day not organized around output. We are the ones who decided the day should be otherwise. It might be worth asking whether we made the right call.