Comment by seadan83

Not in the very slightest? Didn't most early american colonies die of starvation and disease?

I feel you completely discounted this: "Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure." And instead responded to only the following simplification as if it were an absolute point: "In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve"

Though, let us both stop nitpicking. It is hard to convey the full nuance, particularly when tapping this out on a phone.

In fairness, I did conflate a few concepts and did not convey some nuance. Though my point that humans are not adapted for our current lifestyle remains.

(1) serfs were not voluntarily lifting weights for leisure.

(2) humans were not historically jacked. They were lean. They looked like thru-hikers, or marathon runners. It is the reason why having fat was a beauty standard. Onky the rich could have that many excess calories and not be M tan from working. The body does not choose to put on unnecessary levels of muscle without training and constant nutrition

I did not mean to convey as was read into my statements that humans did zero leisure. It is an absurd claim. Though, running a marathon for the hell of it is likely well out of the cards for most people, particularly in a winter climate. To which my point, the need to go for intentional walks was less than what it is today. Not zero, but less.

As for the conflation, the lack of nutrition was particularly salient in WWII when most Americans were not getting enough calories.

"LeBlanc argues that the U.S. military’s interest in nutrition research exploded in the 1940s, after it began seeking healthy recruits to deploy in World War II and found a male population physically weakened by years of malnutrition during the Great Depression." [1]

Celebrating during a harvest makes sense. A lot of that food is liable to go bad. It is a time of plenty,in contrast to long winters before canning was invented.

My point is the need for recreational leisure amongst adults was less than compared to present day in "post industrial countries" for two reasons: (1) substance living intrinsically involves physical activity. (2) food scarcity. Yeah, it is easy to strawman my argument as if there was no excess expenditure of energy. I'll re-iterate my point is that subsistance living is not conducive to a lot of excess calorie expenditure. Second to that, the number of people who were at a subsistence level was historically far higher. Third, a lifestyle where time is measured more in months and seasons, where one needs to do "everything" manually - is fundamentally different then the lifestyles of today (where with $100, today you can eat as well as did the King of France)

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/01/historian-traces-m...