Narrator: In the 1960s, a young anthropologist named Richard Lee traveled to the Kalahari Desert to study the Ju/’hoansi, one of the last isolated hunter-gatherer societies. He went in with the assumption that their lives must be a brutal, constant struggle for survival. What he found shattered that belief. The Ju/’hoansi weren't starving; they were well-nourished, consuming over 2,100 calories a day. And they weren't toiling endlessly; they spent a mere 15 to 17 hours a week on the "work" of acquiring food. The rest of their time was dedicated to leisure, socializing, and rest. This discovery raises a profound question: if humanity’s "natural" state was one of abundance and leisure, why are we, in our technologically advanced world, so obsessed with work, growth, and the fear of scarcity? In his book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, author and anthropologist James Suzman embarks on a sweeping journey through physics, biology, and history to unravel this very puzzle, challenging the fundamental assumptions that drive our modern lives.

Narrator: Modern economics is built on a single, powerful idea: the problem of scarcity. It assumes that human wants are infinite, but our resources are limited, forcing us to work tirelessly to bridge that gap. But Suzman argues this is a recent and culturally specific belief. For 95% of human history, our hunter-gatherer ancestors operated from a presumption of abundance.

The experience of the Ju/’hoansi people provides a vivid illustration. When they first encountered the market economy, they were bewildered. The concepts of wage labor, accumulating wealth, and working for a future you can't see were alien to them. Theirs was an "immediate-return" economy. They trusted their environment, which they saw as a giving parent, to provide for them each day. As a result, they desired little and were easily satisfied. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously called them "the original affluent society," not because they had much, but because they wanted so little. Their affluence came from freedom and leisure, a stark contrast to our modern affluence, which is measured in possessions and requires constant, stressful work. This reveals that our current work ethic isn't innate; it’s a product of a dramatic shift in how we see the world.

Narrator: To understand our relationship with work, Suzman takes us back to the most fundamental laws of the universe. He explains that from a physics perspective, "to live is to work." Life itself is a constant, energy-burning struggle against the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder, or entropy. A rock can sit for millennia without effort, but a living organism must constantly capture and expend energy just to maintain its structure, to grow, and to reproduce.

The Ju/’hoansi creation myths reflect this deep understanding. They believed a creator God made the world but left it unfinished, allowing a trickster god named G//aua to wreak havoc, representing the forces of chaos and entropy. Humans, in this view, must constantly work to maintain order. This scientific and mythological perspective gives "work" a much broader definition than just a 9-to-5 job. It is any purposeful expenditure of energy to achieve a goal, from a plant turning towards the sun to a human building a relationship. This reframes the conversation: the question isn't whether we should work, but what kind of work gives our lives purpose and meaning.

Narrator: For hundreds of thousands of years, humans were foragers. Then, about 12,000 years ago, a revolution occurred that changed everything: agriculture. Farming, Suzman argues, was humanity's biggest and most consequential gamble. It swapped the immediate returns of hunting and gathering for a "delayed-return" system. Farmers had to invest immense labor upfront—clearing land, planting seeds, and tending crops—for a reward that was months away and never guaranteed.

This shift fundamentally altered our relationship with time, property, and scarcity. Suddenly, the future became a source of anxiety. Will the rains come? Will pests destroy the harvest? For the first time, humans began to produce surpluses, which led to the concepts of private property, inequality, and a new kind of work. Work was no longer a brief, daily activity but a season-long, back-breaking toil. Skeletons from early agricultural societies show evidence of malnutrition, disease, and repetitive stress injuries—problems rarely seen in their forager ancestors. Farming created a world of relentless labor and introduced the Malthusian trap, where population growth constantly threatened to outpace food supply. It was this agricultural mindset, not our deep evolutionary past, that planted the seeds of our modern obsession with endless work and growth.

Narrator: If farming created the problem of scarcity, cities amplified it exponentially. The agricultural surpluses allowed for the rise of cities like Uruk in Mesopotamia around 6,000 years ago. For the first time, large populations of people who didn't produce their own food could live together. This led to a new kind of work: specialized labor. People became scribes, priests, soldiers, and artisans.

But cities also created a new kind of psychological scarcity. In a small foraging band, your needs are your own. In a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers, your needs become relative. You see others with more wealth, status, and power, and a new "malady of infinite aspiration" is born. The sociologist Emile Durkheim called this anomie—a state of normlessness where desires are unmoored from reality, leading to constant dissatisfaction. This is illustrated in the modern story of Thadeus Gurirab, who left his family farm in Namibia for the capital city of Windhoek. He wasn't just seeking survival; he was seeking opportunity in a world where the farm could no longer support his aspirations. Cities became the crucibles of innovation but also of inequality, where the gap between the haves and have-nots grew ever wider, fueling a relentless drive for social mobility through work and consumption.

Narrator: In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the 21st century, technological progress would be so great that we would only need to work 15 hours a week. He was right about the productivity gains, but spectacularly wrong about the outcome. We are living in the age of automation he foresaw, yet we are plagued by overwork, burnout, and anxiety about our jobs.

The story of the Kellogg's company during the Great Depression offers a glimpse of the road not taken. To avoid layoffs, Will Kellogg cut the workday from eight hours to six, effectively creating an entire new shift of jobs. For years, the company thrived, and workers reported higher satisfaction. But after World War II, driven by a new wave of consumerism and the desire for more income to buy more things, the workers themselves voted to return to a 40-hour week. We have used the gifts of technology not to buy ourselves more free time, as Keynes hoped, but to fuel an endless cycle of production and consumption. This has led to absurdities like karoshi (death by overwork) in Japan and the fact that in 2015, the average CEO in the US earned nearly 300 times more than the average worker. We are haunted by the ghost of scarcity, even in an age of unprecedented abundance.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Work is that our modern relationship with labor—the idea that it must be hard, that we must always want more, and that our value is tied to our productivity—is not a law of nature. It is a cultural artifact, born from the agricultural revolution and supercharged by the city. For most of our species' history, we lived with a different set of assumptions, ones based on sufficiency, leisure, and trust in our environment.

As we stand on the cusp of a new revolution driven by AI and automation, we are faced with a choice. We can continue down the farmer's path, clinging to an outdated economic model of scarcity and growth that is straining our mental health and our planet. Or, we can look back to our deeper history to remember that there are other ways to live. The book challenges us to ask a difficult but essential question: If machines could do all the necessary and unpleasant work, what would we do with our freedom?