Amen.
My daughter recently brought home one of those supposedly "thought-provoking" essay assignments from school. IIRC it was something like "what is the defining characteristic of civilization?"
Turned out everybody else cited things like literacy and mutual kindness and counterpoint, but my own immediate unreflective split-second response was "leisure."
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^^^^^^^ CB: For the arguments against this claim that swivilization has more leisure than "primitive" society see Marshall Sahlins' _Stone Age Economics_ chapter "The Original Affluent Society". Hunters and gathers work shorter hours than slaves, peasants and capitalist proletarians. Ruling classes have a lot of leisure time
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Three to Five Hour Working Day
Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week. An interesting comparison is also posed by recent studies of labour costs among agriculturalists of neolithic type. For example, the average adult Hanunoo, man or woman, spends 1,200 hours per year in swidden cultivation;21 which is to say, a mean of three hours twenty minutes per day. Yet this figure does not include food gathering, animal raising, cooking and other direct subsistence efforts of these Philippine tribesmen. Comparable data are beginning to appear in reports on other primitive agriculturalists from many parts of the world.
There is nothing either to the convention that hunters and gatherers can enjoy little leisure from tasks of sheer survival. By this, the evolutionary inadequacies of the palaeolithic are customarily explained, while for the provision of leisure the neolithic is roundly congratulated. But the traditional formulas might be truer if reversed: the amount of work (per capita) increases with the evolution of culture, and the amount of leisure decreases. Hunter's subsistence labours are characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore, the women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men, and provide the greater part of the food supply." "
^^^^^