The first humans did not work in the way that we understand it today. Our distant ancestors spent much of their time searching for that day’s food and shelter, a short-term and endlessly repeated process that was necessary for survival. Work today means consciously striving now in order to accrue a benefit in the future, but is not as immediately urgent as hunter-gathering. The idea of the working day is a product of civilisation, and must have arisen at the same time as agriculture around 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For most of history – well into the 20th century in Russia and China – the majority of people were peasants who subsisted by working the fields. They sowed and tilled, knowing that they would reap a crop to see them through the next winter. These people were by definition ‘at work’ in a sense that pre-civilised hunters weren’t.