Memes of Production

More than 8, I promise you.

Subsistence farmers work sunup to sundown. Hunter-gatherers have it somewhat easier, but there is a very distinct reason why complex societies don't generally arise from most hunter-gatherer systems, and it's not because hunting and gathering makes you dumb. It's because it's not really a system that affords a lot of flexibility in terms of what you do each day, regardless of how many or how few people there are in a region. Your rhythm is decided by the rhythm of the whims and wishes of the environment, where the animals have gone, how the wind has scattered the seeds last season. And your best knowledge is a very broad statistical guess as to what will be where, and in what quantities before competing species beat you to it.

The good thing is that you can be done very quickly some lucky days, whereas subsistence farming demands the full-time labor all the time. The bad thing is that you can burn an entire day for next-to-nothing, whereas subsistence farming is at least reliable. The worse thing is that your cushion against literal starvation is much, much smaller than even a subsistence farmer's - and subsistence farmers live much closer to starvation than any of us.