What interested Sahlins the most was not how much more leisure time hunter-gatherers enjoyed compared to stressed-out workers in agriculture or industry, but the “modesty of their material requirements.” Hunter-gatherers, he concluded, had so much more free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs. “Wants may be easily satisfied,” Sahlins noted, “either by producing much or desiring little.”12 Hunter-gatherers, he argued, achieved this by desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent
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