Maybe the jobs themselves were not enjoyable physically but the satisfaction of a day’s work was.

Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.

Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.

I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.

Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.

> Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?

If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.

And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).