Why waste your life in front of a TV screen, when you could be pushing rocks into a big pile?

The reason we have 40 hour workweek is that industrialists realized it maximizes the productivity of physical labor, and its studied quite through out. In mental labor the studies say that maximizing long term productivity is even lower than that. You get more done for a week if you add additional hours for a week, however within week or two your productivity dips so that you produce LESS than when you were working 40 hour week. If we add commute to 40 hour workweek, and count the stuff people must do to keep their self in working condition and not too smelly, there is less than 40 hours of leisure time. I just did Excel out of what I want to do in a week and what I MUST do (like eat, sleep...) Then end result was 187 hours a week, unfortunately for me there is only 168 hours in a week.

This article gives an interesting perspective of how many man-hours were lost, but that doesn't mean those man-hours would have been put into something constructive instead.

How much of a Giza pyramid could have been built instead of writing this article ?

Edit: typo