When there are very big ambitions, and expecting the greatest outcomes while having the minimum inputs, and if we look from this position, then the life of the Stone Age people can seem very miserable when people had no other business than being in constant search of food that would keep them alive. It is a simple way of perceiving Paleolithic, or current hunter-gatherers as having the bourgeois desires and motives whilst having only stone tools and bows with arrows.
In actuality, if we compare the energy spent per capita, during the Neolithic it was the same as that of during the Paleolithic era, and it was even the same all the time until the industrial revolution. People actually had to spend much less energy to get the same amount of food during the earlier eras than that of later