It’s like taxes. You work huge part of the year to feed someone else.
“from the perspective of everyone who isn’t our peasants is that if the peasantry only does the amount of agricultural labor necessary to subsist themselves and just a little more, the society doesn’t have economic room for much else in the way of productive (or unproductive) economic activity. Remember: our peasants are the only significant population actually doing farming. Sure the Big Men and the gentry and temples and monasteries may own land, but they are mostly renting that land out to peasants (or hiring peasants to work it, or enslaving peasants and forcing them to work it).”