this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Hunter gathers (which human are from an evolutionary perspective) worked 4 hours a day and would have had a lot of exercise.
They were around similar, closely related people, with a united culture and strong community.
Their form of stress would have been "oh fuck a bear. Let's get away". "Wow remember when we spend 10 minutes this week stressed about a bear"
Humans work a shit load, including getting ready for work. Don't have time to sleep enough. Human society is largely devoid of anything that it should be, not enough of the stuff that mattered and too much of everything else. Low level stress is constant.
I'm sure they also had community infighting, gossiping, feelings of unfairness, jealousy etc. You know like all humans in all parts of history.
They also had a short lifespan where a broken leg, bad tooth or infected cut could kill you. Not to take away from what you wrote but to add that it probably wasn't as ideal of a life as we may think.
I'm not on about ideal.
It's about what we are built for.
Like you could say no suffering, i.e. no physical exertion is ideal. But we know physical exertion is good.
Maybe all the shit we had to deal with back then was good for us, or okay for us. But the bad things for us now are mentally much worse, even though they don't seem as bad.
Like maybe occasionally being starving and coming together as a community then later having a feast and everyone being super happy is mentally better than you stressing out because you were planning to make chicken nuggies and chips, then watch TV alone but you forgot to stop in the store on the way home.
Can you give any other example(counter argument, whatever you wanna name it) but science, especially life sciences? I always try to find it myself, but nah. Are medicine-adjacent fields the only inherently good things we have made?
Well maybe not other examples, but my comment was more along the lines that I think that we (modern humans) idealize hunter-gathers. When what was probably more reality was that they had difficult times as well. That is wasn't a utopia by any means. I would say that agriculture and animal domestication came out of a need to reduce the task of having to hunt down your food.
If you get to just walk out of your hut and harvest plants or you don't have to run down a wild pig, instead just butcher one in the pen you're going to do that. But the downside then is you need to spend more time tending to the animals and plants to make sure they survive. So you give up some downtime.
Yeah but now you gotta spend MUCH more time because of simple biology and logistics: You wanna eat the muscle of the animals, but the muscle tissue only develops if the animals move... you need much more animals and your feed is going to simple scaffolding stuff like bones and fur. Now you gotta grow more feed to feed your livestock. Welp, now you have smaller area per animal so they move even less (i.e., muscle growth is reduced even further)... what do we do? Vertical farming!
Which can be summarized by "we work too much"