Nobody cares if you beg to differ if your examples are all about farming. Farming was historically a last resort when you couldn’t live off the land by foraging and hunting. It was more common in less fruitful locations. Read some anthropology before you speak on it. Or learn more about modern agriculture and how shitty its returns are for the investment. Which is unsurprising considering modern agriculture is just shoving 3-5 crops in a bunch of places where they don’t want to grow and praying there’s enough nitrogen in the soil this year.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.
Of course you’d rather have an easy moment in time than a hard day. If your air conditioned trip to the market is preceded by ten hours combined time commuting to, from, and performing work then I think you just prefer being inside to out. Because that’s a long day for a hunter and not something they’d do five to seven days a week. For a lot of human history people had so much time on their hands that they would throw random festivals, make giant earthworks, form intricate gift giving rituals to keep up relations with faraway tribes. Not everyone, sure! But enough that you know about all of this.
I’d rather gather berries for forty minutes! Or wade around on Californian shores trapping fish in the silty shallows. Or live in a world where we ate what we grew instead of feeding it to cattle or turning it into ethanol fuel. All of which are ways of life that have been practiced before, and ways of life that are perfectly possible, which begs the question, where on earth does the opposition to doing better come from? You’re not a fuckin monkey.
Nobody cares if you beg to differ if your examples are all about farming. Farming was historically a last resort when you couldn’t live off the land by foraging and hunting. It was more common in less fruitful locations. Read some anthropology before you speak on it. Or learn more about modern agriculture and how shitty its returns are for the investment. Which is unsurprising considering modern agriculture is just shoving 3-5 crops in a bunch of places where they don’t want to grow and praying there’s enough nitrogen in the soil this year.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.
Don’t know what to say! Branch out maybe.
Of course you’d rather have an easy moment in time than a hard day. If your air conditioned trip to the market is preceded by ten hours combined time commuting to, from, and performing work then I think you just prefer being inside to out. Because that’s a long day for a hunter and not something they’d do five to seven days a week. For a lot of human history people had so much time on their hands that they would throw random festivals, make giant earthworks, form intricate gift giving rituals to keep up relations with faraway tribes. Not everyone, sure! But enough that you know about all of this.
I’d rather gather berries for forty minutes! Or wade around on Californian shores trapping fish in the silty shallows. Or live in a world where we ate what we grew instead of feeding it to cattle or turning it into ethanol fuel. All of which are ways of life that have been practiced before, and ways of life that are perfectly possible, which begs the question, where on earth does the opposition to doing better come from? You’re not a fuckin monkey.