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I somehow think this is an idea popular mainly among people who never had to live that way for real (and no, going for a weekend in woods for fun is not compara

I somehow think this is an idea popular mainly among people who never had to live that way for real (and no, going for a weekend in woods for fun is not comparable). Yes, they don't have our types of stress, but it's just not true that this is stress free living. Their every single moment is fighting to survive, to collect enough water, to hunt enough meat, not to get hurt, not to get sick or injured. And they're used to that life, so superficially they might look like doing much better than us, but life is still hard for them. Walking for hours to collect water and then bringing it back every single day is not something that people who had to do it remember fondly. Looking for food can be fun when there is enough of it, but sometimes there isn't, and they know very well that if they fail their family will be literally be left hungry, their children might even die. I honestly doubt it's much less stressful than worrying about mortgage. And all of that is in the normal situations, until a drought or disease strikes, or until their best hunter gets killed or injured, or neighboring tribe attacks and steals their women. In such extreme times civilization is the safety net that saves your life, and that's why we come up with it, in the first place. To make our life easier. And it is. And if it's too stressful for you, is it really because of the civilization, or because of your own choices and ambitions?

sek3 9y ago
We don't have civilization today. We have a consumption machine that has gone of the rails trapping everyone from CEOs, Generals, Judges, Politicians to Janitors in mindless superficial activity. We have more in common with an ant colony than whatever civilization ideal anyone ever imagined.
- nils-m-holm 9y ago
  And anyone who mentions it will get marginalized. :(
  - guntars 9y ago
    I doubt you or the parent commenter are going to be marginalized because of that comment is any way. The fact that you can have these beliefs and express them in a public forum is a sign of how civilized things actually are. There are plenty people alive that have lived through times where that wasn't an option. Talking to them might give you some perspective.
    - nils-m-holm 9y ago
      Rest assured that I'm not making such a remark without having some perspective. Of course you can express your opinion freely, as long as it is irrelevant and pretty much nobody listens. That's why I can make such a comment here: nobody cares. Talking to some people who were abused and tortured today in so-called democratic countries might give you some perspective.
- Radim 9y ago
  This is an interesting point. I was born in East Europe "behind the iron curtain", but lived in the west for a long time. And then East Asia for even longer. There are huge differences in how people perceive "civilization" and how "trapped" they feel vs actually are. The west with its rigorous rules, both explicit and implicit. Regulation of every facet of your life, to a degree you don't realize (it's so natural! building permissions! driving permissions! marriage permissions! breath the air permissions! otherwise the world collapses!) until you've lived somewhere else. South East Asia with its reckless freedom, or downright anarchy (Thailand). The social pressure is applied more on the family level. There are few explicit regulations, and even where they do exist, you're half expected to ignore them. All of this is changing of course. As Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". There is no doubt in which direction the civilization is moving. Individual human ingenuity is an outstanding achievement, but isn't evolution always oh-so-squinting toward larger, more integrated, more efficient structures? The game of entropy. The naive integration attempts in the 20th century didn't work out so well, but the pressure is building again. Maybe this time.
  - tigershark 9y ago
    Honestly I will be extremely happy when people from south east Asia or from Europe or from everywhere in the world will be banned from driving and self driving cars can do it, wasting so much less lives. I have never been to Thailand, but in the two times that I have been in Philippines I have seen two corpses under a blanket because of two separate road accidents. Much, much, better to limit the so called "freedom" of some people if it helps to save innocent human lives.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      People who would trade freedom for safety deserve neither.
lordnacho 9y ago
One thing to consider is people lived like this for ages and ages. So our brains are evolved to cope with that kind of living. A lot of the Kahnemann/Tversky type biases that people exhibit is because their ancestors lived in an environment similar to the bush people. Take people out, and all sorts of things happen. People get addicted to sugar, heroin, Facebook. You get unhealthy due to lack of exercise. You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings). You grow up feeling awkward because you can't contribute from the age where you can talk, and you have to sit in front of a blackboard for years before you get let near anything. Your natural allies, your relatives, are not so near you as you'd like. You don't even have that many because you can't have a family until you're quite old. I can see why there's this paradox that nothing seems to change how happy people are.
- rfugger 9y ago
  > You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings). I feel a lot of the issues in our society boil down to this. Logically we should feel more secure in a modern economy because of the sheer material wealth, and yet so many of us suffer depression, anxiety, and a raft of other chronic health issues. I suspect this is at least partly because we are evolved to find security in close communal relationships with people around us, but these relationships have become more shallow in modern society.
  - lordnacho 9y ago
    There was some article recently arguing that the Las Vegas shooter was lonely. I don't know about that specifically, but I've run into a lot of people who were desperate for some social contact. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them ended up committing terrible crimes because of it. At my parents' restaurant we'd often get the odd guy (normally a man) who was there just because he wanted to see other people. The sort of person you see who'd jump at any chance to talk to someone. They'd smile at everyone else, and try get some chat going, all while dining for one. Normally it would be my dad asking the guy about his life, he is good at that. I remember when I was much older, and eating with my family at a restaurant, there'd be a regular we'd see who'd come in for a beer, smile at everyone, and then move on to the next place, and repeat. It was a small town. Dude seemed nice enough. For me it's always interesting to observe myself when I'm with family. I have a huge number of cousins owing to a busy grandfather. There's a pleasant yet hard-to-explain familiarity with them, because I didn't grow up with any but 5 of them. The others (dozens, I can't count and they keep finding me on FB) grew up elsewhere, but somehow I feel warm and fuzzy when they're around. Last time we all met up it was in Vegas.
Can_Not 9y ago
> And if it's too stressful for you, is it really because of the civilization, or because of your own choices and ambitions? Most people didn't choose their parents, their gender, their skin color, their poverty level, their childhood religious beliefs, what highschool they went to, their birth location, the job opportunities around their birth location, their spouse's choice's, their illness itenerary, etc.. So it's definitely interesting to read someine accurately describe a systematic problem then at the last second blame the victims and not the system.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  AFAIK underprivileged dream mostly about becoming more like privileged ones, and not so much about giving up everything to go and live in a jungle/mountains. IMHO most of the people complaining of modern life being too stressful are the middle or upper class working their asses off to buy a bigger house/car/yacht/whatever just because everybody around them does the same and that's what they see as a measure of success. Many of them could easily solve the problem by changing their life style, but that would mean giving up on some ambitions, social status and luxury. It's a choice one makes, not something you're forced into, so I really don't see them as victims, at least not victims of the society.
racer-v 9y ago
In such extreme times civilization is the safety net that saves your life, and that's why we come up with it, in the first place. To make our life easier. It makes our life eaiser in those extreme times when a safety net is needed. We pay for this by spending our normal days working in office buildings and paying insurance premiums instead of fishing and picking fruit. It's a classic case of selling freedom for security.

sek3 9y ago

We don't have civilization today. We have a consumption machine that has gone of the rails trapping everyone from CEOs, Generals, Judges, Politicians to Janitors in mindless superficial activity. We have more in common with an ant colony than whatever civilization ideal anyone ever imagined.

nils-m-holm 9y ago
And anyone who mentions it will get marginalized. :(
- guntars 9y ago
  I doubt you or the parent commenter are going to be marginalized because of that comment is any way. The fact that you can have these beliefs and express them in a public forum is a sign of how civilized things actually are. There are plenty people alive that have lived through times where that wasn't an option. Talking to them might give you some perspective.
  - nils-m-holm 9y ago
    Rest assured that I'm not making such a remark without having some perspective. Of course you can express your opinion freely, as long as it is irrelevant and pretty much nobody listens. That's why I can make such a comment here: nobody cares. Talking to some people who were abused and tortured today in so-called democratic countries might give you some perspective.
Radim 9y ago
This is an interesting point. I was born in East Europe "behind the iron curtain", but lived in the west for a long time. And then East Asia for even longer. There are huge differences in how people perceive "civilization" and how "trapped" they feel vs actually are. The west with its rigorous rules, both explicit and implicit. Regulation of every facet of your life, to a degree you don't realize (it's so natural! building permissions! driving permissions! marriage permissions! breath the air permissions! otherwise the world collapses!) until you've lived somewhere else. South East Asia with its reckless freedom, or downright anarchy (Thailand). The social pressure is applied more on the family level. There are few explicit regulations, and even where they do exist, you're half expected to ignore them. All of this is changing of course. As Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". There is no doubt in which direction the civilization is moving. Individual human ingenuity is an outstanding achievement, but isn't evolution always oh-so-squinting toward larger, more integrated, more efficient structures? The game of entropy. The naive integration attempts in the 20th century didn't work out so well, but the pressure is building again. Maybe this time.
- tigershark 9y ago
  Honestly I will be extremely happy when people from south east Asia or from Europe or from everywhere in the world will be banned from driving and self driving cars can do it, wasting so much less lives. I have never been to Thailand, but in the two times that I have been in Philippines I have seen two corpses under a blanket because of two separate road accidents. Much, much, better to limit the so called "freedom" of some people if it helps to save innocent human lives.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    People who would trade freedom for safety deserve neither.

lordnacho 9y ago

One thing to consider is people lived like this for ages and ages. So our brains are evolved to cope with that kind of living. A lot of the Kahnemann/Tversky type biases that people exhibit is because their ancestors lived in an environment similar to the bush people. Take people out, and all sorts of things happen. People get addicted to sugar, heroin, Facebook. You get unhealthy due to lack of exercise. You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings). You grow up feeling awkward because you can't contribute from the age where you can talk, and you have to sit in front of a blackboard for years before you get let near anything. Your natural allies, your relatives, are not so near you as you'd like. You don't even have that many because you can't have a family until you're quite old. I can see why there's this paradox that nothing seems to change how happy people are.

rfugger 9y ago
> You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings). I feel a lot of the issues in our society boil down to this. Logically we should feel more secure in a modern economy because of the sheer material wealth, and yet so many of us suffer depression, anxiety, and a raft of other chronic health issues. I suspect this is at least partly because we are evolved to find security in close communal relationships with people around us, but these relationships have become more shallow in modern society.
- lordnacho 9y ago
  There was some article recently arguing that the Las Vegas shooter was lonely. I don't know about that specifically, but I've run into a lot of people who were desperate for some social contact. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them ended up committing terrible crimes because of it. At my parents' restaurant we'd often get the odd guy (normally a man) who was there just because he wanted to see other people. The sort of person you see who'd jump at any chance to talk to someone. They'd smile at everyone else, and try get some chat going, all while dining for one. Normally it would be my dad asking the guy about his life, he is good at that. I remember when I was much older, and eating with my family at a restaurant, there'd be a regular we'd see who'd come in for a beer, smile at everyone, and then move on to the next place, and repeat. It was a small town. Dude seemed nice enough. For me it's always interesting to observe myself when I'm with family. I have a huge number of cousins owing to a busy grandfather. There's a pleasant yet hard-to-explain familiarity with them, because I didn't grow up with any but 5 of them. The others (dozens, I can't count and they keep finding me on FB) grew up elsewhere, but somehow I feel warm and fuzzy when they're around. Last time we all met up it was in Vegas.

Can_Not 9y ago

> And if it's too stressful for you, is it really because of the civilization, or because of your own choices and ambitions? Most people didn't choose their parents, their gender, their skin color, their poverty level, their childhood religious beliefs, what highschool they went to, their birth location, the job opportunities around their birth location, their spouse's choice's, their illness itenerary, etc.. So it's definitely interesting to read someine accurately describe a systematic problem then at the last second blame the victims and not the system.

ivanhoe 9y ago
AFAIK underprivileged dream mostly about becoming more like privileged ones, and not so much about giving up everything to go and live in a jungle/mountains. IMHO most of the people complaining of modern life being too stressful are the middle or upper class working their asses off to buy a bigger house/car/yacht/whatever just because everybody around them does the same and that's what they see as a measure of success. Many of them could easily solve the problem by changing their life style, but that would mean giving up on some ambitions, social status and luxury. It's a choice one makes, not something you're forced into, so I really don't see them as victims, at least not victims of the society.

racer-v 9y ago

In such extreme times civilization is the safety net that saves your life, and that's why we come up with it, in the first place. To make our life easier. It makes our life eaiser in those extreme times when a safety net is needed. We pay for this by spending our normal days working in office buildings and paying insurance premiums instead of fishing and picking fruit. It's a classic case of selling freedom for security.