I strongly recommend you check out the book Sapiens. This is one of his core arguments - that the life of an agriculturist was much worse than that of a hunter

I strongly recommend you check out the book Sapiens. This is one of his core arguments - that the life of an agriculturist was much worse than that of a hunter gatherer because the agriculturist would have a less varied diet, would be vulnerable to famines, would have weaker immune systems (due to weaning sooner) etc. And yet some people chose to become agriculturists anyway because it appeared to promise a better, more stable life. Each change they'd make would be small. They'd start out collecting wild wheat, say. They'd eat it and move on. They'd figure out that coming back to that area at a certain time of the year made sense, so they would. Then they'd figure, let's scatter these seeds so they'd spend a little time before moving on. Then one person might have realised, planting it deeper yielded better results. So they would plough the land a bit and move on. But as they invested more effort into the land, the more food they'd get from it. They'd start to spend more time living in that area, protecting their work. But then two things would happen 1. Their 100 person hunter gatherer band would expand, to a larger group, say 150. That area could support a hundred hunter gatherers easily, but not 150. If no one in the group wanted to starve, they had to continue farming. 2. Gradually over a few generations, the number of people in the settlement would grow let's say 10 fold. These people would set up other settlements and practice agriculture there. It's not like they could be hunter gatherers because by then the knowledge would have been lost. The density of these settlements also meant that in any conflict with hunter gatherers over territory, the agriculturists would win. So gradually, there would be way more agriculturists. Each farmer might be less happy than the average hunter gatherer, but the farmers' advantages meant that there would be way more farmers anyway. If we started out in an area with 500 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers, in a 1000 years, we'd end up with 5000 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers (assuming they were allowed to stay). A 50-50 split becomes 90-10. I've paraphrased Yuval Noah Harari here. I think it's worth reading the whole book because he presents this really well. What's more, you start to evaluate ideas (is farming a good idea?) not just in terms of their merits, but also in terms of how well the idea will survive. Survival of the fittest applied to ideas. Agriculture, in that sense is a _better_ idea, not because it makes people happy, but because with time it has more adherents.