So I am partial to the idea of working "to do the minimum amount of work necessary to underwrite a good life." I think our culture is broken in several ways, an

So I am partial to the idea of working "to do the minimum amount of work necessary to underwrite a good life." I think our culture is broken in several ways, and this sounds like a good approach. BUT, the romantisized ahistorical model of the Ju/’hoansi people (also known as !Kung San, "bushmen") the argument detailed here is based on... had it's high point in 1966 indeed, and is no longer considered reliable by anthropology. It's based on too many romantisized assumptions feeding into what Western anthropologists wanted to see. 1. That the Ju/’hoansi people had, just until the Western anthropologists showed up, been exclusively "foraging" and "isolated" without contact with their neighbors or "civilization". In fact, when Richard Lee showed up they were already in economic and cultural contact with their neighbors, but he left this out of his account, assuming it happened just before he got there and was "uninteresting". 2. That the Ju/’hoansi culture was unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus represneted how humasn lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. All people have history. Even to the extent they were "foragers", it doesn't mean their ancestors had been foragers for hundreds of thousands of years, had an unchanged culture for hundreds of thousands of years, or lived "just like" humans of hundreds of thousands of years ago. 3. That the Ju/’hoansi lived that way entirely by choice -- or entirely as determined by their "environment" and not as part of larger human regional multi-ethnic society. Edwin Wilmsen made an argument backed by evidence that can't be quickly dismissed that they actually functioned as a regional underclass in relation to other ethnic groups in the area, that perhaps they would rather have had more than "the minimum amount necessary" [or a different level of 'good life'] but didn't have access to the means of production to do so. All of these counter-claims are also simplifications and debatable. But the original picture of "foragers who have been living this way for thousands of years with no contact with anyone else and thus show how humans lived in pre-history" is clearly also an over-simplification, and is not really how anthropology sees things anymore. That people are still repeating it as gospel in 2021 I guess shows how attractive it is to some of us in our culture in 2021, as much as it says anything about prehistory or the Ju/’hoansi. And to be sure, the Ju/’hoansi in the last half of the 20th century, show a different way to live, sure. As do all sorts of people around the globe. I think it is accurate and beneficial to let anthropology remind us of the incredible diversity of ways humans have found to live, that things we think are invariant or necessary for "healthy" culture almost never are, that there are far more paths available than we might assume.