5 ms·

Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. For thousands of years, we essentially just lived with and around

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. For thousands of years, we essentially just lived with and around family. Yet now I get to see my entire family for a few days every year. Some cousins I haven’t met in years. The people I spend the most time with everyday are also the people I care the least for - colleagues and acquaintances. I don’t have a solution. But I just know innately that this isn’t how things are supposed be.

nly 4y ago
Even a couple of generations ago things were very different. Maybe Americans don't see this so much because it's a country of migrants, but it was common over here in the UK, just a century ago, for people to spend their entire lives within a 10 mile radius of where they were born.
- beardyw 4y ago
  You have hit on an issue which always seems to be overlooked. It is easy to talk about "extended family" as of it was one thing. It isn't and can't be. When a child marries, as a couple they belong to two families. When their children marry they belong to two families. And so it goes. [1] An older individual may see all descendents as "their family", but in reality they are all shared. Somebody here mentioned the Kennedys, but despite a powerful image, the same applies to them. The only way for a real extended family to survive is by all living in close proximity to everyone else so those structures interleave. Like, I assume, the Navajo. The bicycle was first to blame, then the car, then the plane. [1] "marry" used in a loose context here, any relationship in reality.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Maybe its a cultural thing, but I've always been taught that even extended family is family, regardless of how often I see them, and if they come to me for help, I'm obligated to help them.
    - balfirevic 4y ago
      Do you believe everything you've been taught?
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  The median American lives 18 miles from their mom. Americans are moving less than at any time in US history. For the most part, the idea of a nation in motion is over. The typical American isn't the typical Hacker News reader though, the typical Hacker News reader is going to go where the money is, not stay where the family is.
BigHatLogan 4y ago
Well said. I'm not sure which method is "better" (maybe a society's overall productivity increases if children leave the home, but I don't know if this is "good" for the individual or not), but this does seem unnatural. However, I didn't feel this way during high school. I spent eight hours there during school itself, and then two or three hours afterwards playing sports with my friends. My memory is a little hazy, but I don't recall spending a lot of time with my parents even back then. But for some reason it feels different today, even though I actually think I spend more time with my parents today (I usually visit them on weekends). I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because high school (for some of us, not for everyone) is largely spent with your friends, so your "social needs" are more readily met, versus at your typical rank-and-file corporate environment. Anyways, I'm rambling again. I agree with you though fundamentally: this arrangement seems unnatural, and suboptimal too.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  in my case, i'm the youngest of the family (and mid 30's) and lost many many many relatives already. i'm aware that people will die one day and so I try to enjoy my family while they still alive
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Dipping a toe into genealogy will do that as well.
- woweoe 4y ago
  I also would have preferred to spend more time with my friends than with my parents. Due to conflict with my parents I have no real desire to talk more to them nowadays either. I think one of the reasons is because children are generally building their personality at high school, where as by the time we reach work we've already built over personality and we are no longer flexible.
em500 4y ago
For thousands of years, most people just couldn't move very far due to physics and economics. The were mostly forced to be neighbours with family. It's always valuable to have good relationships with neightbours, whether they're family or not. As the old Dutch saying goes "Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend” ("it’s better to have good neighbour than a distant friend"). (I think that's an adaptation of a section of the Bible Proverbs 27:10: "Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family, and do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you— better a neighbor nearby than a relative far away.")
- hackernewds 4y ago
  It's nice to be family with your neighbors. But it's best to be neighbors with your family. The family bond really supercedes anything else (in most cases)
  - ntlk 4y ago
    It’s nice unless your family is awful.
- hpkuarg 4y ago
  Unrelated, but it always amuses me how much Dutch sounds like drunk English ;-)
lucumo 4y ago
> Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. I feel it is as unnatural as not having cholera roaming around: better than the natural state of affairs. I love my family, but family vacations make me want to run away screaming. Having to live with family would break me.
- badpun 4y ago
  In human's natural state (hunter-gatherer), most of the deadly infectious diseases didn't plague us. They only started jumping to humans when we started doing animal husbandry (new diseases got to us via close living with animals) and when we started living in dense cities. Both conditions were only met circa 10k years ago.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    That's also around the time where our natural tooth defenses started to become overwhelmed, and cleaning of the mouth, tongue, teeth, and gums became necessary.
koonsolo 4y ago
The good news is that you get to pick your colleagues and acquaintances.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Do we? I picked the company I'm at. I had a little input on the team I'm on. I don't have any control over who comes and goes on our team. If I were to join a new company I'd be picking at best a vague group of people I've met once while interviewing.
Markoff 4y ago
As they say you can't choose your family, but you can choose friends, so I can see how many/most of the people would choose between age 20-40 to stay away from family, then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved plus them helping with watching grandkids is also bonus (this doesn't really apply to me, my mother is 4 hours away by train, father 6 hours and inlaws 11 hour flight.
- watwut 4y ago
  > then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved Is this really so common or just something a writer said once? Because I definitely went the opposite way. And genuinely, I never seen anyone say that they did became more understanding toward stuff that bothered them the most when they were younger. I know both people who try to emulate parents with own parenting and those who are firmly decided to do things differently. (Most have both aspects.)
  - Markoff 4y ago
    It's my own experience, while I still disagree with many things my parents did, I don't judge tham as much as before I had kids, now I'm more understanding. It doesn't even mean you approve their approach, you can choose different one, but you can see how difficult it is whatever you decide to do.
    - watwut 4y ago
      That is the thing, I went opposite way. I understood what they were aiming for with certain things and do judge them more harshly for it.
  - woweoe 4y ago
    I guess there is going to be a number of people whose parents were basically abusive.
juliendorra 4y ago
Language ruined everything, as it allowed us humans to update and maintain our social network (not the digital ones, the in-brain one) without seeing or (like apes do) touching each others for days. Our groups/tribes jumped from 30 members maximum (chimpanzees) to 100-200 (Dunbar’s number, calculated from a meta-study). That’s nearly 7 times more close relationships, and no need to see more than one or two daily to keep track! From there, it’s all downhill, with writing allowing even bigger groups, distant communication, the printing press, telephone, allowing our small brains to manage huge social networks across the world and over the years. Really, language is the source of all these fake, distant relationships! Good articles to read, even more if you are building or studying internet social networks, communication tools, etc. "Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective" https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf "co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans" https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199... They are part of the material I use in my ´History of Tech Design´ class! ( https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7C https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7... )
gonzo41 4y ago
If you were around your family all day you'll get over them just like your colleagues. The most unnatural thing about modern life IMO is that we are not doing physical labor all day and instead sit. Whilst also working more. --edits for my terrible phone
- FFRefresh 4y ago
  Minor quibble with the usage of 'unnatural'. Humans are part of nature and our creations/society we build are a result of nature as well. In the bigger picture, I don't see why 'physical labor' should be considered some privileged activity of humanity that we must hope to get back to. Movement and physical activity are important for our bodies, but that doesn't mean physical labor is an unalloyed good. If anything, we're seeing evolution at play, we're expending less human energy for our labor over time. That seems good! We just need to figure out how to not let our physical bodies degrade in a way that can worsen our quality of life.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    I get what you're saying, but doesn't that kind of negate the usefulness of the word 'natural' to use it in this way? If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?
    - FFRefresh 4y ago
      I actually don't think invocations of 'natural' are very useful given: 1. There's a degree of ambiguity involved with the term as far as what gets lumped in with natural vs not 2. This ambiguity gets leveraged by those who want to push for whatever their subjective takes on the ideal state of the world/human relations. (i.e. it gets used a lot as a cheap tactic to dismiss human behavioral changes or how we organize ourselves or technological change, etc.) 3. Using 'unnatural' or 'artificial' to describe the modern world on the surface has an air of being descriptive/fact-based, but in reality the speaker tends to be assigning a value judgment (natural = morally good, artificial = morally bad) to a portion of the world they don't like. I don't think I've ever seen someone say "[X] is unnatural, we should have more of it!" To answer your question on "If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?' - my answer would be why are we trying to describe the modern human lifestyle as 'unnatural' or 'artificial' in the first place? What are we really trying to convey? I think humans are part of the natural world, and we cannot escape the laws of nature. We live within the bounds of the laws of nature. Calling some of our activities 'artificial' seems to be really about saying we don't like the given activities for whatever reason. And if that is the reason for using the term 'unnatural' or 'artificial', why not just say it and then state why we don't like it? To bring it all back to the parent I was responding to, is it really that physical labor is some 'natural' thing whereas non-physical labor is 'unnatural' (do any other animals or oganisms do 'labor' as we use the term?)? In general, types of human labor seems like a weird area to assign a natural/unnatural label on. Or is it really about thinking something may be getting lost as we move away from physical labor? And if so, we should just say so instead of leaning on the power of the word 'natural'. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
lampshades 4y ago
I grew up around a large extended family and now live in a large metro away from anyone I’m related to other than my wife and kids. I wish my kids could grow up like I did but my siblings don’t look like they’re having kids soon and neither do my wife’s siblings. But, I feel so sad for my children when it’s just us on Christmas. It feels lonely because growing up, Christmas always had like 20 people. We’ve thought about moving back closer to my family now that I work remotely but my wife is from a different part of the country and that makes it tougher because it would take us further from her family. She’s also from the city (not our current city) and doesn’t like the idea of living somewhere rural (she considers it rural, the metro we’d consider has 500k people though).
riekus 4y ago
I agree, about one year ago while backpacking for couple years I landed in a rural village in rural Australia, met a girl there and stayed for 18 months. I myself am from the Netherlands, and really noticed how life there revolves around things that I think are so much more important. Like bigger families, nature, lots of space and better work life balance. In the end I couldn't live with the thought of me creating a new family there and leaving my parents, sisters and niece's behind even though I would love my future siblings to life this simpeler rural life. On top of this, the girl I broke up with visited for the last 3 days and just drove her to the airport, she dug up all these emotions again and second guessing my decision again.. Your post really resonated
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Yeah its really sad. Most of the time I've spent with my family has already happened. The future holds at most a week or two each year in the future. It is really hard as well since I really dont want to live in the part of the country ANY of my family currently lives in.

nly 4y ago

Even a couple of generations ago things were very different. Maybe Americans don't see this so much because it's a country of migrants, but it was common over here in the UK, just a century ago, for people to spend their entire lives within a 10 mile radius of where they were born.

beardyw 4y ago
You have hit on an issue which always seems to be overlooked. It is easy to talk about "extended family" as of it was one thing. It isn't and can't be. When a child marries, as a couple they belong to two families. When their children marry they belong to two families. And so it goes. [1] An older individual may see all descendents as "their family", but in reality they are all shared. Somebody here mentioned the Kennedys, but despite a powerful image, the same applies to them. The only way for a real extended family to survive is by all living in close proximity to everyone else so those structures interleave. Like, I assume, the Navajo. The bicycle was first to blame, then the car, then the plane. [1] "marry" used in a loose context here, any relationship in reality.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Maybe its a cultural thing, but I've always been taught that even extended family is family, regardless of how often I see them, and if they come to me for help, I'm obligated to help them.
  - balfirevic 4y ago
    Do you believe everything you've been taught?
rufus_foreman 4y ago
The median American lives 18 miles from their mom. Americans are moving less than at any time in US history. For the most part, the idea of a nation in motion is over. The typical American isn't the typical Hacker News reader though, the typical Hacker News reader is going to go where the money is, not stay where the family is.

BigHatLogan 4y ago

Well said. I'm not sure which method is "better" (maybe a society's overall productivity increases if children leave the home, but I don't know if this is "good" for the individual or not), but this does seem unnatural. However, I didn't feel this way during high school. I spent eight hours there during school itself, and then two or three hours afterwards playing sports with my friends. My memory is a little hazy, but I don't recall spending a lot of time with my parents even back then. But for some reason it feels different today, even though I actually think I spend more time with my parents today (I usually visit them on weekends). I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because high school (for some of us, not for everyone) is largely spent with your friends, so your "social needs" are more readily met, versus at your typical rank-and-file corporate environment. Anyways, I'm rambling again. I agree with you though fundamentally: this arrangement seems unnatural, and suboptimal too.

boredemployee 4y ago
in my case, i'm the youngest of the family (and mid 30's) and lost many many many relatives already. i'm aware that people will die one day and so I try to enjoy my family while they still alive
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Dipping a toe into genealogy will do that as well.
woweoe 4y ago
I also would have preferred to spend more time with my friends than with my parents. Due to conflict with my parents I have no real desire to talk more to them nowadays either. I think one of the reasons is because children are generally building their personality at high school, where as by the time we reach work we've already built over personality and we are no longer flexible.

em500 4y ago

For thousands of years, most people just couldn't move very far due to physics and economics. The were mostly forced to be neighbours with family. It's always valuable to have good relationships with neightbours, whether they're family or not. As the old Dutch saying goes "Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend” ("it’s better to have good neighbour than a distant friend"). (I think that's an adaptation of a section of the Bible Proverbs 27:10: "Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family, and do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you— better a neighbor nearby than a relative far away.")

hackernewds 4y ago
It's nice to be family with your neighbors. But it's best to be neighbors with your family. The family bond really supercedes anything else (in most cases)
- ntlk 4y ago
  It’s nice unless your family is awful.
hpkuarg 4y ago
Unrelated, but it always amuses me how much Dutch sounds like drunk English ;-)

lucumo 4y ago

> Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. I feel it is as unnatural as not having cholera roaming around: better than the natural state of affairs. I love my family, but family vacations make me want to run away screaming. Having to live with family would break me.

badpun 4y ago
In human's natural state (hunter-gatherer), most of the deadly infectious diseases didn't plague us. They only started jumping to humans when we started doing animal husbandry (new diseases got to us via close living with animals) and when we started living in dense cities. Both conditions were only met circa 10k years ago.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  That's also around the time where our natural tooth defenses started to become overwhelmed, and cleaning of the mouth, tongue, teeth, and gums became necessary.

koonsolo 4y ago

The good news is that you get to pick your colleagues and acquaintances.

AlwaysRock 4y ago
Do we? I picked the company I'm at. I had a little input on the team I'm on. I don't have any control over who comes and goes on our team. If I were to join a new company I'd be picking at best a vague group of people I've met once while interviewing.

Markoff 4y ago

As they say you can't choose your family, but you can choose friends, so I can see how many/most of the people would choose between age 20-40 to stay away from family, then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved plus them helping with watching grandkids is also bonus (this doesn't really apply to me, my mother is 4 hours away by train, father 6 hours and inlaws 11 hour flight.

watwut 4y ago
> then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved Is this really so common or just something a writer said once? Because I definitely went the opposite way. And genuinely, I never seen anyone say that they did became more understanding toward stuff that bothered them the most when they were younger. I know both people who try to emulate parents with own parenting and those who are firmly decided to do things differently. (Most have both aspects.)
- Markoff 4y ago
  It's my own experience, while I still disagree with many things my parents did, I don't judge tham as much as before I had kids, now I'm more understanding. It doesn't even mean you approve their approach, you can choose different one, but you can see how difficult it is whatever you decide to do.
  - watwut 4y ago
    That is the thing, I went opposite way. I understood what they were aiming for with certain things and do judge them more harshly for it.
- woweoe 4y ago
  I guess there is going to be a number of people whose parents were basically abusive.

juliendorra 4y ago

Language ruined everything, as it allowed us humans to update and maintain our social network (not the digital ones, the in-brain one) without seeing or (like apes do) touching each others for days. Our groups/tribes jumped from 30 members maximum (chimpanzees) to 100-200 (Dunbar’s number, calculated from a meta-study). That’s nearly 7 times more close relationships, and no need to see more than one or two daily to keep track! From there, it’s all downhill, with writing allowing even bigger groups, distant communication, the printing press, telephone, allowing our small brains to manage huge social networks across the world and over the years. Really, language is the source of all these fake, distant relationships! Good articles to read, even more if you are building or studying internet social networks, communication tools, etc. "Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective" https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf "co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans" https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199... They are part of the material I use in my ´History of Tech Design´ class! ( https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7C https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7... )

gonzo41 4y ago

If you were around your family all day you'll get over them just like your colleagues. The most unnatural thing about modern life IMO is that we are not doing physical labor all day and instead sit. Whilst also working more. --edits for my terrible phone

FFRefresh 4y ago
Minor quibble with the usage of 'unnatural'. Humans are part of nature and our creations/society we build are a result of nature as well. In the bigger picture, I don't see why 'physical labor' should be considered some privileged activity of humanity that we must hope to get back to. Movement and physical activity are important for our bodies, but that doesn't mean physical labor is an unalloyed good. If anything, we're seeing evolution at play, we're expending less human energy for our labor over time. That seems good! We just need to figure out how to not let our physical bodies degrade in a way that can worsen our quality of life.
- lukas099 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but doesn't that kind of negate the usefulness of the word 'natural' to use it in this way? If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?
  - FFRefresh 4y ago
    I actually don't think invocations of 'natural' are very useful given: 1. There's a degree of ambiguity involved with the term as far as what gets lumped in with natural vs not 2. This ambiguity gets leveraged by those who want to push for whatever their subjective takes on the ideal state of the world/human relations. (i.e. it gets used a lot as a cheap tactic to dismiss human behavioral changes or how we organize ourselves or technological change, etc.) 3. Using 'unnatural' or 'artificial' to describe the modern world on the surface has an air of being descriptive/fact-based, but in reality the speaker tends to be assigning a value judgment (natural = morally good, artificial = morally bad) to a portion of the world they don't like. I don't think I've ever seen someone say "[X] is unnatural, we should have more of it!" To answer your question on "If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?' - my answer would be why are we trying to describe the modern human lifestyle as 'unnatural' or 'artificial' in the first place? What are we really trying to convey? I think humans are part of the natural world, and we cannot escape the laws of nature. We live within the bounds of the laws of nature. Calling some of our activities 'artificial' seems to be really about saying we don't like the given activities for whatever reason. And if that is the reason for using the term 'unnatural' or 'artificial', why not just say it and then state why we don't like it? To bring it all back to the parent I was responding to, is it really that physical labor is some 'natural' thing whereas non-physical labor is 'unnatural' (do any other animals or oganisms do 'labor' as we use the term?)? In general, types of human labor seems like a weird area to assign a natural/unnatural label on. Or is it really about thinking something may be getting lost as we move away from physical labor? And if so, we should just say so instead of leaning on the power of the word 'natural'. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

lampshades 4y ago

I grew up around a large extended family and now live in a large metro away from anyone I’m related to other than my wife and kids. I wish my kids could grow up like I did but my siblings don’t look like they’re having kids soon and neither do my wife’s siblings. But, I feel so sad for my children when it’s just us on Christmas. It feels lonely because growing up, Christmas always had like 20 people. We’ve thought about moving back closer to my family now that I work remotely but my wife is from a different part of the country and that makes it tougher because it would take us further from her family. She’s also from the city (not our current city) and doesn’t like the idea of living somewhere rural (she considers it rural, the metro we’d consider has 500k people though).

riekus 4y ago

I agree, about one year ago while backpacking for couple years I landed in a rural village in rural Australia, met a girl there and stayed for 18 months. I myself am from the Netherlands, and really noticed how life there revolves around things that I think are so much more important. Like bigger families, nature, lots of space and better work life balance. In the end I couldn't live with the thought of me creating a new family there and leaving my parents, sisters and niece's behind even though I would love my future siblings to life this simpeler rural life. On top of this, the girl I broke up with visited for the last 3 days and just drove her to the airport, she dug up all these emotions again and second guessing my decision again.. Your post really resonated

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Yeah its really sad. Most of the time I've spent with my family has already happened. The future holds at most a week or two each year in the future. It is really hard as well since I really dont want to live in the part of the country ANY of my family currently lives in.