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The inability to be present has more to do with this artificially complex modern life we've engineered ourselves into, more than the trappings of our intellect.
by Solvency 3y ago
The inability to be present has more to do with this artificially complex modern life we've engineered ourselves into, more than the trappings of our intellect.
Life was far more assuring, rewarding, bountiful, and meaningful if you were living in a small Native American community in the year 1400 and millions of bison roamed the plains, and the soil was the most fertile in the world, and you had a direct, non-abstracted, immediate relationship with every person in the community around you. All of your inputs lead to physically direct outputs.
And all of your biological wetware and quirks were designed and evolved to operate in this context. Hunting, foraging, moving your own body around, sleeping and waking with the sun, having non-digital relationships, eating whole foods from the earth.
And it's not to say life never had its struggles. But it was certainly more biologically consistent and natural than what we've turned it into.
- mahathu 3y agoEnjoy working 12 hour days every day and eating potatoes 365 days of the year?
- lm28469 3y agoOpen literally any history book and be amazed at how far you are from reality. For the extreme vast majority of history we worked way less to sustain ourselves, certainly not the current 8 hours per day + average 100 minutes commute. The current 8 hours a day only sounds good because we had a short period of 10-12+ hours a day in mines and factories It's funny how people are so confidently incorrect and so happy to be slave to their work, almost bragging about it. I can't even wrap my head around that, some form of Stockholm syndrome perhaps https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... https://medium.com/world-issues-politics-economics-and-more/before-the-industrial-revolution-mankind-worked-a-20-hour-week-cab974740649 https://medium.com/world-issues-politics-economics-and-more/... https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human-history-people-worked-15-hours-a-week-could-we-do-it-again.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...
- hospitalJail 3y agoIgnorance is bliss? Is it better to believe in gods that will reincarnate you as a bear if you die in battle? Or is it better to have access to knowledge? Also, bad weather and praying to gods wasnt exactly input/output.
- swader999 3y agoI could go another round as a bear. Bears are awesome.
- hospitalJail 3y agoNo, you don't get to be a bear at all. That was the mysticism the clan leader tricked you into dying for him for.
- dotnet00 3y agoThis reads like the usual "appeal to nature" fallacy. If you're going to focus on things like the soil being fertile and being directly involved with your neighbors, you kinda also have to consider the complete inability to cope with storms and disease and all the social ills that were reinforced because of that tight knit community. We like to think of past life as having been the benefits of all our modern moral leanings and all our "invisible" technologies combined with idealized visions of farming fertile lands and hunting among herds of animals, but any history book makes it obvious why our ancestors struggled so hard for us to live differently. Ignoring that many of the anecdotes presented in the linked article are mostly the author projecting despair onto others, those fundamental issues of disease, old age and death, were even worse when we lived "naturally" and had stronger ties to the people we lived around.
- digging 3y agoLargely agreed. A total regression view is inaccurate and foolish. Plenty of people had shit lives before industrialization and plenty of good lives were cut short. We can't just assume "the past is better." That's wrong in many ways. However, when we look at our lives today, we can see things that are not good, and we can find ways that those things could be good. Many solutions can come from the past. Connection to our communities and investment in our environment seem to have real benefits for us an individuals, besides the systemic benefits.
- nradov 3y agoHow can solutions come from the past when we don't even have reliable information about what the past was like? Archaeological data on the lives of pre-Columbian indigenous New World peoples is extremely limited. Even much of what we think we know is probably mistaken, or at least badly distorted by modern biases.
- digging 3y agoSimple: we don't replicate the lives of past peoples. We take ideas from [our ideas of] the past and find out if they work for us. And... it doesn't need to be from indigenous New World people.
- swader999 3y agoDisease, weather, conflicts with other warring tribes. Fitting into the hierarchy, the ever present threat of banishment.
- ROTMetro 3y agoUnless you had a Crow/Sioux type situation where your tribe was being eradicated by a neighboring tribe and you had been captured and enslaved, or your clan lacked power/influence due to a low number of strong males. But sure, if you were in the top it might have been like you describe.
- ericmcer 3y agoHave fun with that. I much prefer having modern medicine, grocery stores, modern entertainment etc. Just yesterday I picked up a bunch of tacos and sat down to watch the movie Renfield with the family and I had a brief moment of awe about all the resources that are at our fingertips. I am not rich by any means but can watch one of the greatest actors in history performing on a 72inch 4k screen in my living room whenever I want. It is amazing. If you were a Native American in the 1400s you were pretty much guaranteed to die young and in a painful fashion after a very hard life.
- steve_g 3y agoI agree with you 100%. The average person now lives better than the richest kings a few hundred years ago. But I think it's funny that you use Nick Cage as an example. Not to be mean - I like him too. But it's still funny.
- ericmcer 3y agoOh yeah I was hoping someone would notice the Nick Cage greatest actor bit haha
- glitchc 3y ago> greatest actor Surely you don't mean Nicholas Cage! That title clearly belongs to John Cena.
- 31carmichael 3y agoI'll also stay in 2023, thank you. The author of the comment, "Life was far more assuring, rewarding, bountiful, and meaningful back when...... " is ignorant and cannot imagine the hardships of such a life. He's nostalgic for a life that he didn't live. You don't have to fight off a saber tooth tiger to find meaning in this life.