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> but all those things you "were doing with improper form" are easy enough that people had been informally teaching each other to do them plenty well for thousa

by roenxi 2y ago

> but all those things you "were doing with improper form" are easy enough that people had been informally teaching each other to do them plenty well for thousands of millenia. I suspect you're idealising a past that never existed. I don't think there is any particular evidence that people were ever in good physical health or easily in touch with their bodies. The evidence I have seen is they were malnourished, parasite- and disease-ridden and often lived relatively short lives filled with pain and discomfort. There are surely some lifestyle diseases that came into existence since the 1000s but there are also a lot more that disappeared. I think this stuff is just generally tricky to get right and people struggled then about as much as people do now. For some easy things like diet there is no real question that they had it much worse.

swatcoder 2y ago
First, I think you're haveing a knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion that the basics of healthy, normal human behavior comes "easy" and responding as though I suggested that life was some blissful utopia we should all return to or something. Those are just two entirely different claims, and I only made one of them. Second, as far as your actual claim, not only do written and material records really not back some harsh dystopia in an abstract sense, but lived experience and direct observation from modern history directly dispute it. While colonialism did a number on many specific communities and seats of power, most communities around the globe were still not living all that much differently as they had been in the many centuries beforehand until as recently as the 20th century. Anthropology thrived as a field of study specifically because there were countless such communities still existed mostly undisturbed. And these communities faced challenges, just as ours does, but they weren't desperate, afflicted, and stricken except in acute and ephemeral pockets of disease outbreak, resource exhaustion, natural disaster, etc -- all of which we still face now ourselves. Third, intuition alone should make you second guess your unevidenced sense of an dystopian elsewhere and elsewhen as it presupposes that humans -- despite spreading all over the world, reshaping it for millenia, and developing all sorts of sophisticated culture along the way -- were somehow the most awkward and incapable of lifeforms to ever live on that world, existing in sime constant misery and affliction profoundly worse than any wild animal. That doesn't really add up, right? At the end of the day, the comfort and security of human life has never been perfectly optimal and utopian anywhere for all that long, including now, but the ease of just bheaving as a well human (which is what this discussion is about) comes quite naturally and shouldn't feel "hard" or at all once you've actually received the cultural inheritence in how to live it. This easy-feeling cultural inheritence has very recently been disrupted in some high-visibility modern communities, which is a little tragic, but the insights are still available to those that missed them, as the person I responded to attested for themselves. So my question was simply whether or why they still felt these things were hard when so many others don't and never did. No idealization involved.

by roenxi 2y ago

swatcoder 2y ago

First, I think you're haveing a knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion that the basics of healthy, normal human behavior comes "easy" and responding as though I suggested that life was some blissful utopia we should all return to or something. Those are just two entirely different claims, and I only made one of them. Second, as far as your actual claim, not only do written and material records really not back some harsh dystopia in an abstract sense, but lived experience and direct observation from modern history directly dispute it. While colonialism did a number on many specific communities and seats of power, most communities around the globe were still not living all that much differently as they had been in the many centuries beforehand until as recently as the 20th century. Anthropology thrived as a field of study specifically because there were countless such communities still existed mostly undisturbed. And these communities faced challenges, just as ours does, but they weren't desperate, afflicted, and stricken except in acute and ephemeral pockets of disease outbreak, resource exhaustion, natural disaster, etc -- all of which we still face now ourselves. Third, intuition alone should make you second guess your unevidenced sense of an dystopian elsewhere and elsewhen as it presupposes that humans -- despite spreading all over the world, reshaping it for millenia, and developing all sorts of sophisticated culture along the way -- were somehow the most awkward and incapable of lifeforms to ever live on that world, existing in sime constant misery and affliction profoundly worse than any wild animal. That doesn't really add up, right? At the end of the day, the comfort and security of human life has never been perfectly optimal and utopian anywhere for all that long, including now, but the ease of just bheaving as a well human (which is what this discussion is about) comes quite naturally and shouldn't feel "hard" or at all once you've actually received the cultural inheritence in how to live it. This easy-feeling cultural inheritence has very recently been disrupted in some high-visibility modern communities, which is a little tragic, but the insights are still available to those that missed them, as the person I responded to attested for themselves. So my question was simply whether or why they still felt these things were hard when so many others don't and never did. No idealization involved.