5 ms·

> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better s

by jameslk 11mo ago

> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things. That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune

kamaal 11mo ago
This keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work. There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view? I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
- darthcircuit 11mo ago
  I’ve lived in the mountains most of my life and only a couple years in a city. I’d take the mountains any day. The view doesn’t get old (at least to me). The air quality and noise alone are enough for me to not want to go back to a city. I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem. I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.
  - kamaal 11mo ago
    >>If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem. The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute. In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable. Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity. I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.
    - darthcircuit 11mo ago
      I love this perspective. Thank you.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  > Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view? Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes. And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all. In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true of me for you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that. And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.
- _yy01 11mo ago
  > I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth) This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer. Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it. Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life. oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards. We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.
  - kamaal 11mo ago
    Large metropolitan cities in India are purely for job reasons. I do believe buying expensive real estate in a city like Bangalore is pointless. You can put the same money in a good mutual fund, and buy a home in a Tier 2 city around Bangalore. You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things. The pollution, population density and pace are all a lot lower. Plus if the idea is to retire early, this is like the best plan you can come up with.
    - _yy01 11mo ago
      > You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things. * Then it takes 2 hours to reach your office in Bangalore. * It just postpones the actual problem. Gradually the tier-2 towns will get crowded too. * It means your local tier-2 town won't develop, and economy will be centred at these metropolitons.
vintermann 11mo ago
No, that won't work. The dynamics have changed completely: although your agrarian commune has a ton of advantages compared to a farm 200 years ago, neither you or them could get by without their outer societies. The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools, for instance, and certainly not, say, extracted the iron for those tools. And the economy between the farm/agrarian commune and wider society has changed dramatically. The agrarian commune has far less to offer its surrounding society. It will have to get by on charity and endowments (both ultimately based on outer society work).
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  > The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools... Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview. In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it. Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies. I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0 [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es

by jameslk 11mo ago

kamaal 11mo ago

This keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work. There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view? I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.

darthcircuit 11mo ago
I’ve lived in the mountains most of my life and only a couple years in a city. I’d take the mountains any day. The view doesn’t get old (at least to me). The air quality and noise alone are enough for me to not want to go back to a city. I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem. I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.
- kamaal 11mo ago
  >>If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem. The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute. In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable. Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity. I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.
  - darthcircuit 11mo ago
    I love this perspective. Thank you.
somenameforme 11mo ago
> Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view? Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes. And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all. In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true of me for you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that. And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.
_yy01 11mo ago
> I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth) This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer. Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it. Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life. oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards. We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.
- kamaal 11mo ago
  Large metropolitan cities in India are purely for job reasons. I do believe buying expensive real estate in a city like Bangalore is pointless. You can put the same money in a good mutual fund, and buy a home in a Tier 2 city around Bangalore. You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things. The pollution, population density and pace are all a lot lower. Plus if the idea is to retire early, this is like the best plan you can come up with.
  - _yy01 11mo ago
    > You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things. * Then it takes 2 hours to reach your office in Bangalore. * It just postpones the actual problem. Gradually the tier-2 towns will get crowded too. * It means your local tier-2 town won't develop, and economy will be centred at these metropolitons.

vintermann 11mo ago

No, that won't work. The dynamics have changed completely: although your agrarian commune has a ton of advantages compared to a farm 200 years ago, neither you or them could get by without their outer societies. The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools, for instance, and certainly not, say, extracted the iron for those tools. And the economy between the farm/agrarian commune and wider society has changed dramatically. The agrarian commune has far less to offer its surrounding society. It will have to get by on charity and endowments (both ultimately based on outer society work).

somenameforme 11mo ago
> The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools... Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview. In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it. Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies. I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0 [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es