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What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

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Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#71

Post by fittingopposite »

t098i3 wrote: post #57
bitwize wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of he…

Brett Devereaux's series of articles "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" is a must read for anyone who benefits from modern technology, IMO: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... Pre-industrial life was dominated by labor, struggle and death. There was virtually no social, intellectual or economic mobility. It sucked!

Tribal hunter gatherers cultures (and not agrarian cultures) are very egalitarian. Social mobility is not relevant at all because there is no stratification. You are just you and I think this is some of the beauty we in modern world yearn for. Not only people today but also pre industrially. In Europe we left this hunter gatherer lifestyle several thousand years ago...

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#72

Post by fittingopposite »

pbkompasz wrote: post #26
cortesoft wrote: post #14

I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools. I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or mov…

> Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city with…

The title says hunter gatherers. That's totally different from life 150 years ago. It's even different from the medieval or agrarian iron age times.

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#73

Post by fittingopposite »

nkrisc wrote: post #44
cortesoft wrote: post #14

I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools. I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or mov…

Have you spent lots of time out in the wilderness before? Those you describe aren’t pleasant, but you learn to accept and deal with. I’m sure the are all kinds of unpleasantness in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc. I once spent a week hiking and camping in a rain forest. The first day I was trying…

Love it and totally agree. The comfort we think we need is nothing else than hedonic adaptation.

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#74

Post by fittingopposite »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #51
cortesoft wrote: post #14

I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools. I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or mov…

The amazing thing technology brought me is that I can now have optic fiber in my house in the middle of nowhere . I'm literally typing this while hearing the sound of waves and if I look above my laptop's screen, I see the reflections of the (near full apparently) moon on the sea. It's a bit of a remote place (closest village is a 10 minutes drive and closest highway is a 45+ minutes drive) so I've got to fix many th…

That sounds nice. Which parts of the globe do you recommend for such a lifestyle? I assume your not a digital nomad but rather deeply embedded in your environment? Would love to learn more about this lifestyle. Want online resources you can recommend?

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#75

Post by fittingopposite »

stevenalowe wrote: post #29

“ The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.” Except none of that ever existed

I don't agree. It's a description of a simple hunter gatherer life. Why do you say this has never existed?

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#76

Post by fittingopposite »

nozzlegear wrote: post #23
Morromist wrote: post #5

Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people. No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power. One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because…

> Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people. Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.

With the difference that the larger the cities, the less we know the people around us and socialize with them. Totally different if you live in a tribe of 200 people or a mega city with 20 million people around you.

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#77

Post by fittingopposite »

bloppe wrote: post #42
Morromist wrote: post #5

Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people. No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power. One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because…

I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.

I feel the issue we experience in the modern world that it just feels unnatural and alienating to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of people we don't know at all and who don't know us. In a small tribe you have the comfort of knowing everyone around you fairly well. The modern world is so anonymous.

Re: What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

#80

Post by Animats »

nozzlegear wrote: post #23
Morromist wrote: post #5

Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people. No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power. One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because…

> Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people. Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.

Unlike the hunter-gatherer concept, medium sized cities can work. But they don't.

Cities in the 50,000 to 250,000 population range are not doing that well. That's what drives population to mega-cities. This, when you think about it, is strange. A city in that size is big enough to support multiple factories, large retail establishments, fully equipped hospitals, entertainment businesses, repair services for all key technologies, and an airport. So why don't such cities outperform mega-cities, where the friction costs of scale start to get in the way?

This has been studied. Search for "medium sized cities" "problems". The phrase "urban shrinkage" is used in Europe. In most of the developed world, medium cities are not doing well. What seems to happen is that young people leave, the average age becomes older, a smaller fraction of people are in the workforce, factories close, and a slow death begins. Those forms of decline feed each other.

Japan is furthest along this path. Only Tokyo and Osaka grow; the rest of the country has hollowed out. It's a big issue in the US and in Germany. Don't know about other countries.

Without growth, medium sized cities age and die. Yet population is leveling off. Now what?

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