Animals often seem to do nothing.
Sit and watch a wild rabbit all day, and while he'll be eating a lot of the time, his 2nd favourite activity appears to be just sitting idle.
He's awake, eyes open, just not doing anything.
One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
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Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
#82As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…
Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.
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Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine a…
The average level of happiness might be higher in hunter-gatherer societies, but the population they can support is far lower, so the total amount of well-being is also far lower.
You're the only person to even slightly respond to what I wrote. Everyone else repeated primitivist memes without engaging with the argument at all.
My hypothesis was that the edge cases were likely a problem. You might have been able to live well in a hunter-gatherer society of you were healthy and if natural disasters and invading peoples left you alone.
I'm sure deciding which children should live or die in a random weather-induced famine or watching invaders kill your family takes the shine off being a hunter-gatherer.
I suspect there are multiple reasons for the birth of civilization, agriculture, and technology, but one of these was probably as a form of insurance. Others probably included cults and religion, effectiveness at warfare (defensive or offensive), and simple fascination with and emulation of impressive feats like megalithic architecture (in other words mimetic behavior).
Of course people are right that there is no panacea and that we may have traded one set of problems for another, but that's how things go. History is a walk across state space exploring various nooks and crannies and finding out what angels and demons lurk there.
Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set of…
"The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." - Jared Diamond [0] "Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern…
I think there is a good argument that we eat too much food for our own good and that we should eat way less.
As far as I am concerned, intermittent fasting helped me achieve better metabolic health. Not on the level of hunter gatherers, but above average for my age bracket.
But I didn't have to give up all the perks of civilization to achieve that. Just some daily physical activity and eating less.
Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is low mostly due to high infant mortality followed by mortality of those under 15 years. If you live to 15 you have a pretty good shot of living to 60. The modal age at death is 68-78 [0]. Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture a…
> The average life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is low mostly due to high infant mortality followed by mortality of those under 15 years. If you live to 15 you have a pretty good shot of living to 60. The modal age at death is 68-78 [0]. Even that's "mostly" from infant mortality, a significant non-infant mortality still remains. From your linked article >~60% of newborns in these populations survive to age 15 and…
> Is there a direct source for the healthspan claim?
I do not know one that directly compares numbers so I've pulled from a few sources.
Consider Americans: here [0] is an actuarial table from the US CDC which lists % of adults with some chronic conditions by age (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, cancer, arthritis) Of note is that nearly 70% of adults 55-64 are diagnosed with at least one condition and 37% are diagnosed with at least two conditions. This paper [1] says that two thirds of Americans of any age die from a chronic disease.
Consider H-Gs: The paper in the earlier comment as well as the paper it references [2] indicate that H-G death from degenerative disease is relatively rare. At age 60+ about 24% die from degenerative disease. A H-G population in Bolivia has 5x less coronary artery disease than western counterparts, even in old age [3]. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison of healthspan but it does give some idea of prevalence of chronic disease in the two populations.
Some comparisons of population disease were made by those studying indigenous people under colonial administration [4]:
"Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly."
A large part of this may be due to diet. The China Study [5] compares provinces before and after the introduction of western style cuisine and finds this change associated with increases of chronic disease, especially cardiovascular and cancer.
It is not a simple comparison, but I think there is a case that outside of accidents and infections the average H-G may be healthier than the average industrial human.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/health_policy/adult_chronic_conditi...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876976/
[2] https://gurven.anth.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[4] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets...
Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.
Not to worry, if everyone in the world sat on a beach all day, most would starve and we'd return to pre-industrial population levels.
Let’s calculate the amount of agricultural effort it would take to feed the average adult until age 70. To first order, corn providing calories plus adjustments. In the US, I find about two weeks of adult agricultural labor are required to feed an adult to age 70.
Assume one average US farm family (1000 acres, 200 bushels/acre corn) effort feeds 25000 adults/yr,
defined as adequate calories from corn (8 bushels/year to provide annual calories for one adult).
So 350 food lives/yr from birth to death (75-80 yr life expectancy).
Every day, a farm family (3-5 for 1000 acre farm) births a new food life.
Can’t just eat corn so soybeans, vegetables, meat…count machinery, fuel, processing, shipping…let’s multiply that by a fudge factor of 3 to account for that. Two extra people for every farm family member for additional crops, distribution, shipping, fuel, machinery.
So, 3-5 person/days * 3 ~ 14 days. Two weeks adult ag labor provides for 70 years of adequate food for one person.
I could squeeze two weeks labor into a beach schedule sometime over 50 years to be assured to eat for the rest of my life.
Lots of ways to challenge the numbers…but double, triple them, and it’s still a tiny fraction of a life.
IT tech is fine, but ag tech improvements have fed, and continue to feed, the world.