Makes sense to me. Their "work" was essentially just ... living life!
Now, living life is what you do with about 5-15% of your time. The rest is work/red tape/...
Now, living life is what you do with about 5-15% of your time. The rest is work/red tape/...
One contributing factor to the play-like quality of hunter-gatherer work is that the work was not excessive. According to several quantitative studies, hunter-gatherers typically devoted about 20 hours per week to hunting or gathering and another 10 to 20 hours to chores at the campsite, such as food processing and making or mending tools (e.g. Lee, 1972; Sahlins, 1972 ). All in all, the research suggests, hunter-gatherer adults spent an average of 30 to 40 hours per week on all subsistence-related activities combined, which is considerably less than the workweek of the typical modern American, if the American’s 40 or more hours of paid employment is added to the hours spent on domestic chores.
One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins (1972), famously characterized hunter-gatherer societies collectively as “the original affluent society.” An affluent society, by Sahlins’s definition, is one in which “people’s material wants are easily satisfied.” Hunter-gatherers were affluent not because they had so much, but because they wanted so little. They could provide for those wants with relatively little work, and, as a result, had lots of free time, which they spent, according to one observer of the Ju/’hoansi (Shostak, 1981), at such activities as “singing and composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around and resting.”
Those are not the big gotchas you think they are. They are luxuries that only have value in the context of our western society, but don't intrinsically.
Think about it.
1. Office -- if you live in a nice climate, a climate controlled building is not much of a draw, in fact hanging out outside most of the time is more fun 2. Grocery store -- not much of a need for this if you can get all your food from the nature around your home 3. Dentist -- this is mostly to solve problems of civilization. Eating lots of grains, especially refined ones and refined sugars, leads to cavities. The causes of cavities mostly got introduced to our diet when grain was adopted 10000 years ago, and again in the mid 20th century with the advent of ultra processed food.
What else are you going to list? A car that you don't need in a walkable village?
Then there's healthcare. Most healthcare in the west today deals with lifestyle diseases caused by modern processed food, obesity, etc.
Then there's infectious diseases-- again mostly an urban problem, really starts taking off when agriculture and sedentism began 10000 years ago. Lot of living packed together in close proximity with plenty of animals.
Admittedly advanced healthcare for accidents and other freak health conditions other than modern obesity or infectious diseases, would be an undeniable luxury. But it really represents a small percentage of health care services, both these days and in the past.
I don't know, I personally like all of those things. Especially since I wouldn't be around anymore without them, neither would be my wife or my son. There is nothing romantic about a constant struggle for survival.
Just like the idea of the noble savage is wrong and hard to get rid of, so is this idea. It was never a constant struggle for survival. Depending where the tribe lived, there were indeed times of hardship, like winter or draught. Or war. And hunting some animals is and was dangerous - but so is driving with a car and wars we also still got. Oh and times of hardship are still a thing: "828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021".
But most of the time, it was lots of free time in a pleaseant environment without toxins and plastic garbage and fresh air among your trusted friends. It might have been cold at night, but the more you enjoyed the sun at day. And nothing tastes as good as self hunted meat, when you are hungry. This is the reason, why this archaic livestyle is romanticised - and our genes were optimized for it - not for the air conditioned office living.
For example, for some weird reason you are obsessed with dentists. Read this then: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oral-mystery-are-....
Cavities were probably rare before agriculture.
Same goes for antibiotics -- infections were a lot rarer before agriculture concentrated much larger population densities AND put them next to birds to catch respiratory illnesses from. Population density was basically a health hazard from 10,000 years ago to really, really recently, when modern plumbing finally solved it once and for all.
Finally, humanity arose in an area where cold was not a major issue. There are still plenty of areas like that.
And of course, food shortages historically are almost always associated with agriculture -- it's not surprising that intensively cultivating land to force it to sustain a much larger population would also be much more precarious. How could you possibly have a shortage if there's 10 or 100 times as many calories available in the area as are needed? It's in agriculture, where you only grow about what you need, because you allow the population to reach the maximum that can be supported, and force a large portion of them to work hard all their days to support as big an army as possible to conquer more land and repeat the cycle.... yeah, you become very vulnerable to small problems.
It seems like a lot of the problems of modernity are scaling problems -- problems you only run into when you insist on a much higher population density. We have been busily solving them for millenia, and by today, yeah, I'd pick today over 10,000 years ago. But don't kid yourself. There were plenty of generations in the 1300s who would have loved to trade places with hunter gatherers in a rich habitat with a low population density. This is the subtlety you are missing.
Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming), searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc., doing hand-to-hand combat, hunting...
Spend a day in front of a computer.
Which one do you think will end in a feeling of happiness?
> Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming)
We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity.
> searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc
You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor.
> doing hand-to-hand combat
Between tribes (or even within your own), it can easily be more fatal than that.
Not only are you worried about calories, you're also concerned about not being outright murdered.
We can do that at best 2/7 days a week. In reality, modern life forces us to dedicate even less time to that.
I've done that many times. The feeling at the end of the day is always unlike any other. Wouldn't swap those experiences for anything else.
> You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor.
Have you ever picked mushrooms? Do you know how little time it takes to get enough mushrooms for weeks to come? And then how much meat there is in a deer?
I agree that the risk of being murdered is higher. Although I think you overestimate the frequency of encounters. There weren't a lot of people back then on Earth. I also don't think this decreases happiness all that much. The slow senseless willowing away in an office everyday seems like a much less happy existence, even if it's a longer one.
That's ultimately a choice. Nobody is making you work, however, if you want a certain standard of living and a location it's one way to raise the funds to do so.
Personally, I choose to work 9-5 and live comfortably, safely and predictably, and I don't much care for long walks or whatever.
And there are no do overs.
If you break your leg, you’re dead
If you have a tooth infection, hope it doesn’t spread to your blood
if you get attacked by a wild animal, hope you can survive your wounds
If someone stronger comes and rapes you or your loved ones, maybe you can gather your buddies together for a revenge attack.
You can't be serious.
Hand to hand combat?
Just because you're depressed doesn't mean you have to bend reality to pretend "hunter gatherers had it best".
Hell, no one is forcing you to use work with a computer. There's many avenues to do a more "in line with nature life".
But I suspect you want your internet and amenities and all that jazz.
Notwithstanding, creating tools and arranging supplies is work. But the banality of this is that people spend plenty of time socializing at work today, in office or elsewhere. It's not like we stopped doing that. Are we going to start putting double quotes around the "work" that we do because of idle chat?
Work is good for us. Some jobs are just not as good as others.
I have another comment in this thread giving examples of how modern and ancient foragers differ.
1. Utter bullshit - completely useless to everyone; unjustifiable.
2. Actively evil - work that may be respected in society but is killing the world. Suits with BMWs selling weapons, insurance, oil, corporate tax loopholes etc.
3. Honest, but with most profits funneled upward, creating an ever more unequal society.
Even artists, musicians, beadmakers etc are forced to do grisly hustly things to survive - the fun gets sucked out of it for most. Our society is deathly ill.
Isn't part of what you're romanticizing of these traditional societies the utterly useless shit they might do with some of their time? Our work pays because someone values it, that is tautological.
You say that as if it helps your point?
I'm talking about "bullshit jobs" as in those described in the book 'Bullshit Jobs' by Graeber. Think Wally from Dilbert; sinecures without the dignity. Here:
> Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.
Because, as sad as it is sometimes, in a capitalist society as long as someone pays for job being done, that job holds some value. Even if the people doing it fail to see that sometimes. If you care about some greater meaning ij your job, otherwise if it pays the bills, gets food on the table and, ideally, provides some financial stability, tue job actually provides a ton of value to thw person holding it, regardless if someone classifies it as a BS job or not. By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have.
Value to the psychopathic dictator buying billions in weapons for his country is not the same thing as value to society.
Value to Exxon is not the same thing as value to every living creature on the planet.
What Graeber did was look at the net balance. I recommend you look more into it, because your interpretation of what he and I are saying is way off.
> By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have.
Did your boss tell you that? Look at a graph of productivy versus wages over the last 50 years. We should be working 15 hours a week, like our prehistoric ancestors did.
We're killing the planet. Thousands of species are being lost. Infinite growth is a lie that is literally going to kill us. It has to stop. This isn't metaphysical or philosophical, it's life and death.
And no, nothing we do in the Western World, or the vast majority, is life and death. Theat is reserved for people suffering war, civil or otherwise, famine and rampant crime. Or people suffering through deregulated, unconstraint capitalism (which, I know, applies to people in the US for example, people that don't hold jobs that make up the majority of HN users so). So yes, this whole BS job thing is, IMHO, highly dubious.
Edit: Our pre-historic ancestors worked more than 15 hours, and they faced constant death by stuff we don't even blink about anymore. If Graebers counter point to modern office work, aka BS jobs, is pre-historic hunter-gatherer lifestyle this whole thing gets even more rediciulous. Fun fact, no hunter gatherer could earn a living writing books about other peoples societies and lives.
Yes.