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Comment by tmarsden | Hacker News Reader

You're probably right, it was a made up number to make a point. The point being that if you are not growing your own food (or hunting it) you're probably engaged in "surrogate activity" for a living and not directly satisfying your physical needs. Would you say more than 1/100,000 people in today's world grow and or hunt for their food daily?

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That's an absurd definition. It also fits the kind typical HN/high-tech mold of underappreciating most people and professions.

What makes you think think that your definition of "surrogate activity" is an interesting distinction? That only "growing your own food" is going to make people fulfilled, biologically? Is there any evidence of this? That hunter gatherers, or that farmers in history, were somehow happier?

As far as I can tell, most people throughout history worked really hard, but tried as much as they can to do anything but what they had to do to survive. Every single human culture has music, art, science, etc.

Now you're moving goalposts at breathtaking speeds. Previously, you defined surrogate activity as "artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal", i.e. definitely not producing anything useful. Now suddenly it's supposed to be anything "not directly satisfying your physical needs".

They’re not my definitions, that’s straight from the source material. The idea of “surrogate activity” as I understood it was any goal "not directly satisfying your physical needs.” The aspect of it being made up is because it’s chosen by the individual and not a direct requirement of survival. To me that’s just two ways of saying the same thing.

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