- cross-posted to:
- aiop@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aiop@lemmy.world
Cross-posted from “No, it’s not ‘normal’.” by @DougHolland@lemmy.world in !aiop@lemmy.world
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I beg to differ.
An anthropologist should know about food scarcity. For thousands of years the family unit, tribe or village was under extreme competition from neighboring people and animals for resources.
There is a video from cameras on monkeys. They literally spend their whole day looking for food. Or in other words, every waking hour is spent in the pursuit of sustenance. Pre-tractor man was the same. Without modern capitalist agriculture you would be toiling on the farm tending to sheep, chickens, plowing fields, milking cows and all the myriad of tasks needed to fulfill the food groups you so nonchalantly stuff your face with. It be non-stop work for all the variety you currently take for granted.
The world, with low life-expectancies, was hazardous with no medicines, protections from the weather or modern law. Which i think brings a bit of stress when a festering carbuncle could mean your death. But thanks to innovation, it can now be easily cured by companies who seek monetary reward. I’ll take this normal over the other one.
You could have agriculture without modern capitalism.
We have people who treat Eve online optimization like a full time job for example. If their needs were met, I think they’d work happily on optimizing tractor schedules and crop rotation plans
I would probably do my job for free if I didn’t have to think about retirement and keeping my house and filling my belly. I just like what I do and I find it rewarding. The problem is still resource allocation.
No, I don’t think centralizing power and central planning will solve this either, I’m just saying people will be productive even without money.
Buddy, I grew up in the south where most of our food came from a vegetable garden and canning. We cut firewood for heat and had water from a spring. I can tell you it absolutely does not take all the waking day to tend to all that.
And did you tap latex trees for the rubber? Did you smelt ore for the metal? Did you buy the glass from a company that was used to can those vegetables or did you refine it yourself?
No. The seeds came from a catalog. The hatchet to chop the wood from a store.
Modern conveyance made it so you wouldn’t have to spend all day tending to survival. Yet the author seems to imply that life is harder now, than in the past.
Im smelting some iron now to make my first car.
Nobody cares if you beg to differ if your examples are all about farming. Farming was historically a last resort when you couldn’t live off the land by foraging and hunting. It was more common in less fruitful locations. Read some anthropology before you speak on it. Or learn more about modern agriculture and how shitty its returns are for the investment. Which is unsurprising considering modern agriculture is just shoving 3-5 crops in a bunch of places where they don’t want to grow and praying there’s enough nitrogen in the soil this year.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.
Don’t know what to say! Branch out maybe.
Of course you’d rather have an easy moment in time than a hard day. If your air conditioned trip to the market is preceded by ten hours combined time commuting to, from, and performing work then I think you just prefer being inside to out. Because that’s a long day for a hunter and not something they’d do five to seven days a week. For a lot of human history people had so much time on their hands that they would throw random festivals, make giant earthworks, form intricate gift giving rituals to keep up relations with faraway tribes. Not everyone, sure! But enough that you know about all of this.
I’d rather gather berries for forty minutes! Or wade around on Californian shores trapping fish in the silty shallows. Or live in a world where we ate what we grew instead of feeding it to cattle or turning it into ethanol fuel. All of which are ways of life that have been practiced before, and ways of life that are perfectly possible, which begs the question, where on earth does the opposition to doing better come from? You’re not a fuckin monkey.
We’re running hunter gatherer hardware with intense survival instincts designed to protect us from getting eaten by sabretooth tigers in the age of anxiety.
We pay in sabertooth tigers for sabertooth tigers, and hey, your sabertooth tiger boss would like to show you a sabertooth tiger, just scroll down on your mobile sabertooth tiger, skip a few sabertooth tigers, click the tiger, and then you should see a sabertooth tiger.
And do not sleep. There are tigers.
