If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures, sure, it could be attractive contrasted against the cacophony of modern digital and other distractions, but here's a basic thing: If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.

If on the other hand, you, living in some grimmer, dirtier past, wanted any other sort of life, the choice didn't even really exist unless you were one of an incredibly tiny minority that formed the elites of society. And even among these people, the slightest infection could randomly kill you, losing your eyesight with age was a gradual sentence into blindness, and god help you if you ever were to have any major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss.

Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true even if some specific details might be cherry-picked(and i'd like to see which one's you're referring your suspicion to)

Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.

There's a crisis of singleness that hasn't been present in much, although not all, of human history.

Home ownership is way down. At various points throughout human history it was common for people to own their own homes.

Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.

I resonate with the rest of your post - I do think having a connection to society is vital, and I also think that the US has become too much of a me-first, get-ahead-at-all-costs hustle culture that devalues social bonds. But I see people still forming very deep cultural identities.

I also agree with you that pride in one's accomplishments and a sense of purpose is important and home ownership is ONE way to achieve that - to have control over at least that facet of your life.

But it's far from the only one.

Lenocracy. The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/

Like most of Greers writing, it makes you think and also wonder what is in the water at his house.

The service economy is all about taking a whopping cut of everyone else's work, and it seems like venture capital is only interested in funding companies who will be able to do that. Uber, Doordash, Task Rabbit, the App Store, etc.

Never have I come across an author I simultaneously agree and disagree with.

In other words, it didn't start with social media. Rather, social media exacerbate what was already happening for decades at this point.

Aside from this being one hell of a subjective thing to measure vs. the past, and aside from it not necessarily being a bad thing (cultural identity has been used for centuries by demagogues to foment grotesque acts of religious and political violence, compared to what you see in many modern pluralistic liberal societies), it's also a very minor thing compared to all the colossal negatives of life in the past.

We can find our own voluntary cultural associations and create connections to society in all sorts of ways. Modern living, modern technology and modern conveniences don't hinder this. If anything, they make it easier. In a ridiculous irony considering the occupations of so many people on HN, and their lifestyles, there's a lot of hypocritical hate for social media and digital connectivity, but one part of it that's unfounded is the idea that it can't be used by those who are creative for expanding their own personally chosen connections to certain communities more widely.

As for the crisis of singleness, that's more complex, but maybe no longer forcing younger people into marriages of convenience and religious prudery about how the neighbors might be "scandalized" has something to do with fewer marriages. I see little wrong with that. The society I live in pursues marriage less than at any time in its history, but at least today you see nowhere near the frequency of young men and women being shotgunned into youthful marriages for absurd religious and social reasons that later lead to those marriages being abusive, unhappy and stagnant.

I agree with worries about your point on home ownership, but like anything else, it too has its caveats and complexities. One of these being that many younger people want to live in places that are trendy but also own their own property there. Market pricing for high-demand areas isn't something that can be magically wished away.

Finally, >Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.

I'm sorry, have you actually read about how many hours people working in cottage industries and farming in particular (what the vast majority of people did for a living before industrialization) had to pull off just to stay afloat? I'd be willing to bet that they'd pick shorter hours with a manager or two over that existence.

On the other hand, the amount of autonomy and freedom an average modern person in the developed world today has is vastly greater than it was in this past existence you seem to be idealizing without closer examination. This applies even if you include all the middle managers you like over this modern worker's head. This is the case because, very importantly, it's their free time outside of work that matters most.

It's incredible to think a 17th century farmer of mid 19th century cobbler had more autonomy than a modern white collar worker in, say, Pittsburg, or Oakland California or Lyon, France does today just because you don't like the management culture in which the modern workers work their relatively moderate hours.

You seem to be missing my point about autonomy. Certainly your average peasant was in a much worse economic situation than most modern people and has less human rights. However, they likely also had less moment to moment micromanaging. As long as you deliver your quota at the end of the season, your feudal lord probably isn't dictating your daily work.

Human beings are not purely logical creatures. While from an objective standpoint people are certainly better off today, it's possible that the things that we've given up are more important for subjective emotional/psychological wellbeing.

I guess perhaps that's true in some countries, but not for the US. People put off major medical needs for years and even decades to wait until they can get on medicare.

Dental issues are even worse. Yes, the availability of the treatments is nice, but the majority of people are deeply stuck in modern society to have access to those treatments.

I could make a large list of all the ways in which this comparison is laughable.

You should make a list. I would find it very helpful. The people claiming the world progresses in a single direction will eat their words one day.

> The people claiming the world progresses in a single direction will eat their words one day.

That's a completely unfounded assumption on your part. It may end up being true, since the future is uncertain at all times, but at least right now anyone can say that the world has improved for humans like never before in measurable ways from those of earlier. That's a hard fact.

It's easy to intuit this by thinking about society in terms of generations. Since a peak fertility window is around 20 years, a generation also tends to be around 20 years. So how much will population rates change as one generation dies, every ~20 years? It's easy to work out by example. Imagine a fertility rate of 1. That means each woman is having 1 child on average. You need to have 2 for replacement. It generalizes to a factor of fertility_rate/2, so with a fertility_rate of 1 the population will decline by 50% per generation, per 20 years. If you start with a generational population of 8, then you'd have child populations of 4, 2, 1. Once that 8 generation starts dying, the 4 generation will start dying about 20 years later. And when the 8 generation dies you lose 50% of your total population, and 50% again when the 4 generation dies, and so on every 20 years. That's going from 8 population to 1 in 60 years! This also emphasizes why immigration is obviously not a solution, the scale is simply far too large.

Also bear in the mind the vicious cycle these outcomes will create. With a growing population your economy also naturally grows, even if it stays (proportionally) the exact same size - because there's more people, more consumption, and so on. The exact opposite is true in cases of population decline. So you're going to be trying to encourage people to have more children at the same time that your economy is collapsing. You will also have totally screwed up age ratios - in our example your 60-80 year old group will make up 50% of your population, forever! So you also have a lower labor forces, extremely high costs in terms of social security/healthcare/etc, and so on.

So there is no way that any civilization can persist on any reasonable timeframe with a subreplacement fertility rate.

The first thing that comes to mind is dependence on other people. Modern life has made it possible for the average person after a certain age to live without meaningful interaction with others. In the same vein one’s ability to choose one’s company has been greatly increased, which leads to superficial relationships and the isolation of those that no one chooses to be with.

> This paints a powerful case for humanity also being psychologically and emotionally better off, on average, than at any older time in history

This is not at all obvious for the reasons listed above, after a certain point material abundance does not cause psychological well-being. I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.

> Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true

The only broadly true statement that can be made about this topic is that modern life is generally incomparable how it was historically.

I find that the sentiment underlying these arguments is usually masturbatory in nature.

I have been trying to find a news interview for years. It was on Fox news just before Christmas about 15 years back, they had someone from an anti-consumption group. Needless to say, the interviewer did not take kindly to the position they had "It's un american to not buy Christmas presents!". But the last point the interviewee made as they played the music over them was something along the lines of "Consumption is three times high per capita than the 1950's and we are no happier because of it!".

Fair point to be made.

> I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.

While they aren't the only ones, folks like the Jainists, Taoists, all manner of Buddhists, Hindu's have lead very happy lives living on a tiny fraction of the material needs that we have. Not saying they didn't appreciate some of the new things but it isn't a case of living in squalor for millennia.

I mostly agree, but my point was that materialist analysis has obvious limits. It also naturally favors industrial society as industrial society optimizes for material production (not necessarily material satisfaction, mind you, hence why I mostly agree)

> If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures

If you presume superiority by comparison to our modern "complex" pleasures, sure, you're not going to find much interesting in the past.

> If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.

You will still be haunted by what you have seen of other humans and heard from their lips—there's no escaping that.

The will to live.

The depression is rampant. People are lonelier than ever, and they eventually kill themselves. Despite the fact that the world is objectively a better place to live, for the first time in history of any species people don't want to reproduce because it sucks.

Human happiness is directly correlated with relationships. Not with technological progress. But with relationships. Which are under fire in modern society.

But hey, here's a new iPhone. Go browse tiktok on it or something.

Maybe within the last 30 years but certainly not if you count even just prior to 1970 when heavy manufacturing still provided the primary jobs.

Mill and mine jobs sucked worse than agriculture. Women had zero choice other than homemaker, teacher and secretary. Many Rust Belt men were basically functional alcoholics because life was so damn difficult. For example, a black humor joke at Bethlehem Steel was that nobody ever retired from the car shop (they manufactured railroad cars)--they died of some form of weird cancer long before that.

People complain about how badly we deal with "mental health" now but everybody had to just suck it up and effectively smoked and drank themselves stupid to deal with it in the past. And prior to World War II and the broad distribution of antibiotics, basic physical health was a crapshoot let alone mental health.

I'm not happy about IQ starting to trend down. However, IQ continuously increasing indicates that groups of people were still systematically malnourished up into the early 1990s.

I may have a bunch of problems with the way things are going, but I'm having a tough time coming up with a time when it was that much better than things are right now.

Certainly most of the people sitting here reading HN would have had a really shitty time in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably even 1970s). They've forgotten that smart people had a hard time escaping their local social area and were strongly ostracized up through even the 1980s.

Eh with access to information IQ has become much less useful. We need a test much less bound to culture than what is currently offered—which includes at least a rework of verbal intelligence, which is literally just knowledge of culture. Knowledge without context is basically useless and certainly has little to do with intelligence.

Here's the post about what's needed to feed society with bread (there are many others) https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.

And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.

Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.

Hygiene theory has gone a long way to alleviate some of the more problematic disease issues. I have said that if we went full Mad Max (I don't think we are), hygiene theory would survive because of how useful it is.

Starvation is one of those issues of the odd cycles of nature. Many I have spoken with that do back to the land farming have said, on a 5 year average calories aren't an issue. The problem is it usually means 3 bumper years followed by two starvation years. Thru modern agriculture we have both made systems of storage and fertilizers that flatten over these issues.

As for the governance of strongman. There was the flip side of, they couldn't strong arm people TOO much because if enough people figured it was worth over throwing them, the boss would be overthrown with violence or death. It was risky being at the top, there was a reason why the kings thrown was backed up to a wall. Stops the assassin coming from behind.

---

"Of course our farmers don’t care about maximum efficiency (because that means for maximum efficiency of people who aren’t the farmers eating the surplus). They care about marrying, having families, raising children, keeping friends, staying close to loved ones and so on. Farmers, after all, are people, not mere tools of agricultural production (we will talk about non-free farmers next time) and so they do not serve their farmers, their farms serve the needs of their families."

---

And "friends", as the article also describes, meant something very different. It was not infrequent that friends could be entire households where relationships would last for generations. Modern life has really done away with most of these things.

I'd also say that many things people look on as negative, like difficult labor, are not necessarily so. I spent a fair amount of time when I was young working in construction and it was some of the most rewarding paid work I have ever done, by a wide margin. If it paid as well as the path I ended up taking, I would have absolutely stayed in construction for as long as my body held out. That last part might sound grim, but it's the exact same in fields like software development. Over time your mind will slow, as will your motivation to keep up with the latest API, language, and just general trends. At that point you're going to be headed for 'early retirement', quite likely even earlier than a guy working construction - with construction workers having a median age of around 40!

At a personal level, tools/equipment that is self serviceable and can be maintained for a long life span. While some of this is still around, it is much more difficult to find.

At a moderate level. More time for family and community, unfortunately this one area that looking back we have slid backwards in. We are definitely better than the open century of industrialism but before that, hours were much more moderate, you also mostly worked near or at where you live.

At a wide lens angle. A vast majority of our technique is now having the blow back of ecological destruction/instability and a long period of climatic instability. The kind of thing that makes planning 7 generations ahead near impossible except on the grandest and somewhat vaguest terms.

Today you can still buy simple tools and equipment that are very long lasting, or you can choose modern conveniences. Either way, you actually have that choice, and buying either won't cost you a huge percentage of your wages as was the case in preindustrial times in which any manufactured or produced goods were enormously expensive by tendency.

People in modern times have more time for community and family than at any other point in history. This applies especially if they don't pursue the kind of material hamster wheel that many do. Almost anyone wanting to live at the subsistence levels of preindustrial societies could do so today with far less work than the people at that time endured to achieve the same. I think you're grossly understating how hard and long the work hours just to feed a family and literally keep it from death were prior to (at the most) 200 years ago.

As for your last point, the science on climate change doesn't predict the end of the world at all. Go read the IPCC's own worst case scenarios. They certainly don't predict our extinction. What's more, do you really think people in the 17th century felt any ability to plan 7 generations ahead, or easily avoided living in grimly filthy conditions at a level that was superior to today?

I think the angle you have is one of assuming I am advocating that "things used to be better!". I am not, I am saying it is possible to pick parts of the past that worked, figure out a way past the unintended issues of today and combine them into something better. This is essentially the entire idea of the Solar Punk movement.

Also I wasn't talking about the work hours 200 years ago, more like 1,000 years ago. Typical work days were about 4 hours a day in most societies. There are stories from France about 500 years ago about just how much spare time people used to have, it was kind of wild. Boring yes, but it was also because you can only grow so much food. The issue is that that kind of economy that is outside of the monetary system cannot be charted and graded accurately. There are lot so people in southern India that on paper are incredibly poor but in reality are very self reliant.

And yes I have read large parts of various IPCC reports. No, we are not going extinct. I didn't say anything about extinction. But a sizable fall is still a big wallop to industrial civilization even if it isn't a fatal blow. While folks may not be directly planning 7 generations, things were more stable from an environmental sense that many could assume things like food supply (on average) would be fine. The big issues then were much more political.

That lifestyle still exists in many parts of the world, but there is a reason why most of these substinence farmers encourage their kids to get an education and move out. Those poor farmers in India or China would pick the ticket out if they could. Just like how most farmers left to work in factories during the industrial revolution.

You can read some more critical analysis by historians or just work in a farm yourself, it's hard, long , backbreaking work. It's not something most humans would be will ing to return to.

To encourage people to self reflect on their needs and wants. To see that maybe they don't need so much stuff while keeping the meaningful advancements of our culture. The first act of revolution is contemplation.

Hypothetically, what if we lived with per capita the material demands of say 1920's with the health and food advancements of today. The social gains we have made still in place. All of a sudden a 20 hour week would be in sight. But that would mean folks have to go against the hedonistic treadmill and live with less. To use less energy, stuff and stimulation.

A night sky without light pollution and darker nights from a sleep perspective.

Large families and extended families. Your great grandparents likely had 5+ siblings.

100ppm lower CO2 levels had a meaningful impact on cognitive and physical performance.

Less intrusive advertising such as pumping gas without videos popping up.

Natural sounds and smells in a world without massive pollution.

Edit: It’s easy to say the modern world is better based on metrics which exclude meaningful downsides. Job security doesn’t get tracked the way unemployment rate does.

In 1790 individual members in the House of Representatives represented 39,000 people (though a low percentage of that could actually vote), today it’s closer to 800,000. But nobody is saying your voice is less important every year.

When I was spending my vacations with my grandparents as a child, they had a huge garden with an astonishing number of different kinds of fruits. They were planned in such a way that most of the year, from early spring until the beginning of the winter there was at least one kind of fruit that became ready for harvest every week.

Those fruits had flavors that cannot be matched in any way by those that can be bought from a supermarket, which are selected to look beautiful and to have a long shelf life. Not even at the local markets where farmers sell their products can I find anything as good as the fruit cultivars of my grandparents.

Similarly for meat. The meat of the truly free-range chicken or of the suckling pigs that I could eat at my grandparents was unbelievably more tasty than of the industrially-grown animals.

The vast majority of the people living today, who live in cities and eat only what can be bought there, have never tasted anything so good and they cannot imagine such tastes. Even when I have traveled through rural zones, I have never seen again any garden remotely similar to what my grandparents had a half of century ago or any similar fruit varieties.

I would certainly be happier if I could ever eat again such food. Except for food, I agree that everything else is much more comfortable today and I prefer it over what was available a half of century earlier.

I'm not even going to go down the route that most people in the world didn't have grandparents with a huge garden - let's accept as a baseline that maybe there was a time in human history when every human had access to something like this.

Before the modern world, a single frost, blight, or death in the family, could have wiped out an entire harvest and everyone in a community would starve.

That's less likely today.

Result: Probably a net benefit for humanity overall. Worth it? Highly subjective but as a humnist, i think I have to say yes.

My grandparents grew up on farms similar to what was described above (in the early 20th century). They did not have access to all these delicious fresh fruits year-round, only during the summer. However they did have access to a crazy number of delicious preserves which they dutifully made when the fruit was at peak ripeness. These they were then able to enjoy throughout the winter months.

I also strongly feel the need to bring population growth and the Repugnant Conclusion [1] into the picture. World population was less than two billion when my grandparents were born [2] and less than one billion a century before that. I believe you are correct that more total people (than ever before) have access to nutritious and delicious fruits year round, despite the fruits having less flavour and likely lower nutritional value overall.

However, if the world population were smaller (down to one billion, for example) an even greater proportion of the population could have access to delicious fruits year-round. Then it must be said that what we have gained from technological progress has been offset to some degree by population growth. We of course can expect world population to level off as access to reproductive technologies and education becomes universal. What I am skeptical about is whether we will ever have the technology to give the entire world population a standard of living comparable to an average American today, never mind someone from a century ago (or a person lucky enough to own a homestead today).

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Are we as a global society just spending big on the credit card of energy surplus disregarding the payback, or is this a genuine long term gain?

I guess we will have to wait until the year 2300 to have that answer.

I strongly suspect any example I provide will be attacked, so I recommend to use your imagination. I think you can do better than this.

If you really want an example I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman, who can write better than I can, who is thoughtful in his choice in how he uses research versus poetic license, who has already responded to critique on the novel. There's plenty worth critiquing but it's better than assuming the absolute lack of any loss. And I'd like to emphasize I don't believe in past utopia (I think anarcho-primitivism is equally lacking in imagination, perhaps even more so)—just that the idea of one-dimensional progress is moronic.

EDIT: To add on to this, Graeber points out that there's a wide span of time in between the invention of agriculture (~12kya) and the beginning of what we collectively agree is civilization (~8kya). Why this delay, if sedentary farming and market-oriented distribution offers such obvious benefits?

EDIT2: spelling

EDIT3: KSR context

Edit: It's also bad form to edit your comment after it's been replied to without indicating you edited it.

https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slav...

Depending on if you are going by total numbers or a percentage of the population can sway the messaging on this wildly.

yea my bad, I didn't expect you to reply so quickly.

I think (certain important portions of) modern day Human's curiosity/imagination capabilities have atrophied, since we know everything. Or maybe more accurately, they've been concentrated in a narrow, specialized range: knowing everything.

I spent about a year raising two hogs, babying them when compared to how almost anyone raises pigs. They loved their lives, I know exactly what they ate, and I know exactly what their last moments were. I just started curing another round of bacon a couple days ago, and when I get to enjoy it I know exactly how much work and love went into it.

I don't think this process made anyone as miserable as possible, and it makes me much happier than when I didn't k ow where my food came from, how it was raised, or how it was processed.

To ensure that the creatures they shepherd have as few bad moments as possible. To have hogs and to know they will only have one bad day.

Sure, it’s a trade off, but it’s ridiculous to pretend we haven’t lost anything. We pay for our high standard of living with anxiety and neuroses.

And if you gather food like berries and fruits - you (at least sometimes) get to eat foods ripened that day in the field. How many today get that luxury?

And if one of the things that provides joy to humans is to prepare their family’s food - many folks today would be disqualified.

Especially true of software engineers. Take a mediocre paying remote job at a mediocre non-tech firm, work 2 hours a day as the work is easy, and spend the rest on yourself.

But I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.

We are doing some cool things nowadays, yes there is some blow back to account for. The past had a lot of awful things, but there were something things we did that we should consider integrating with modern techniques. And so on.