[neuronic]

It's a truly mind-boggling feeling when you escape the busy city life and somehow manage to be truly in sync with yourself.

I was hiking in Scotland and Iceland over the last two years and either times there was a breaking point when we were in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland some weather forced us to camp near a volcano off-site from the camping zones. In the morning, I got out of our tent and looked across a vast space of grass, rocks and ashes. A creek flowing nearby made the only perceivable noise aside from wind.

You take a look left and right. Breathe. A breeze goes over your face and you hear the deafening silence emanating from nature itself.

It was then when the usual life all felt like a massive distraction from life itself. It was a nice, calming and deep feeling that it's completely enough to just be... hard to convey.

[mettamage]

I know how that feels, with camping as well. But I cannot shake the thought that most of our life is simply about survival.

And society is a better alternative than hunting/farming on your own.

[leadingthenet]

Sure, but is it a better alternative than hunting/farming in groups? I'm not convinced.

[Filligree]

Farming is not a good life. Hunter/gatherers famously had it much better.

Doesn't matter. The sustainable population of farmers is orders is magnitudes higher, to the point that they can push out any hunter-gatherers almost without noticing. I hope that modern life is at least closing on that quality of life, but I don't think it is yet, for most people.

[blunte]

What most people know as farming is not the only nor most effective way to grow food in trade of time and resources.

Permaculture practices, "food forests", etc. are a better alternative and take most of their effort in the several year setup process. Once in balance, they are generally self sufficient and can produce significant amounts of edible food.

That's not to say everyone should become a "farmer", but for people in the HN community, it should warrant some study (it's all about systems design and design patterns).

[thrownblown]

the !kung bushmen spend about 15-20 hours a week "working", some as little as 12

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

What about the !Kung bush women?

Probably most of the labor of hunter gatherer societies was done by women. The men hunted some, but a bigger responsibility was raiding their neighboring tribes (often for women) and protecting themselves from being raided by their neighbors.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, many times women are treated as property and there is horrific violence against women.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/worl...

Also a lot of these societies are polygynous with men having multiple wives. So yeah, men work less - but that is because the women do the work for them under threat of violence.

[thrownblown]

The highest cause of death among young men in the HG tribes of Papua New Guinea is other young men. It's an incredibly violent culture there. The !Kung tell a much different story:

Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:

In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and vio­lence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppres­sion of aggression. From this point of view, values about interper­sonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and sep­arated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropolo­gist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:

During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of dis­cord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]

[hnick]

I've thought about this and come to the conclusion that the ambitious man/town/society down the road is the problem. You can hunt and gather all you want, but societies build technology and excess manpower and one day they will come along and ruin your day.

You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!

[mettamage]

I don't know about that.

We live longer though. Could we sustain that if we'd be hunters, or as farmers? (in the long-term)

[sunpar]

And you don’t need to go far for this effect. I still to this day remember a beautiful calming moment I had when on a walk in the backyard near a house outside of Portland Maine.

[brootstrap]

Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.