[FFRefresh]

Minor quibble with the usage of 'unnatural'. Humans are part of nature and our creations/society we build are a result of nature as well.

In the bigger picture, I don't see why 'physical labor' should be considered some privileged activity of humanity that we must hope to get back to. Movement and physical activity are important for our bodies, but that doesn't mean physical labor is an unalloyed good. If anything, we're seeing evolution at play, we're expending less human energy for our labor over time. That seems good! We just need to figure out how to not let our physical bodies degrade in a way that can worsen our quality of life.

[lukas099]

I get what you're saying, but doesn't that kind of negate the usefulness of the word 'natural' to use it in this way? If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?

[FFRefresh]

I actually don't think invocations of 'natural' are very useful given:

1. There's a degree of ambiguity involved with the term as far as what gets lumped in with natural vs not

2. This ambiguity gets leveraged by those who want to push for whatever their subjective takes on the ideal state of the world/human relations. (i.e. it gets used a lot as a cheap tactic to dismiss human behavioral changes or how we organize ourselves or technological change, etc.)

3. Using 'unnatural' or 'artificial' to describe the modern world on the surface has an air of being descriptive/fact-based, but in reality the speaker tends to be assigning a value judgment (natural = morally good, artificial = morally bad) to a portion of the world they don't like. I don't think I've ever seen someone say "[X] is unnatural, we should have more of it!"

To answer your question on "If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?' - my answer would be why are we trying to describe the modern human lifestyle as 'unnatural' or 'artificial' in the first place? What are we really trying to convey? I think humans are part of the natural world, and we cannot escape the laws of nature. We live within the bounds of the laws of nature. Calling some of our activities 'artificial' seems to be really about saying we don't like the given activities for whatever reason. And if that is the reason for using the term 'unnatural' or 'artificial', why not just say it and then state why we don't like it?

To bring it all back to the parent I was responding to, is it really that physical labor is some 'natural' thing whereas non-physical labor is 'unnatural' (do any other animals or oganisms do 'labor' as we use the term?)? In general, types of human labor seems like a weird area to assign a natural/unnatural label on. Or is it really about thinking something may be getting lost as we move away from physical labor? And if so, we should just say so instead of leaning on the power of the word 'natural'.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature