[artyom]

Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.

There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.

The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.

It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

[zdc1]

Yes. We can complain that technology is "too complicated" but so is the human brain, consciousness, and every other biological system which we have failed to fully understand.

Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.

[buovjaga]

> It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse