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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

"Life is hard" is the clarion song of someone who doesn't yet live in the time where society has solved the problem they see.

Life was hard when we had to forage for food.

Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide.

Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio.

Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time.

And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;)

The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.

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The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to everything that came after it, on average for most people.

Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient.

The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.

On the other hand, we were willing to trade away a lot for a more predictable food supply, apparently. Even the threat of agricultural mass-starvation hasn't caused us to tear up the farms and start roaming the forests.

Did you not read my whole comment?

People adopted agriculture because the forests no longer had enough food. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles were no longer viable. So of course they wanted a more predictable food supply.

Long before this point in time, that wasn't a concern: the forests were full of food, so there was no reason to bother with agriculture. People invented agriculture out of necessity, like most inventions.

Where did I talk about "agricultural mass-starvation"? Agriculture is how people avoided starvation when the resources ran out. But it wasn't as nice as the "golden years" when the forests had plenty of food and there weren't many humans competing for it. But there was no way to go back to that time, just as there isn't now.

Ha! The natives of Hawaii would engage in mass fights to the death every generation or two, when starvation threatened the whole population. Enormous armies would push against one another until one was pushed entirely off of a cliff, killing everyone (10's of thousands). Then, plenty of food for another 50 years.

"Garden of Eden"

And, again, if we're in a market economy then sometimes people have to move. Not a societal problem. In fact, very much a first-world problem.

No, actually gentrification can occur in developing countries as well. Finding ways to rationalize the negative effects of gentrification is the first world problem.

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