I can't even imagine the hunger and famine they had to endure if the herds didn't migrate in the same pattern one year. Or if a harsh winter killed off your gathering food.
What about all the worms and parasites they probably had. If you look at hunter gatherers today they are all short and thin.
[1]http://www.history.com/news/encampment-discovered-near-stone...
[2]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/history/why-wa...
[3]http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/10000-year-old-massac...
To that point, there are many people who would, if freed from the need to "work for a living", happily be farmers. The happiest people I know are the farm family that provides our CSA food. And they take more pride in their farm than someone riding a tractor to spray Monsanto chemicals all day. They love their work. If someone gave them a million dollars and they would never need money again, they'd still run the farm just as they do now (although they might give the food away).
Likewise, doctors! People become doctors to heal the sick, not to get rich. Virtually every doctor I've ever met is completely passionate about their job, frustrated mostly by the money-driven bureaucracy, not the patients. And they were taught by professors who couldn't be any happier than they are, teaching a new generation of doctors how to save lives.
Most jobs worth doing would gladly be done for free. If you look at a job and realize that no one would do it if they weren't paid a lot of money (or were desperately trying to stay off the street), you have to wonder if that job should be done at all.
Like garbage men? Or people who work in sewers? Or many of the "dirty jobs" out there? How many of those jobs are important to the function of our society and need to be done but would be grossly understaffed in no one "needed" to work? It is a great utopia to think about if you don't go too deep.
If you have horrible jobs and pay very little for them and the only way you can fill them is by making it a choice between shitty job and starvation, then what's the functional difference between that and slavery?
Oh yeah. Just like slaves could choose between serving and torture and death.
If someone wants more than the basic, though, more than just eating and shelter, they can always go get a job, doing those things that may not be pleasant, but are financially valuable (like picking up the garbage). And since people can choose to not do them in a meaningful way (not just choosing between work and starvation), the jobs will have to start paying real value.
CSA's are different and most families I've met doing it quit some other job to do it. Hell if I didn't want a certain standard of life (one of MY choosing) I'd happily do organic farming and raise animals for food. But I work so I can be happy outside of work and have the freedom to do what interests me. Office jobs are easy, I've done shit jobs for shit pay and burnt out.
As far as measuring happiness, one method would be levels of stress hormones in the blood.
Infectious diseases, though, are very much a product of agricultural society, as is starvation/famine. We might be living through the century (or possibly, have just lived through the century) where our technology finally enables us to fix these two problems caused by our ancestors' conversion to agriculture.
[0] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
I don't "get" why we're arguing about it at all - we don't need to. In 2016 there exist authentic, functioning hunter gatherer societies and it is possible to witness and document them.
Here is some witness and documentation:
http://www.vladsokhin.com/work/crying-meri/
... perhaps scroll down to the photos of women being cut open and burned at the stake for witchcraft, or the mutilated survivors of tribal justice.
Looks like a real party.
Besiders, hunting/gathering is a dead end -- it doesn't lead off this planet, which is ultimately what we'll need in order to not be a forgotten about galactic footnote.
Almost all of my illnesses have been contracted either at work or from my partner who contracted it at work.
I think it is also worth noting that our current capital-centric trajectory does not lead off of this planet either. We are far closer to global catastrophe than we are to extraterrestrial colonization.
... All of which have been driven by the application of lessons learned by public health doctors and scientists.
I'm talking about the 1890-1940 activity to make food safe. Stuff like mandatory pasteurization of milk, wholesomeness requirements for meats, etc. You had early 20th century Typhoid epidemics in NYC fueled by bad milk.
If you take a look at longevity and infant mortality statistics, they got dramatically better from 1800 to 1890.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg
I'd call it 1880-1920, but yes.
All of which you need civilization to properly achieve, and which aren't available to purely hunter-gatherer societies.
A nomadic culture in a moderate climate doesn't cluster to the point it has contaminated drinking water, is floating in its own effluvia, or is breeding epidemics.
Mid-ninteenth century London and New York were pretty horrible. No freshwater supplies, no sewers, no waste removal, horse-drawn transport leaving droppings, urin, and carcasses everywhere, cholera epidemics killing 50,000 people a year.
Absent in-migration, London couldn't maintain its population.
I'm not saying pre-ag life was easy. Simply that early industrial conditions were horrid.
Even many viral infections are far less common thanks to vaccinations and early intervention/isolation.
> Almost all of my illnesses have been contracted either at work or from my partner who contracted it at work.
And this is a social problem, not a "modern medicine" problem. Idiots need to stop going to the office sick. One dumbass knocked out half my office 3 or 4 years back. Came in with a cold, 15 people sick over the next two weeks.
Also you're taking for granted all of the illnesses you avoided merely by being vaccinated for them as a child. Almost nobody in developed society contracts polio anymore, but that doesn't make it any less lethal to groups not acquainted with modern medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_eliminated_fr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...
When your hunter-gatherer alter ego gets wounded by a spear or an animal, there's a high probability that that wound is going to get infected, and a moderate probability that the wound turn into sepsis and kill you.
And while anecdata don't prove points, let me present to you my opposing anecdote. I recently fractured my tibia in a fall. I had it properly treated by doctors, and not quite three months afterwards all that remains of my injury is a slight limp, which should be gone in another month with continuing physical therapy. Meanwhile, in a hunter-gatherer society, this type of injury would likely result in permanent lifelong lameness, and could easily be a death sentence. But for me it was just an inconvenience -- I only even lost a total of three days of work, because modern civilization thankfully affords me the opportunity to be a knowledge worker. I can deal with catching the occasional cold.