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Comment by crawfordcomeaux | Hacker News Reader

I have friends who are doing this. They live on land rent-free which is owned by someone who wishes property ownership wasn't a thing. They grow their own food. They dumpster dive for perfectly good food. They process and eat roadkill deer.

These people live fulfilling lives and work to contribute to each others' well-being and the well-being of others. I'm working on finding a similar living situation for my partner and our child.

Your ideas about what happens when someone quits the rat race are false and fear-based.

We don't live in a kill-or-be-killed world and we have many choices about how we live.

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What happens to the deer population when everyone in the US starts road-killing them for food?

There are literally a whole ecosystems to learn to be interdependent with. Farming is still a thing, too. The deer are simply a single example of a way to eat. Hunting is also a thing. Don't buy into the myths of scarcity and learned helplessness society uses to get people to play along. Everyone's capable of learning how to reconnect with and be an active contributor to nature. We simply have a society that operates competitively with nature, rather than mutualistically, and it shows.

Sorry, hunter-gatherer never supported a civilization. It took big Ag to feed a city full of people.

The back-to-nature theme is fine for privileged landowning educated people. But the vast majority of everybody everywhere is dependent on the local grocery.

That's a choice everyone's making. There are other ways, and big Ag isn't the only one. Sitting in the current solutions instead of looking to evolve them and learning from the past isn't how hypersanity works.

And yes, hypersanity is probably the most extreme form of privilege. Also, the back-to-nature theme is great, not merely fine, and something indigenous cultures are trying to reclaim as a human birthright. They're arguably way less privileged by your standards. Privilege isn't a reason to dismiss a good idea.

Treating nature as something to live with collaboratively rather than avoid or treat as subservient/separate from us isn't privilege. It's science. Mutualism > competition.

If it comes to 'hunt your own food' then no, 'living with nature' that will would starve billions. While Big Ag feeds them, in a fragile pipeline of varying yields and weather.

Its 'privileged' to preach that nonsense to apartment-dwelling two-shift-working people with barely the time to visit the bodega on the way home.

Its 'privileged' to imagine this approach to live could be for more than indigenous peoples (rapidly dying out, why is that do you think?) and upper-class first-world wealthy dilettantes.

You're projecting a lot of things onto what I'm saying. I never claimed hunter-gatherer was for everyone. Getting back to nature is. That's science.

Privilege is there to be shared. This includes privileged wisdom.

Indigenous cultures are dying out due to settlers and colonizers decimating their lands, cultures, and people. This is not news. It has nothing to do with their way of life, aside from not having developed appropriate weapons and immune systems from those who would seek to kill/displace them.

As for the global food problem, I personally hypothesize capitalism needs to fall or radically transform before that can be addressed.

Learning to peacefully and freely share food seems like the simplest way to address current food issues, but people's desire for money seems to get in the way.

And I repeat, 'getting back to nature' is a pipe dream for most people, living on a cement street in an apartment 25 stories up. Which is over half of everybody already, and growing.

No, it's simply a collectively difficult thing to accomplish on our current path.

Your take is simply a disempowering reason to stay stuck. We can always reconnect with nature in various ways. Your perspective is self-limiting and keeps you from realizing ways to accomplish it.

Other people are probably figuring out how to do it and you haven't even bothered to find out how.

Here's the first link I found from googling "how to reconnect with nature while living in a city." These are decent approaches and I would say are barely scratching the surface.

https://permaculturenews.org/2017/02/20/can-connect-nature-c...

Ok, I read that (sort of). Ignoring the nonsense about 'healing frequencies', the rest seems to be middle-class advice about taking time, becoming an urban beekeeper, visits to the zoo and other time- and money-consuming hobbies that work for first-world educated people. Not a two-job parent in a too-small apartment.

Go outside. Find a tree. Sit under and observe it. How does it change over time? Consider where everything nourishing it is coming from. Don't have a tree available? Imagine one and start there.

If you want to reconnect with nature, you can. You sound like you don't want to believe it's possible, but even the smallest amount of effort can make a load of difference. Have you done any googling to challenge your belief? Have you sought out free ways to reconnect with nature?

I live on 80 acres of treed land with wildlife. I have a kitchen garden that feeds me. I'm doing fine thank you.

But I'm hyper-aware of how my situation is utterly different from billions of humans on this planet, with little or no access to even a tree. Or opportunity to sit under it. Living in high-rise apartment blocks far, far from these imagined opportunities.

The world out there is more like blade runner, than a utopia, for the vast majority of people.

And, yet, it's still possible. Your stance denies the existence of people figuring out how to do it and people's ability to reconnect. I know they're out there because I've met some. It's that simple. Your perspective is hyperbolic and disempowering, so it can't possibly be true (unless someone chooses to believe it, in which case, they're disempowering themselves). I'll continue to tell people everywhere that it's possible to reconnect with nature, even if they live in the void of space.

The mind is a powerful tool and if people believe they can use it to reconnect, they're much more likely to find a way to. When it comes to subjective experiences, it's important to engage cognitive biases in the direction we want them to go. Beliefs are useful for that, so we need to choose them wisely. Telling people they're not capable of accomplishing things is only helpful if they're rebelling against you because then they'll take it as a challenge. For others who are already in a disempowered state, they could use your message as reinforcing their stuck perspective. I choose to view life in such a way as to promote change and well-being, not get me or anyone else who hears my perspective stuck in it.

Not speaking in absolutes; I didn't inject that into this. Just point out the vast majority of apartment-dweller who ...

With their natural predators mostly eradicated, the deer population could do with a good culling in many states. Disclaimer: I've eaten deer in the past. However, now I'm not so sure I'd choose deer as a protein source. I'd rather not expose myself to Chronic Wasting Disease[1]. It is not a pleasant way to die.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/occurrence.html

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