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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

I like to imagine a tribal villages before civilization went into overdrive. That’s the lifestyle humans originally adapted to. I imagine that in the village, there are niched personalities. One guy is way spiritual and offers guidance and spiritual support. Another is a warrior spirit, always eager to conquer and to gain more resources for his village. A third is the carpenter. Society today must accommodate these same people types, or they’ll feel out of place. It’s okay if you (like me) don’t respond to the Don Quixote type narrative; I think it sounds naive, but it’s always easy to be a critic.

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Tribal villages like constant strife and either going all-in Spartan with daily military drill or else getting swallowed and seeing all you love die and get savagely raped? The ancients had it hard and we have it really, really easy with our peaceful freedoms.

Is this comment historically accurate? How often are lands conquered? I think not, to what you say. Also, this only accomodates the last ~3000 years of human history. Before the agricultural revolution, humans lived a very different life as apex predators. It was not until we can grow and store crops that armies could exist.

It’s not. Even in their own time, the Spartan bullshit was a myth pushed by themselves. Some civilizations such as the Chumash in what is now Los Angeles worked as little as 8 hours per week in order to survive.

> Some civilizations such as the Chumash in what is now Los Angeles worked as little as 8 hours per week in order to survive.

What was their life expectancy?

It makes more sense to me to calculate how much total free time they had compared to now. So even if they lived to be only 40-50 years old they would still have more freedom in hours/days than the modern worker.

I worked remotely for a whole year and it was 100x better than working in an office. I can only imagine what only working 8 hours a week is like.

> It makes more sense to me to calculate how much total free time they had compared to now.

You won't have much free time if you and your family can only aspire to reach the ripe old age of 30, if you manage to be the lucky ones who are lucky on the infant mortality lotto.

> You won't have much free time if you and your family can only aspire to reach the ripe old age of 30

That was never the case though; ancient societies had much lower life expectancy at birth because they were very likely to die in early childhood. People who made it to adulthood, sure, didn't live as long as today on average, but the difference is much smaller than life expectancy at birth numbers would suggest. You seem to recognize the high infant mortality, but not understand how it affects the other stats like life expectancy at birth.

Their mortality rates were 100%, as are ours. Their life expectancy was infinitesimally small relative to the eternity they'll be dead for, as are ours.

That's silly - otherwise we can rationalize infant death as a perfectly acceptable length of time to live.

> Their mortality rates were 100%, as are ours.

You're desperately trying to avoid the question. Their free time doesn't mean anything if they die in their 30s while living a life where they are forced to endure famines and the deaths of loved ones for avoidable problems such as lack of medical care.

Life is suffering, this is ancient wisdom, and an absolute. Serfs suffer. Billionaires suffer. Ants suffer. We suffer in a variety of different ways, but nothing changes the fact that we suffer. Talking about our ancestors like their lives were exclusively miserable is like pitying kids in the 80s because their video games weren't as good, it's ridiculous. They just played different games. There's nothing meaningful here to measure quantitatively, it's all a matter of perception.

> There's nothing meaningful here to measure quantitatively

Yes, there is - their age.

I'm must be out of the loop, because I've never met a dead person who is the least bit upset that they're dead. It's only the living who freak out about it, and they aren't even qualified to have an opinion on the matter.

Cool, nihilism it is. Nothing matters, everything is awful, and we're all just dead flesh anyways.

Didn't Sparta lost quite a few fights? For all the myths,they were not succesfull at creating imperium.

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