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Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is what this article doesn't mention. Take, for example, antibiotics.

It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've had them for fewer than 100 years. Take one wrong step, make one bad food decision, or cut yourself building something and it could be game over.

For example, take Calvin Coolidge Jr.:

> ... while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.

https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-...

Lincoln's son, William, died from typhoid fever. I bring up these two cases because the children of well-to-do, powerful men dying from these diseases today would be a scandal. But not long ago, it was to be expected from time to time.

I'd be curios whether Lynx has ever had to go to the hospital for an infection, or maybe childbirth.

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I get the impression that she lives the way she does because it makes her happy, not because of religion or ideology, like the Amish. She has no problem sending out emails to get in touch with people, and she has her solar panels and phone.

This is a good point.

We might have antibiotics to fight serious infections but the modern way of living is still slowly killing us in many other ways.

This is a common notion that I am yet to understand or relate to...

What does "still slowly killing us" even mean? Life is slowly killing us because everyone everywhere is getting old and is dying. It has been that way since the first multi-cell organism. What does this have to do with our way of life?

If our current way of life is killing us slower than all other previous ways of life, then it is surely better than them? What kind of characterization is it even, what does it accomplish?

What is "a way of life" anyway? Sedentary, no-sports? Eating farm-produced food? Watching TV? Having clothes? Driving cars? Living in individual houses instead of big villages?

It may have been a poetic way to describe the feeling some people have that while we are alive, we are not doing the things that make a life, so to speak.

I don't know how to put it succinctly, but a single comment on HN months ago described the feeling. Is it true? I don't know, I don't have "myself but living as a thousand years ago" to compare. We do know that people's social circles, e.g. the number of close friends people describe themselves as having, has been shrinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085

""" The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.

The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.

The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.

No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else. """

>Sedentary, no-sports? Eating farm-produced food? Watching TV? Having clothes? Driving cars?

Yes. You're getting there...

You know those great clouds of smog that surround cities? That kind of stuff.

It's not just "driving cars". The ecosystem is completely fucked because of over- and mis-use of technology.

We don't face any struggles in our lives. This leads to depression.

I'm not criticising our culture or way of life. We naturally want to spend our lives comfortably at peace. We have managed to improve our lives, generation over generation, to the point now where the average person can reasonably expect to live their entire life without fear of violence or starvation and die of natural causes in their 80's.

But just like how eating all the high-calorie food we want leads to diabetes, because our bodies are evolved to a much less calorific diet (and periodic starvation), we evolved to face more challenges. The lack of fear and the ease of our survival leads to mental health problems because we have the luxury of wondering wtf we're doing here, instead of wondering how we're going to survive until next week.

Exercise helps with depression, partly because it's not easy, it requires effort and discipline and it's not "fun". Forcing yourself to get out of the house and go for a run is difficult (I know, I went through clinical depression and had to force myself to do this. Still do). It does the same for your body - stresses it to make it more healthy.

Hopefully it'll change. As following generations get used to lives without struggle or fear or starvation they'll adapt and be more mentally healthy. We'll also conquer diabetes, somehow, I'm sure.

Many people face struggles in their lives. Can be struggling to pay the bills, sickness, mental health problems, abuse at home or work, loneliness and so on. These did happen int he past too, but it is just not true that people today don't face struggles.

> Exercise helps with depression, partly because it's not easy, it requires effort and discipline and it's not "fun". Forcing yourself to get out of the house and go for a run is difficult (I know, I went through clinical depression and had to force myself to do this. Still do). It does the same for your body - stresses it to make it more healthy.

Exercise is and can be fun. And there are enough forms of exercise to take the one that matches your personality. People get addicted to exercise and many people overdo it - even injuring themselves for fun.

The struggle to go out was not because exercise is inherently not fun, but because you had depression.

Having your house bombed, being drafted and forced to fight a war. Having most of your family die of plague. Being raped repeatedly by a rich man with no way of ending it because you're poor. These are struggles. Trying to work out how to pay your bills, or get up on a Monday morning to face your job, are not in the same league.

Exercise was used as a punishment during most of my schooling. It's not "fun" (otherwise the punishment wouldn't work). "drop and give me 20" is a punishment, not a reward. Getting addicted to something doesn't mean it's "fun".

You may enjoy exercise. Good for you, I'm jealous. Wish I did. But the reality for the majority of people out there is that it's a chore that they'd rather not do if at all possible.

And thanks for telling me about my depression. Please, go on, tell me more about my life that you clearly understand so much better than me...

Lonliness is not struggle in the same way we struggled to survive for thousands of years not knowing what next week would bring. Your examples kind of bear out his point.

Then again, the thousands of years mentioned here are kind of imagined history.

The acute life threat of war times and famine was not constant. While 21 century west have higher life expectancy then the past, the "don't know what next week brings" is not how majority of history works. There are such unstable periods (world wars etc) that get changed for stable periods.

Second, parent said that we don't face any struggle which leads to depression. That is not true on any point. People struggle, they are poor or in pain.

Third, unstable periods make mental health issues go worst. Including depression. They also make consequences of those mental health issues worst - meaning depressed person is more likely to die, get hurt or hurt others.

> We don't face any struggles in our lives. This leads to depression.

I’ve never heard this before, and that’s a bold claim to make so matter-of-fact without a reference. Do you have one?

Social struggle is quite different than the day-to-day struggle to survive that was the default until recently on the human scale. Not sure that needs a reference.

I wasn’t referring to whether we face fewer struggles.

What I think needs citation is that this causes depression.

There has been some work on it. There is a higher prevalence of depression in our modern society. Other societies facing more struggles are less prone to depression. It makes sense, if you think about it - if you're struggling to feed yourself and your family, you're not happy, but you're also not depressed. You haven't got time to be depressed.

Of course, there's other interpretations: people with depression would have not bothered to get up to feed themselves, because what's the point? They would be early victims of whatever violence the society was under.

I've seen similar while travelling. Poor societies with better family connections are less depressed. Mentally unwell people are looked after by their families. Everyone seems happier and more content with their lives, despite being materially poorer.

Returning to Australia after a year away in Cambodia, my first impression was "why is everyone so unhappy and angry?". It's strange. We have everything, yet we're unhappy.

Well if we went back to the "old" way of living, it would very quickly kill almost all of us.

Exactly this. The "old" way of living, you were considered in your old age if you made it to your 40s.

When looking at historical life expectancies, a common mistake is to look from birth. High rates of infant mortality shift the average. The life expectancy from birth for a Roman was about 35 but take it from age 5 and it jumps up to 60-65.

today, kids think that being 30+ is old

That's not new but probably more jarring since adults are more childish than they used to be

It certainly would need to, because you can't sustain 7 billion people on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Despite its many disadvantages, agriculture won out because you can feed more people on less land, which makes it easy to push hunter-gatherers from their land.

The modern way of living makes us weak and reliant on technology - It happens at a genetic level. Removing basic evolutionary pressures causes the species to evolve complex adaptations to constantly changing abstract cultural problems instead of more concrete and static problems in our environment.

In the context of recent human evolution, survival has taken the backseat to mating - But evolution has a way to balance itself out. Humans will become so overly optimized for mating that we will lose all basic survival abilities and our immune systems will become weak and fully dependent on complex drugs.

All species heavily optimize for mating, to the point of detriment. You think the male peacock needs all those feathers to survive?

Yes, but unlike the peacock's feathers, technology makes our survival easier not harder. This is what makes us weaker over time. Because of technology, natural selection doesn't select for fitness as strongly as it would otherwise - Technology lowers the bar in terms of what genes are required for survival, so natural selection becomes centered around abstract cultural aspects related to mating such as (for example) wealth which doesn't correlate very strongly with fitness (likely inversely correlated in fact).

Anything which allows for weak genes to pass down to the next generations is bad for evolution. That's what happened to many species of birds in New Zealand; there were so few natural predators for such long periods of time that many lost their ability to fly. Then when predators were introduced, a lot of these species went extinct very quickly.

Many species exhibit strong sexual selection pressures, it's a natural part of evolution.

A hammer and a hard place. We have alot to improve -

I had days when i down right thought “this is hell”, when deeply thinking about “modern” life and the exploitation and existential issues needed to maintain it.

I honestly wouldnt choose us, if i was starting a new. on the other hand murder or genocide arent an option either, so we have to improve, somehow, or suffer badly.

Some of us already have no choice.

President Garfield died from blood poisoning too. But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them and no healthcare to remove it. But Garfield being president had all sorts of excessive medical attention before proper sanitation procedures were common in US medical practice. By the way I've just read Candice Miller's book on him and find her writing style great.

Both he and President McKinley had their wounds probed excessively, under not too sanitary conditions.

With modern medical procedures, both would have likely survived.

Actually in several cases bullets are not removed as removing them may cause further damage: https://www.carenade.com/blog/bullet-time/

> But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them

Many of those poor soldiers died - including from infections.

Nobody is saying they didn't, that isn't the point being made.

I always bring up Darwin when thinking such thoughts. Rich guy as well, I think his father was a businessman. But the thing about Darwin is he articulated just how cruel nature can be while being a victim himself. Something near half his kids died.

Darwin also suffered from chronic health problems for his entire adult life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin

"For over forty years Darwin suffered intermittently from various combinations of symptoms such as: malaise, vertigo, dizziness, muscle spasms and tremors, vomiting, cramps and colics, bloating and nocturnal intestinal gas, headaches, alterations of vision, severe tiredness, nervous exhaustion, dyspnea, skin problems such as blisters all over the scalp and eczema, crying, anxiety, sensation of impending death and loss of consciousness, fainting, tachycardia, insomnia, tinnitus, and depression."

The time integral of his suffering must be enormous. I'm a little horrified that a man so famous can suffer so much, and yet almost no one knows about it. They remember him for his achievements; but the countless days he spent in pain are forgotten.

Some think it was Chagas disease, contracted while he was in South America during the Beagle's voyage.

I’ve just discovered that I’ve been living for with blood parasites from my travels many years ago. It’s been really terrible, chronic inflammation, years of doctors telling me that nothing is wrong. I only discovered it because one of the symptoms got so bad without explanation that I bought and refubished an old microscope and started looking at things for the last few months.

First I saw their eggs, and I thought they were white blood cells. There were millions of them, but my WBC counts came back low. After a few months I finally saw one of the little monsters. I sent photos to my doctors and they ignored them. Finally, I got a video call with a doctor, went through the whole procedure with them and found one on the call. This got their attention, but they couldn’t re-order labs because they had already come back negative. The proper tests/treatment are very specific and expensive in the US, nearly impossible to get approved by insurance, although they are given for free in the third world.

This stuff happens. Native people generally develop some form of neonatal immunity or tolerance. Travelers mostly stay safe in leisure travel, but some studies show it to be less rare than expected. For me it took a combination of an untreated flesh wound, and a flood of contaminated water.

I’m reminded of the blood parasites support group in Fight Club. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of my life I’ve lost to this.

I'm curious, what happens next for you? What is the treatment for the parasites?

Keep in mind that one of the definitions of the word “suffer” is “to undergo or experience (any action, process, or condition)”.

The article you link to also mentions that Darwin himself found upsides to his condition, which implies that the integral of the suffering (now using the emotionally-valenced definition of the word) may not have been of the magnitude you imagine, nor even necessarily negative.

On a related and curious note, I have found fainting to be one of the most pleasurable experiences.

> But the thing about Darwin is he articulated just how cruel nature can be while being a victim himself.

Nature isn't cruel. It's indifferent which can seem cruel at times.

Isn't it generally a temporary lifestyle to teach lessons about self-reliance and adaptiveness and not some permanent lifestyle like say, the Amish, who do use modern healthcare despite living a 19th century lifestyle?

The amish don't make any particular effort or have any particular desire to live a 19th century lifestyle. They simply avoid technology that they consider to have more downsides than upsides.

The Amish are more opposed to greed than technology. The two often go hand in hand but not always - individual congregations decide for themselves.

Not to mention that she probably had a bunch of shots while growing up in London.

I keep thinking of all of the young women on her retreats - since they're living completely in the wild for 30 days, what do they do about menstruation? I wish the article mentioned what her primitive solutions are (if any) for some of the more gross inconveniences of being human.

My guess would be that they wear and wash reusable pads. There are modern versions of these, too! Thinx is the big name brand.

Either that or they don’t use anything. Not to get too personal, but it’s not always necessary to use something aside from regular undergarments.

I read menstruation cups are encouraged in poor countries where women can't afford disposable pads, maybe that?

One traditional solution is cattail fluff.

They could just take birth control.

Didn't realize antibiotics were only available in less than 100 years. Amazing progress in so little time. Makes me realize we are much better equipped to fight biological threats than ever before.

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20150417/superbugs-...

Also protected from some nasty bugs by herd immunity from the vaccinated.

To be fair, we got those nasty bugs from domesticating herd animals who lived in herds big enough to support them

Hunting gatherers didn't have to worry about most of those diseases either.

There is a lot she won't die of too, like obesity.

Sure, but we objectively have a lot longer lifespan now than we did pre-antibiotics. Obesity is bad, but unchecked bacteria is worse.

The majority of the world not living 200k years in the past won't die to obesity, either.

A majority in the US will.

Edit:

maybe it's not in fashion to listen to the CDC in these times, but:

"Obesity is a serious concern because it is associated with poorer mental health outcomes, reduced quality of life, and the leading causes of death in the U.S. and worldwide, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer." [0]

Emphasis mine.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html

Except "associated with" is just another way of saying correlated, not the cause of. A lot of people would live healthier lives, both mentally and physically, if we gave up on trying to fight obesity itself and just spent all our effort getting people to exercise.

"Leading cause" means that among causes of death obesity would be the plularity, not the majority

They won't die to it because they don't have it - while the percentage of people who are obese in the US is higher than other parts of the world, it's still not a majority.

No the majority of people will die from, surprise, being old. Being obese might be correlated with dying a little less old, but the cause of death is still, fundamentally, being old.

Obesity is a body type, not a disease

No, jacobush, the majority of people in the US will not die of obesity.

> It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've had them for fewer than 100 years.

We've had effective antibiotics for thousands of years. When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it. It wasn't particularly difficult to commercialize, but no one actually cared.

Modern antibiotics are mostly only necessary if you get shot or you're a burn victim or something, which is why no one cared until WWII. Also, some of the berberine plants that were used before that were starting to become less common around that time.

If we didn't have effective antibiotics before penicillin then human life expectancy would have gone way up after the discovery of penicillin. But looking at the data, it's pretty obvious that that didn't actually happen. Pretty much every scientific paper agrees with this, e.g.:

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.66.12...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8007898

> When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it.

That's false. Penicillin was discovered in 1928. It took until 1940 for researchers to show it could cure infections. It was put to use in a human the next year, and Fleming won the Nobel Prize in 1945.

Infections that could be cured by penicillin (staph and strep) were on their own never a leading cause of death, and so you wouldn't expect penicillin on its own to drive big life expectancy improvements.

> It took until 1940 for researchers to show it could cure infections.

Because they didn't start working on it until 1939.

That's how research works. You have to wait for the researcher with the right skill set to attack the problem in the right way. Sometimes it takes a few years.

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