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smabie

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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