Hacker News Reader

Comment by padastra | Hacker News Reader

Reddit and HN skews to the perennially online, who are composed of people that believe work should be easy, fulfilling, highly paid, and most of all: optional. They also think this is the natural state of nature and it’s everyone else’s fault that it is not so.

View on HN

Based on studies of neolithic tribes, the "natural state of nature" is spending 2-3 hours a day hunting or gathering food, an hour preparing meals, and the rest of the time goofing off.

Is there somewhere in modern society this schedule is available?

Its also spent fighting off other people who want to live on the same very limited natural resources, or you die from starvation. That is the reason we stopped living like that, it hasn't been possible for thousands of years since there simply are too many humans to do it.

The reason there are too many humans to do it is because we invented agriculture, and we stopped living like that just as we invented agriculture.

Spending your time fighting for limited resources is actually not something we stopped doing. If you live in the US on average around 4% of your working time is spent on war, and that's working more than twice the hours, all things considered, of people in the neolithic. And that's in relative peace time, expect that to revert to the mean in the next decade or two.

Anyways, this is besides the point, the natural state of man is indeed to do less labour and even less work than nowadays.

Supposedly actual warfare was quite low until sedentism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...

Apparently, humans would tend to migrate rather than fight for available resources.

>Is there somewhere in modern society this schedule is available?

You could go live a hunter gatherer lifestyle in most forests in North America. Nobody will try to stop you if you are far enough from a road.

Lol, I want to know how many people out there ordering Seamless because they’re too lazy to pick up the food are arguing they would have had an easier life chasing down an antelope with a 14-hour jog across the plain and dragging the several hundred lb corpse back to the tribe.

>natural state of nature

What about modern life has anything to do with this mythical "natural" state? Why should people be left to die as if we were the same as gazelles?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com