One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing
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Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.
Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing?
Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?
Samoan: And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.
[0]: https://timothynoah.substack.com/p/the-guy-who-explained-wha...
Idleness is all well and good, until someone with guns decides that they'd rather have you spend those hours earning a profit for them, instead of lazying around.
- Your kid breaks their leg.
- A natural disaster destroys your home.
- You get cancer.
- Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone.
- A draught causes a famine.
- Your baby is born with a birth defect.
... and so on.
I strongly suspect that humanity set off on its endless hedonic treadmill ride to the stars not because we were dissatisfied with the median of the status quo but because we were dissatisfied with the edge cases.
Today's technophilia is framed as a run toward a glittering future, but I think we started this journey by running away from random misfortune and cruel circumstances. The whole idea of running toward anything is fairly recent vintage, probably enlightenment era onward, though it has some antecedent in Christian eschatology with the idea of salvation being a novelty or in the future vs being in the past.
- People working across thousands of years for independent and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for mathematical sciences.)
- People working to further their own immediate interests. (Every industrial development.)
Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic housing values.
So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via financialized debt.
You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine and protocols keeping people alive.
> You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies.
That might say something about developments in technology, or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around agriculture.
They both construct convincing narratives from looking at the history that deconstruct the "just so" stories of economists. From AtG you see how most of 'civilization' throughout history has been experienced by most people as slavery and warfare and living standards actually improved, or at least didn't become much worse, for many with things like the fall of Rome.
Debt is fascinating because it shows just how new and novel the current inescapable logic of capitalism actually is. Adam Smith's fanciful notion of a fully formed civilization of shopkeepers who adopt coinage to streamline barter is shown to be complete nonsense and with it the foundations of much of "assumed" thought about how people and markets organise themselves.
Yeah theoretically if nothing bad happens to you you can live to 80, just like people in developed countries. The difference is that all the random causes of death (eg. dysentery, or infection because you cut yourself) drags down the life expectancy down to significantly below 80. In other words, people in "modern, developed societies" living to 80 is the average outcome, but for hunter gatherers that might be the 99th percentile outcome. Your comment casually ignores this.
Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture at ages where they become widespread in subsistence culture.
Even that's "mostly" from infant mortality, a significant non-infant mortality still remains. From your linked article
>~60% of newborns in these populations survive to age 15 and ~40% to age 45. Those who survive to age 45 can expect to live another ~20 years
In other words, even if you survive past 15, there's a 33% chance that you won't make it to 45.
>Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture at ages where they become widespread in subsistence culture.
Is there a direct source for the healthspan claim? The study you linked substantiates the individual disease instances being lower, but that could also be caused by dying at around 68-78, before those ailments usually set in.
I do not know one that directly compares numbers so I've pulled from a few sources.
Consider Americans: here [0] is an actuarial table from the US CDC which lists % of adults with some chronic conditions by age (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, cancer, arthritis) Of note is that nearly 70% of adults 55-64 are diagnosed with at least one condition and 37% are diagnosed with at least two conditions. This paper [1] says that two thirds of Americans of any age die from a chronic disease.
Consider H-Gs: The paper in the earlier comment as well as the paper it references [2] indicate that H-G death from degenerative disease is relatively rare. At age 60+ about 24% die from degenerative disease. A H-G population in Bolivia has 5x less coronary artery disease than western counterparts, even in old age [3]. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison of healthspan but it does give some idea of prevalence of chronic disease in the two populations.
Some comparisons of population disease were made by those studying indigenous people under colonial administration [4]:
"Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly."
A large part of this may be due to diet. The China Study [5] compares provinces before and after the introduction of western style cuisine and finds this change associated with increases of chronic disease, especially cardiovascular and cancer.
It is not a simple comparison, but I think there is a case that outside of accidents and infections the average H-G may be healthier than the average industrial human.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/health_policy/adult_chronic_conditi...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876976/
[2] https://gurven.anth.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[4] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets...
My hypothesis was that the edge cases were likely a problem. You might have been able to live well in a hunter-gatherer society of you were healthy and if natural disasters and invading peoples left you alone.
I'm sure deciding which children should live or die in a random weather-induced famine or watching invaders kill your family takes the shine off being a hunter-gatherer.
I suspect there are multiple reasons for the birth of civilization, agriculture, and technology, but one of these was probably as a form of insurance. Others probably included cults and religion, effectiveness at warfare (defensive or offensive), and simple fascination with and emulation of impressive feats like megalithic architecture (in other words mimetic behavior).
Of course people are right that there is no panacea and that we may have traded one set of problems for another, but that's how things go. History is a walk across state space exploring various nooks and crannies and finding out what angels and demons lurk there.
"I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of "self-interest". It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments.
When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores . By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense."[0]
Hobbes statement of some fundamental truth of human nature is both newer and less open-and-shut than we assume.
[0]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under... p 331
"Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly." [1]
"The remarkable metabolic and cardiovascular health of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale populations has long made them attractive models in public health. Given the similarity in health profiles across ethnic groups, it is clearly their environments, rather than genetics, that keep people within small-scale societies so healthy. Indeed, from Australia to the Americas, these populations develop the same metabolic and cardiovascular ‘diseases of civilization’ when they move away from traditional lifestyles and adopt Western diets and activity levels 46." [2]
"Indeed, the modal age at death for hunter-gatherer populations examined by Gurven and Kaplan is ~72 years (range: 68–78 years), near the value for the US population (85 years) in 2002." [2]
"Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less—not more—famine than other subsistence modes." [3]
"Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." [0]
[0] http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_w...
[1] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets...
As far as I am concerned, intermittent fasting helped me achieve better metabolic health. Not on the level of hunter gatherers, but above average for my age bracket.
But I didn't have to give up all the perks of civilization to achieve that. Just some daily physical activity and eating less.
Of course, the author started out wealthy.
Incidentally doing nothing occasionally adds up to something, where-as doing something often amounts to nothing. Most of you are reading this at work after all.
Maybe there is something to how we define terms and measure things.
Assume one average US farm family (1000 acres, 200 bushels/acre corn) effort feeds 25000 adults/yr,
defined as adequate calories from corn (8 bushels/year to provide annual calories for one adult).
So 350 food lives/yr from birth to death (75-80 yr life expectancy).
Every day, a farm family (3-5 for 1000 acre farm) births a new food life.
Can’t just eat corn so soybeans, vegetables, meat…count machinery, fuel, processing, shipping…let’s multiply that by a fudge factor of 3 to account for that. Two extra people for every farm family member for additional crops, distribution, shipping, fuel, machinery.
So, 3-5 person/days * 3 ~ 14 days. Two weeks adult ag labor provides for 70 years of adequate food for one person.
I could squeeze two weeks labor into a beach schedule sometime over 50 years to be assured to eat for the rest of my life.
Lots of ways to challenge the numbers…but double, triple them, and it’s still a tiny fraction of a life.
IT tech is fine, but ag tech improvements have fed, and continue to feed, the world.
And to be clear, extreme poverty has its own clear definition by the UN, which does not apply here. Poverty is simply: the state of having few material possessions or little income. Presumably, like this Samoan.
Does the romanticization go any further than poverty tourism? This reminds me that Thoreau is popularly denigrated today for being hypocritical, but no one seems to make the connection that it's for (more or less) the same thing. If someone is very well shielded from possible deleterious effects of the state of poverty (not including food and shelter), they're still benefiting from wealth directly or indirectly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...
To transition now? I might be scared. I might miss my computer. I might think too highly of myself and less about the collective, nevermind seven or eleven or sixteen thousand generations hence. I'm at the "raise a child" stage of life and even now I (think I) accept my own death if were to happen today. The stories I care about involve humans existing alongside so much other life for thousands of years hence, with an unbroken history (oral or otherwise) so those at the end of life on earth have a really interesting story to look back on. Measuring humans in the billions and cheetahs in the thousands is not a healthy sign (for example).
[0] Feral : Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by George Monbiot
See also : The Old Way : a story of the first people, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (lived with the Zhu/wasi (the slash is a click), or Ju/wasi as her mother spelled it, for about five years in the 50s and noted the changes over the decades from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist, with efforts to maintain culture along the way)
> He describes the narrow alleys of his neighborhood being packed with bayayes who just sit and stand around all day. Like, for the entire day. They have no jobs, no money, no goals, and they eat so little that they have no energy for leisure activities. The closest thing to an objective they have is keeping out of the sun, so they slowly move around the alleys to stay in the shade. Their highlight in a day might be some sort of public commotion, like a thief being caught, which will cause an enormous crowd to swell and watch the proceedings. [...]
> Kapuscinski constantly describes much of Africa’s baseline climate as so hot, humid/dry, bug-filled, and generally insufferable that even passive existence is too taxing to be productive. Ie. the people of Abdallah Wallo can’t work hard because it is literally dangerous to do so.
Doing nothing is the most common activity, but not exactly by choice.
> random individuals or groups of age 15 y and above were selected for observation at random times in the day using tables of random numbers. The anthropologist located the relevant individual and recorded the activity in which they were engaging at the moment they were spotted by the anthropologist, to avoid changes in behavior caused by the researcher’s presence.
> These were con- structed by the diary method, in which each subject precisely recorded (in their own words) the activities they were engaged in during each 5- to 10-min interval of a previous 24-h period
Come on now, these two methods are not producing comparable results.
No on your point 2. Anxiety about the future isn't a downtime, this has been all but proven with many modern studies. Stress kills, I don't think this is debatable nowadays.
"Doing nothing" is a stress free time, whatever it is that your physical body is doing during the time e.g. people tending to their garden.
What are your reservations against the tweets?
>The median adult spent ~27% of their waking time doing nothing
20-30% idleness sounds like a perfect description of the cumulative break time I take on days that are mostly manual labor.
Maybe the researchers should've just asked them directly.
edit: on top of that, they assume a linear relationship between commercial work and total work when half their graphs display extremely nonlinear behavior and the data clearly does not support a normally distributed regression coefficient. This is really bad science.
I spent a lot of time doing nothing growing up. We had a big yard so I spent a lot of time outside. Mostly doing nothing. Sometimes having bonfires where we sat, talked, and did nothing. Somedays I read.
But mostly I did a lot of nothing. I was bored sometimes but honestly I miss those days. I miss waking up and thinking that I had nothing to do and letting the day drag on and on.
I think if a dog realized that food/drink isnt coming, he would go into feral mode and go hunting for that. But upon being satisfied, he would take a break for a bit, because he doesn't have the concept of stockpiling or calculating his long term needs.
Sometimes I waste time on the web and sometimes doing nothing.
re: the article: as someone else here said, I did wonder if some people in non-industrial societies are just resting.
With less technology, that would be categorized as mostly nothing.
We just have something to do while we do nothing. Back in time we did not.
I think we did. We could read a book, do puzzles, draw/doodle, carve a chunk of wood, watch the clouds, etc. That's about the same level of exertion as watching videos or posting on HN.
Back when? TV and very low-value, low-effort reading (periodicals, comics, books) have existed for quite a while and filled many an otherwise idle hour. I think you'd have to go back to the 19th century to find a time when there weren't very cheap options available to fill idle hours without effort. They still had cheap low-value books and such (penny dreadfuls, for instance) but volume and availability was more limited, so do-nothing entertainment wasn't quite as plentiful.
Interacting with social media feel very different from sitting on a porch and whittling. One feels like I'm doing something in my brain. One feels like nothing.
- a lone person leaning on a building having a smoke: no problem
- wandering in circles in the park talking on the phone: no one gives a second thought
- sitting on a bench by yourself doing nothing: who the hell is this psycho?!
Perhaps it has to do with the implicit communal assumption that everyone in public is a potential psycho.
I definitely spend a lot of time doing nothing, even though I might be pretending not.
And then we have giant industry all about passive entertainment where we can turn our brain off, like all the crappy TV and movies and tiktoks, and YouTube, and watching other people play games or do sport where we just sit doing nothing half paying attention.
If there "doing nothing" involved meditating, thinking, or what not, but as far as I'm concerned there "doing nothing" sounds like they're just watching the leafs blow in the wind, the bird sings, and that's just another version of watching TikTok that's slightly less entertaining.
How useful is the information if you don't take the time to roll it around in your head and see where it fits?
what is the value? Why is this part of the conclusion?
Also, why isn't "thinking" a category? Are the people doing nothing really doing nothing.
It's this article trying to link the difference to industrialisation/capitalism lifestyle (versus high-labour and hot climate, for example).
We want to progress to overcome nature (disease, harshness, etc.) but we should also have a measure of idleness and recreation without it letting us slide backwards.
Sit and watch a wild rabbit all day, and while he'll be eating a lot of the time, his 2nd favourite activity appears to be just sitting idle.
He's awake, eyes open, just not doing anything.