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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth. That will only get more true as population growth slows while innovation continues to drive productivity improvements.

But we’re still culturally in the mindset you’re describing: that we must each individually wrest life out of the wilderness day by day.

As a result we seem to be inventing more and more complex and bizarre ways of forcing that reality to still exist. Like pointless YouTube challenge videos done solely to provide ad inventory so well-off people can sell things to other well-off people.

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We aren't inventing more and more complex ways of forcing that reality to still exist. That reality does still exist, it's close to not existing, maybe only another 300-400 years, but it's still 100% true right now. You are ignoring the massive logistical challenge of getting all those things to all those people and spreading all that knowledge to get production happening. Additionally, our current system is built on a 100 leaning towers of pisa. Look at Ukraine, it gets invaded and our global supply of food is massively impacted, many people are going to starve and freeze to death over the war in Ukraine this winter who have never set foot in Ukraine or Russia.

>we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth

This should come with a footnote that it's only possible due to slave labor in third world countries. A much smaller subset of people would be buying iPhones if they were $5000.

iPhones are not food, clothing, or shelter.

Many would consider them an "other necessity", if we're being pedantic.

"It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth."

But that's only true with incentive to work.

Their point wasn't anything to do with wilderness. It was if you had your needs met without the requirement of work, that a significant portion of people would not work. Without those workers, we would no long have enough production.

>as population growth slows

This is only happening because more women are working. Guess what happens when all men and women are free all day long? It comes from the very essence of evolution that when the carrying capacity increases the population rises until it reaches the new one. Any "utopia" would revolve around sex as it is the principal object of human existence and reality.

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