> And chronic stress has been found to deplete the body of the energy it needs to make milk.
lets just say our profit and growth driven society is not structured to nurture humans, neither grown nor newborn.
Exactly. You have a prior hypothesis about stress. This article makes a brief mention of stress and you take it as evidence of your hypothesis even though the article doesn’t support that at all.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90980-3
my point is, I'm not a scientist, so pointing out a bias (in my case a preconceived speculation) won't change my methodology for a future study. you're just going "nuh uh" with nothing else to say.
I am creating a narrative, and based on the discussion from my comment, it was exactly the narrative I wanted to provide.
They didn't have as much safety from pillaging tribes, hungry animals, they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away, or a fire department.
Can all of the advancements in human QoL above be undone by turning on CNN on one's 70" LCD TV in one's warm, electrified, illuminated and weather-proofed home?
"our records indicate you have not used your cloud connected CPAP machine frequently enough. a healthy night's sleep is necessary for maximum productivity at your place of employment. you must use this machine on average 6 hours per day or the portion already paid by your insurance will be rescinded and charged to you. a copy of this email was also sent to your supervisor"
"your smart speaker indicated that you have expressed illegal opinions while home alone, this recording has been forwarded to the Scottish criminal justice system for review"
"healthy employees are critical to our business. To that end we are issuing every employee a smart watch to help monitor and enforce our physical activity requirements to bring down our medical insurance costs"
Also, do they need to deal with phone notifications, or a boss demanding something right now? There are very few things that demand an immediate now in their lives compared to ours.
Whether I'd like to live like that is a different matter, of course. (Among other things, I'm convinced Thag will bash my head first, before I even notice something is wrong.)
srs? lol. back in the day your concerns were food, warmth and that is about it. now it's social media, covid 19, spy balloons, nuclear war, pronoun war, civil war, market crashes, wealth disparity, climate change/refugees, toxic chemical plumes ... I mean the list goes on and on.
This is true for people who are able to detach from the events of the world, but that is not a universal skill.
Plus a lot of the concerns I listed are not just news you hear about - they are things people are living on a daily basis. Just the other day a guy walked into MSU, about an hour away from me, and killed a bunch of people. For some you can tune that out and carry on with your life. For others, notably people in the community or families who were directly impacted, it's traumatic.
The plume of shit in the air down in Ohio is also about an hour from me. It's not just a news story, farm animals are dying. That is someones livelihood and its indicative that the environment is toxic. That would stress you out, wouldn't it? Should I drink the water? Do I need to move? Can I move? Can I even sell my house now that the local area is toxic?
I think you can stick your head in the sand for a certain amount of time but at some point you need to come up and look around at the world we are creating and become proactive instead of just watching it crumble.
News is written in a way that exploits human psychological flaws. It is written in this way to gain attention. News outlets game attention because newspapers that relied on ad-revenue out competed subscription revenue models. The reason this is so is that people place relatively little important on the time value on their attention compared to the monetary value of their subscription. The reason behind this is...
EDIT: I'm not saying that 'modern' stressors aren't actually stressful. I'm saying that not knowing when and where your next meal is coming from or if you're surviving the winter is just as stressful.
Fuck Lovecraft, but I think he was right. It's not our job to know everything about everything, all the time. But that's what we're incentivized to do.
Maybe thousands of years ago humans were just blissfully ignorant of the dangers that existed?
All of these stressors amalgamate into a chronic "fuzz stress" that has no form and no distinguishable source that constantly sits in the back of the minds of the collective public and is very difficult to expunge because doing that would require addressing all of the individual contributors, which is for all practical purposes impossible without sweeping societal change.
They wouldn't even dream about these things, so they weren't unhappy because of it.
You can't feel like you need something if it doesn't exist (in your era at least).
Today we still don't have casual space travel, time travel, the elixir of life or the wonder drug, but it's not the lack of these things that is making us unhappy.
The study says, "Psychosocial stress may affect the composition of breast milk via several pathways."
If I'm reading it correctly, a single sample was taken from 146 women. Breastmilk composition tends to be higher in fats and carbohydrates in the first few weeks of life and varies by time of day[1]. It's highly variable (even within a single feeding) in composition, depending on many factors, like if an infant is sick and their age.
Breastfeeding duration seemed like it may be negatively associated with cortisol in school age children in one study[2]. If that's the case, the best thing a mother in a stressful environment can do is breastfeed.
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33017792/ 2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355137223_Breastfee...
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
> The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
Original question was about "society" which is sort of nebulous, but I think (hope?) most people wouldn't define their relationships with their family and close friends, or with most of the world around them, through the lens of an economic system, be it capitalism, communism, mercantilism or feudalism.
Humans by their very nature possess the instinct to outcompete their rivals as a result of millions of years of evolution. Anyone who was not like that, was removed from the gene pool by those who were either by taking their resources or by outright murdering them.
for clarity, feudalism lasted twice as long as capitalism has currently existed.
and while competition has dominated the scientific and cultural narrative for a while, that's not the exclusive interpretation, or even necessarily the best or correct one.
Was the blacksmith selling the products of his labor to people in the community not capitalism?
What exactly do you mean by capitalism?
Now, sure, that manorial land was technically the means of production, and those in charge of these manors technically owned it (maybe much more like we are used to in civilizational phases, like with the Roman empire ?), but isn't this really stretching the intuitions we have around "capitalism" ?
if we are going to make a distinction between feudalism and capitalism, surely we can similarly make a distinction between capitalism and X, instead of simply defining capitalism uselessly as "free markets" or "human nature." it's inclusive of the institutions which uphold these relations.
For a very long time, helping your community and being involved in it meant you got to eat. That's no longer the case. It's perfectly viable to clock in, say nothing to anyone, clock out, repeat. It's also possible to give all you can to your community and starve to death.
The survival strategy is no longer "seek community" but "seek profit", because human society is now more dangerous and rewarding than the natural environment.