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Comment by mdekkers | Hacker News Reader

> Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years.

Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.

These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.

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That doesn't mean it's false though? The parent seems correct that human beings are capable of subsisting and surviving for many many generations on very austere conditions.

From reading these comments you’d think that human beings were miserable and incapable of any happiness or meaning until someone invented air conditioning and sewage systems.

Yes, life used to be more difficult. No, that doesn’t mean such a life was without meaning.

Perhaps you confused my comment with another comment chain?

No, I was agreeing with you. Human beings survive and thrive even under difficult conditions.

Only by means of statistics - they had so many children that it compensated for high mortality rates.

As recently as in the early 20th century the fertility rate required to sustain population numbers in Germany was over 2.5 - and that was well into the industrial era.

Before such obvious to us things like antibiotics or doctors washing hands it was likely much higher.

So you are saying it works? You just have to have 2.5 children.

Well, that and survive yourself through said childbirths, which was (and indeed is) never guaranteed for approximately half of humanity. Childbirth is dangerous! Obviously, humans have always had more than enough children on average, but the burden of it is quite high.

Everything works as long as you discount survivorship bias.

It does, but the parent poster who lives in a van does not do it, and therefore he's not really surviving anything. And as the first reply to the van implied, he would not be boasting "spiritually" if he had to deal with children in his van.

The species can survive this way. Individuals - not really.

If the species is also alive, that means individuals are alive.

psychologically, though, it’s much easier to suffer hardship. If everyone in your community is also suffering the same hardship. Making unilateral choices to deny yourself, creature comfort doesn’t seem all tha likely to succeed as a strategy.

Maybe not for the median person, but many types of people do succeed with it, such as ascetic monks, stoics, many religious sects, etc...

And the reason for living such a simplistic life is to be a model for those of people who think that it can’t be done.

I have zero unhappiness about the way I live, my problem is other people make it hard for me to live this simplistic life.

I just read that some sociopath is trying to make it illegal for people to live intense in the UK. That’s what I’m talking about.

But they don’t want that, and they are not wrong for wanting to live a more comfortable and less brutal life.

>Come now, people also used to die from toothaches

Last time I was in America (about 20 years ago) there was an item on the news about a child that had died because of an untreated dental problem.

If its on the news its because its interesting due to its novelty.

"Millions of Americans – as many as 25% of the population – are delaying getting medical help because of skyrocketing costs"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

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