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Comment by _nxwj | Hacker News Reader

I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/anthropological-summer/

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Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.

The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.

I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.

Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?

Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.

There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.

I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.

What do you mean you don't understand the goal? The goal for you or for humanity?

The goal is to figure it out for yourself and add meaning, to help your friends and family, the people you love and support.

For humanity, there is no goal, its for each to figure this out. There never was or will be. This isn't Star Trek.

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