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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away.

Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.

Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.

You are not designed for this.

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Counterpoint: My primitive monkey brain likes getting blueberries in wintertime and cheap toys from China.

Monkeys do not know about China or toys. They wouldn't know about blueberries either unless the fruit is local.

Connectedness also stops us from waging war. Or, I should say, it does not stop us, it makes us less likely to start one. But we still do it evidently. And then we all suffer.

We have more wars right now than before.

Do we? If you read something like guns germs and steel or read some Harari, we may not have had big wars with big guns like today, but we sure had a lot of smaller conflicts.

Yeah we do. Most since like WWII. Obviously depends on how you define a "war", so it can skew one way or another.

> You are not designed for this.

What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.

>> Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come.

That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.

The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.

No, that is too simplistic.

Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.

> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.

I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.

My reply was to your comment saying "modern society would collapse...". My response is - if the removal of connectedness makes it collapse, then it hasn't adapted to changes.

Sorry, I don't get that logic. Clearly it has adapted to connectedness. It can adapt to removal of connectedness too, but the quicker that happens, the more painful the process of adaptation.

We seem to be talking past each other?

> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.

Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.

Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.

Things are toppled a lot higher now than several centuries ago. Population is orders of magnitude higher, and we all get our food from far away places in the world. Those things make a very fragile global ecosystem which is very different to the very localised ones centuries ago.

Back then 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval for a few affected areas. Now that those areas supply food to the whole world the problem has grown in scale and fragility.

The civilized world is certainly designed for humans and by humans, though.

Designed by businesses and for businesses. If there is no business profit, 99% of the connectedness wouldn't be there. 99% of tech wouldn't be there.

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