There's also a huge mental cost induced by society. Everything, has to have a purpose, a ROI; everything has a price (even free, it takes space).

When you live in nature, you just do as you feel. No reference, no efficiency, it's freeing; and that's a feeling you rarely get in society.

Just to be clear: everything in nature also has a ROI of sorts. I would say people who live in nature are also constrained by their environment and have to be very economical. They depend on their tribe, on the cycle of seasons and the weather, have to be prepared for chance meetings with predators, can't fully prepare for other things like trauma, infection and natural disaster etc.

The closest you can currently get to "doing as you feel", involves moving to Europe and becoming dependent on the socialist state. You can live for free in a flat forever, never have to work, get free health care for every booboo, just hang out all day surrounded by people who do the same thing. I would say this is currently the state of the art in living an unnatural life. And as a result, you might end up being miserable.

But I do sort of understand what you mean; our brains were built for living in natural environments. These impose fairly random and complex constraints, with stress coming in big but short-lived peaks and real family being constantly around.

Living in a concrete jungle and having constant low level stress, doing and eating the exact same things every day, taking pills for every little ill is a recipe for alienation and early death.

Your view of the welfare state seems extremely skewed. One can certainly not just move here and profit.

Well not sure what country you're in. I did live in the middle of it for many years. This is just my personal impression of the system.

But I don't intend for this to become a political discussion. To me, this is just an effective example of how "doing what you feel like" can be very different from living in nature or in a natural state and being happy.

Well we came out of the jungles, it's in our genes. Humans don't belong to the jungles of concrete. There was research done at the hospitals in the 80s that by having a window with a view to nature in the patient's recovery room after the surgery. The person was discharged couple of days early, had to take less painkillers and had less post surgery complications.

Now they just discharge the patient.

(It worked out okay, but I didn't realize I should have had a wheelchair on hand recently when I picked someone up from a relatively straightforward orthopedic surgery)

Don't confuse technological advancement with overpopulation. The former directly impacts the reduction in natural spaces, the latter is loosely related (but only through the former), at best. If we didn't have to house and satisfy (with resources) so many folks, we wouldn't need to have to expand so much into natural spaces.

I feel the opposite way. In my mind raw nature is chaos and unpredictability. It's hard to relax when I'm not at least in medium sized town.

Its a giant gladiator ring with animals killing each other every minute. From our perch at the top of the food chain we can call nature peaceful. I'm not sure a rabbit would feel the same way.

Part of the calm relaxing feeling many of us get being out in nature may be the comfort of knowing that we completely dominate the entire environment.

Contrast with the often hyper competitive social/city environment.

I was going to say the same thing. If being in nature makes some people happy, that's great, but it's not a universal truth.

I feel the same which is why I moved to a mountain village a long time ago. We are thinking of moving to the edge of a rainforest within a year.