One of the things that was pointed out last time this topic came up (only a few weeks ago) is that most all of us who benefit from modern civilization enough so to be commenting about it on HN are enabled by massive amounts of cheap, wage-slave labor from the poorer half of the world.

So while the average 9-to-5 job, smartphone-browsing lifestyle is probably preferable to the brutality of being a hunter-gatherer, if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month under terrible conditions and long hours, then things might change -- I'd personally take my chances out in the wilderness.

Exactly my thoughts, when people say they have a great work life balance at their enterprise IT company, it’s at the cost of some cheap labour outsourced somewhere.

When you buy cheap cloths at Walmart or even at the brands, just have a look at the tag. Your luxury is at the cost of cheap wage slave labour or a child labour in a third world country.

The new trend is 100% US based customer support. These are the very companies which cheaply outsourced customer support to start with.

That cheap labor is exactly what has brought countless people out of extreme poverty in many countries that over the years have had the competitive advantage of cheap labor. This is how Japan and south Korea started. You can see it in process with China and many others.

I'm not sure how taking away what little industry they have by refusing to buy their products helps these countries.

While I find it said that children are working in many countries today, I'm also not glib enough to think that is those jobs are taken away, their parents will just send them to school instead and they'll go on to live a happy life.

Farmers and other poor from China's interior make a different calculus.

Many move to the eastern parts of the country to work in those factories because they are a better alternative to what they have back home.

It's not all that different from kids in Podunk USA moving to bigger cities for better opportunities despite "the rat race" in cities.

If north America and Europe had not essentially outsourced their labor to China and India, we'd have two billion more people living in extreme poverty, burning wood stoves, etc.

Farmers are not the same thing as hunter gatherers though.

That's just not true. It's not how economics/capitalism works. It's possible for both us "over here in the west" to benefit from "cheap labor" elsewhere, and for the people providing the "cheap labor" to benefit as well! It's a win-win in most cases, which is why over the last 40 years more people have moved out of poverty than at any other point in human history.

"if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month under terrible conditions and long hours, then things might change -- I'd personally take my chances out in the wilderness."

Maybe that's true, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to suggest you would simply not be able to live in the same conditions 2 billion people live in and accept (they don't go out to the wilderness). Are you really so different that for you this will be such and impossible situation that you'd throw yourself to the wilderness?

> Are you really so different that for you this will be such and impossible situation that you'd throw yourself to the wilderness?

These garment factory workers don't have the option to become hunter-gather. There probably is nothing to gather or hunt around where they live and the skills to do it are lost. We are comparing two models of society. Are humans in our capitalistic society happier on average than hunter-gatherers of the past?

This misses the whole point of the article, and injects a political agenda into a conversation about how wealth in the west isn't helping happiness.

> In Western society there are always two lies operating at once. The first lie is that technology will save us and fix everything and is the ultimate path, the second lie is that throwing away all of our technology, being as close to nature as possible, blah blah will also save us and fix everything.

I don't think it's unfair to say that I would benefit from one less day of using my computer per week and exchange it for going outside and reading at the park or going on a hike or biking. Or that abstaining from social media but still having access to online content would benefit my brain.

To me, it's not like M&M Peanuts, where I can either have no M&M Peanuts because none exist in the house, or can consume entire bag in one sitting because some are in the cabinet. Instead, I think it's fair to say I should be more open about being discriminating on the technology we use instead of naively accepting every new hot thing as being good for us as long as we have the discipline to moderate.

I know of people who basically lost years of their lives to World of Warcraft, which is entirely why I never ever touched that game with a ten foot pole because I know my susceptibility to those games. It's also why I deleted Facebook/Twitter, because I know I easily get hooked onto news and that hundreds of designers/engineers are working on captivating my brain in the name of ad revenue.

In a sense, I feel like we just all need to be honest about our own limits and acknowledge that technology has a drawback that is not insignificant. Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized.

> I don't think it's unfair to say that I would benefit from one less day of using my computer per week and exchange it for going outside and reading at the park or going on a hike or biking.

The title refers to a completely different lifestyle, not an added day of leisure. It directly contrasts “hunter-gatherers” and “wealthy westerners.” This is not a trivial distinction.

> Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized.

What was his stance on email?

@bcook - thanks for the link.

You might have picked M&M peanuts randomly, but sugar is a big part of the creeping force of civilization, and hard to fathom its impact on you until you take a break from it for several months.

I made a bet to avoid eating or drinking anything with added sugar for a month.

It made me discover how much stuff has added sugar. Things that I would assume would be fine to eat all had added sugar. Most bread was a write off, practically every sauce, and more or less every packaged food contained sugar.

To be honest, the sugar cravings weren't hard to work through, I've never really eaten much sugar, but the sheer amount of food that I wasn't able to eat because of added sugar was staggering.

At least drinking was easy, I could still drink most wines, beers, and spirits.

> how much stuff has added sugar

I depends on what is "edible stuff" to you. Carrots, meat, cabage, fish, etc. have no added sugar in them. Why not simply cook your food, like most people in the world do?

From what I read here and there, Americans have completely lost foot with food, for them having a meal means to take some boxed thing out of the fridge and put it in the microwave owen for 10 mn. This is /not/ a normal meal, it's a lazy way to get one's belly filled. The normal meal for normal people is prepared at home from raw ingredients and some spices.

I'm not an American. But yes, in the end, I did end up cooking all my food, not that I eat that much ready-to-eat food anyway.

The problem is that I ended up having to make practically everything from scratch. I couldn't use pasta sauces, since they all have added sugar. Most bread has added sugar as well, so no bread for me.

That's not bread, that's sliced industrial cake branded as bread sold in wharehouses. Get your bread from a boulangerie and slice it yourself. And yes, buy no "pasta sauce" because it is just industrial pseudo tomato jam with a formula that has 50 "ingredients", just buy tomatoes and cook them slowly with some onions.

The disease burden of mental health is higher in the United States or France than in Somalia or D.R. Congo. There's a huge apparent paradox here - there's almost no correlation between economic development and mental wellbeing. Wartorn countries with no functioning health system have lower rates of suffering due to mental illness than some of the most prosperous countries on earth. Our society is geared around the assumption that development will make us healthier and happier, but that assumption isn't really supported by the data. However you slice it, our model is badly broken.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

To be clear, the only recommendations in the article are long hikes and maybe some arts and crafts.

It's predominantly an anthropological case study.

These are great suggestions.

I work 50 hours a week and still found time for two hikes this week, in the morning before work.

Like the idea of spending more time playing sports, only have time for one jui jitsu class a week.

Are a large percentage of people in our technological society actualized in that way?

Do people that take a 2nd job to put food on the table for their kids see that as progress for the human race?

Would you rather take a 2nd job or run around naked looking for an animal you can kill?

Everyone realizes the progress humanity has made. It is disrespectful to the people taking second jobs to insinuate that they'd be better off living ten thousand years ago. What does that say about how you view their life?

False choice.

The current level of economic struggle in the US is both unacceptable and unnecessary.

I might take the hunt, and or form community with other peers who have had quite enough.

Together, it's not a bad equation.

I lived that kind of way for a time having delivered from the wilderness to food on the plate before age 16.

On the subject of disrespect: characterizing the entirety of the vast diversity and prehistory of hunter-gatherer society as "running around naked looking for an animal to kill."

I didn't insinuate they'd be better off as hunter gatherers, I questioned whether the flowery stuff the other poster said about advancing the human race was something they gave much thought.

When you consider that hunting has been an elite pastime for the entirety of recorded civilisation, I suspect that many people would indeed opt to "run around [in environmentally-appropriate clothing] looking for an animal to kill"