That, and protection from mosquitos, basically assures that I'm living a better life.
What I can say quite confidently is that you likely never had to go thirsty because you couldn’t risk drinking the water or contracted cholera, heck you likely never even got a bad case of food poisoning thanks modern sanitary regulation and functional infrastructure.
You never had to worry about if that insect bite laid larva under your skin or if the blistering rash you got on your leg is going to spread and imobalize you.
You live a cushy comfortable and safe life which is afforded to the vast majority of people who live in developed nations.
If you want to go back to huts and other “evolutionary compatible habitats” be my guest there are plenty of places on the planet that are a bad day away from being completely sent back to the Stone Age which you can relocate too, just don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.
...talk about projecting!
You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives.
> - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)
Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media.
*Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich.
- Vastly lower mortality
Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives.
> (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)
Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.
- re variety of food: Americans are among the fattest people in history.
- re richer lives: reading and writing is for the literate. Not guaranteed by agriculture. I might argue that the creation of excess directly contributed to a treatment of education as a precious resource.
Culture and art are not dependent on and predate agriculture.
- re: mortality rate. We don’t die by falling from trees, but we’re also much worse at being in trees. Monkeys are pretty unlikely to die by falling out of a tree. We are worse at operating our own bodies in proportion to our reliance on modern medicine
for all the damage done to ecological systems, now the chances of humans and some of those systems actually surviving beyond the life left in this planet is now some number above zero. that's a good thing imo
- Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)
- Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)
- Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)
The way I look at it, agriculture made things way worse... until we advanced far enough to get way, way better.
And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as economic development progresses.