I was hiking in Scotland and Iceland over the last two years and either times there was a breaking point when we were in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland some weather forced us to camp near a volcano off-site from the camping zones. In the morning, I got out of our tent and looked across a vast space of grass, rocks and ashes. A creek flowing nearby made the only perceivable noise aside from wind.
You take a look left and right. Breathe. A breeze goes over your face and you hear the deafening silence emanating from nature itself.
It was then when the usual life all felt like a massive distraction from life itself. It was a nice, calming and deep feeling that it's completely enough to just be... hard to convey.
And society is a better alternative than hunting/farming on your own.
Doesn't matter. The sustainable population of farmers is orders is magnitudes higher, to the point that they can push out any hunter-gatherers almost without noticing. I hope that modern life is at least closing on that quality of life, but I don't think it is yet, for most people.
Permaculture practices, "food forests", etc. are a better alternative and take most of their effort in the several year setup process. Once in balance, they are generally self sufficient and can produce significant amounts of edible food.
That's not to say everyone should become a "farmer", but for people in the HN community, it should warrant some study (it's all about systems design and design patterns).
Probably most of the labor of hunter gatherer societies was done by women. The men hunted some, but a bigger responsibility was raiding their neighboring tribes (often for women) and protecting themselves from being raided by their neighbors.
If you look at hunter gatherer societies, many times women are treated as property and there is horrific violence against women.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/worl...
Also a lot of these societies are polygynous with men having multiple wives. So yeah, men work less - but that is because the women do the work for them under threat of violence.
Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:
In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and violence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppression of aggression. From this point of view, values about interpersonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and separated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:
During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of discord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]
You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!
We live longer though. Could we sustain that if we'd be hunters, or as farmers? (in the long-term)
I want to be as productive as possible (when I'm not allotting necessary time for recreational activity, but my social activity is generally at a minimum) because of a driving fear over the future of earth and humanity. I have a deep urge to do as much good as I can in my life for society, because anything else just seems so selfish.
I was gifted with intelligence and determination, and to waste these skills overwhelmingly in personal pursuits when the world is in flames just seems so irresponsible. Anyone could do that. I want to make a difference, and that requires being as efficient and productive as I can.
For one I would like to break into the educational gaming sector. [0]
I've drafted and prototyped a few programs but haven't released anything substantial yet. Productivity and privacy tools mostly. Persona management utilities, a log utility I hope to eventually have distributed with most Linux distros, a (in my opinion) revolutionary social media platform which I'm still keeping quiet about for now.
I've recently finished drafting initial plans for a software suite which would allow you to maintain a private distributed data store and generate hashes which contain unique revocable keys in order to access and/or modify portions of this store. Websites/entities can be given these unique hashes in order to share information like reputation and private information under their own unique namespace, and other entities can be given access to (optionally fuzzed) fields from other namespaces. A Reputation API would provide entities a common way to provide cumulative updates to a person's reputation.
This could power services such as anonymized chat platforms based on reputation, distributed trustless online transactions, and hopefully a viable alternative to Cloudflare and Google reCAPTCHA. I want to work with websites like Reddit to reduce bot spam by implementing it. To move forward I'm just looking for a partner to aid me in technical writing (RFCs and such) and community management so I can start an open source collective around this idea because it's a lot of work.
I spend a lot of time leisure coding as well just for practice, picking up new technologies and stuff.
What about you, working on anything cool?
[0] My first experiment in this vein last year: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1
The most profound effect I noticed myself is learning passages of music on an instrument (note I'm an amateur, and not especially good!) After not too long trying to learn/practise one evening, I will be noticeably better the next day.
I've recently found that reading before going to sleep (while not staying up late reading) opens my mind the next day and I wake up knowing whether I have accepted or rejected a premise of a nonfiction book. It's like I read, don't think about it then, but then as I sleep I make up my mind or have more questions about the things that I read.
It's strange, and I wish I could learn more about this phenomenon.
The Dark Souls series of video games are known to be hard, especially the bosses. Many people, myself included, have experienced being stuck on a boss and after 20 attempts they give up for the night. Next time you start the game up you beat the boss on the first attempt!
It's hard to know if this is because your subconscious mind kept working on the problem, or if new neural pathways were formed to handle the eye-hand coordination, or, as you suggest, you just came back to the problem refreshed.
Being refreshed, and not frustrated and tired, seems like the simplest explanation for this.
The fiction thing is interesting.
Maybe you disagree but not every minute of life should be devoted to doing the most productive thing you can. Sleeping for sleep's sake or because it makes you feel good should be enough reason. I'd rather turn my attention away from all these life-hack, min-maxing ways of thinking and just listen to my body telling me what it wants.