There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".
I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.
You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.
The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.
If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
Just like almost everyone above... 40 years? 50 years? talk about their childhood with rose tinted glasses on and how nowadays children are spoiled brats.
But if you actually paid attention to what adults were saying when you were a teenager, you would remember more or less the same concepts.
The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.
i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span
It's just that we don't get to enjoy so much time with our kids as we did in the past, that's all. And then we get upset for being thrown into elderly homes.
How much do you remember of being a kid? Teenagers naturally want nothing to do with their parents if you want to have a good relationship with your adult children and you have to reforge it once your kids are past puberty.
>when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far.
10 years of schooling for children is too far. We just adapted to the masochism and forgot how unnatural it is. Then we grow and splurge on therapy and anti-depressants or lose ourselves in addictions and the rat race.
> The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
The quote is from the introduction of a comedy movie from 1980. Not high brow, not literature, before TikTok and tradwife content, before social media, not aiming to feed angst, not meant to be too deep. It’s the setup for 90 minutes of jokes.
Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?
In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.
Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.
Some of the hadza tribe left for school only to return to hunter gatherer lifestyle. Living in poverty on a farm isn't really how we used to live, that was already step 1 of industrialization. We used to live in decently large groups hunting.
The fact that one (1) tribe refuses to live in modern society is such big and shocking news affirms GP's point. Preference for industrialized life is so normal that those who choose otherwise are made newsworthy, just like the news will tell you about any plane crash big or small but never the thousands of flights that landed safely everyday.
>casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".
Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
>Modern life is easy mode.
I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.
Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...
> Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
There were more slaves and serfs 250 years ago than today. It takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are actually a slave when you are not, in fact, being shipped off to a foreign land in shackles just to pick cotton and get whipped because your owner got bored.
I wish your kids the best. Living under parents with this level of delusional paranoia can do some incredible damage to the minds of young people.
So using your perfectly working and well adjusted mind, you can only imagine a single kind of "slavery"?
Would it have helped if I said "bondage" instead of "slavery"? I think so, because you seemed to have latched on to some imagery strongly associated with that word, without trying to understand the point that is being made.
If you have to stretch the meaning of words in order to try to paint the present as comparable to the past, you've already lost the argument.
I'm sorry but an statement like:
>There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains.
Is an obscene display of ignorance. Do you know what dysentery is? Do you have any idea of the immense amount of pain and suffering caused through the ages by famine? Sickness? Have you in your life taken a history course?
You worry about your children, how afraid were you of their mother dying when giving birth? Because that happened constantly.
I mean the word. It's obscene. That people like you can be so utterly detached from the harsh realities of nature is the greatest testament imaginable that by God yes, we do have it easy.
What? we don't have sickness now? Or an ever increasing amount of sickness? We now have kids with diabetes now! Childhood cancer anyone? We don't have Dysentry for kids, but we have diabetes, and cancer for them now. They can now happily live a 100 years in a hospital!
Ok, I agree if that is your hypothetical. But we have t define "if its happening" and what "everyone is more sick" means relative to before microplastics, or whatever your argument is.
I get your point, just disagree that more people are sick now (depending on the definition of sick). If you die, you're not sick anymore.
There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food. And it is not slowing down. We are adding more and more of it..Look up "Regrettable substitution", and that is exactly as hopeless as it sounds...
So regulations are not doing shit.
So given that, and the basic implication that consuming more sickness inducing stuff would make more people sick, why do you need additional proof that people will get more and more sick going forward?
>There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food.
I mean, just no. Unfortunately I don't have a time machine to kick your ass back 300 years ago to a city like London so you get to experience it for yourself.
The claim is twofold, that London, a major capital city, arguably the largest most important city at that time, had little to no functional sewerage, turds floating down the Thames, people drinking cholera straight from the pump, etc.
Which was true at that time.
The second part of the claim is that is no longer the case for London, and somewhat implied is that few other large capitals of the world have such extreme issues now as London has had in the past.
London may have cleaned up, but that'd be a stretch for several large modern cities in India, South America, Indonesia, etc. that are straining their civic infrastructure or applying unevenly.
Globally, in total mass (or other measures) environmental pollution is "worse" now - just largely less visible (pushed from the G20 out to other countries) or dismissed (carbon dioxide is good for plants!! (etc.)).
>Grab a coin right now, try to call the result. If you fail, your child dies before age 10.
And today's reality is that the child would not die, but with a similar chance (may be not right now but in the near future) will have some disease that would make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources...and then child dies anyway....
You think *half of children* are going to have life-ending diseases that will "make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources"???
What's your point? The fact that we still have sickness means things are worse?
What I find fascinating is how people like you, who reference a "pure" and "analog" world, have very "binary" views. Nature is complex, everything is continuous and lives on a spectrum, nothing is binary (not even death). Things can be way better, slightly better, worse etc. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad", everything exists somewhere in between.
But your thinking is so simple and naive, it's a travesty of the nature you appeal to.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.