So they weren’t terrified about what lurked beyond their campfire and could kill them at a moment’s notice? Where an unsuccessful hunt, which definitely happened, could mean you go hungry or eventually starve? Where environmental changes could happen at any point, forcing you to wander hundreds of kilometers in search of new water, food sources?
I really don’t think that our current psyche would be any happier when living in that environment.
It’s pretty simple - lots of resources, happier - no resources, unhappier. We’re living in an era of artificial scarcity. Of course if you currently have to wander the equivalent of hundreds of kilometers in search for new resources (work long hours at shitty jobs) you’re gonna be unhappy. But that doesn’t mean the ancient humans didn’t live in environments where that was the case.
It depends on your situation, and that is pretty much the same. The question is how different the distribution is from earlier to now, that I do not know.
I didn’t say we would’ve been happy, but we certainly wouldn’t have had so much idle time to contemplate our condition (at least not as much) before the development of civilization.
There was, when there were so few humans on this earth, your only goal was to survive as a hunter-gatherer.
So they weren’t terrified about what lurked beyond their campfire and could kill them at a moment’s notice? Where an unsuccessful hunt, which definitely happened, could mean you go hungry or eventually starve? Where environmental changes could happen at any point, forcing you to wander hundreds of kilometers in search of new water, food sources?
I really don’t think that our current psyche would be any happier when living in that environment.
It’s pretty simple - lots of resources, happier - no resources, unhappier. We’re living in an era of artificial scarcity. Of course if you currently have to wander the equivalent of hundreds of kilometers in search for new resources (work long hours at shitty jobs) you’re gonna be unhappy. But that doesn’t mean the ancient humans didn’t live in environments where that was the case.
It depends on your situation, and that is pretty much the same. The question is how different the distribution is from earlier to now, that I do not know.
I didn’t say we would’ve been happy, but we certainly wouldn’t have had so much idle time to contemplate our condition (at least not as much) before the development of civilization.