[QUOTE="m0zart"]
Yeah, but what constitutes a simple life? The hunter/gatherer lifestyle can mean that if there's an overabundance of everything reproducing itself on a continual cycle. That's not the reality of it though.
I think I lead a simple life precisely because so many things are done for me by technology. For instance, you will probably be reading this today rather than next year because of the technology available to me in transmitting it. Even then, assuming that airplanes are still simple enough, you might wait a few days; cars, a week; ships, three to six months; long-distance swimming, a few years, assuming the sharks are friendly.
racer8dan
A simple life to me means a life free from stress and responsibilities.Right, and removing technology from the picture adds a lot of stress and difficulty to what we take today as very simple, non-stressful, and mundane tasks. Removing other responsibilities that come as a natural result of living in a technological society doesn't automatically make life less stressful when those decreasing stress factors in the tech space are offset by increasing stress factors in what are now extremely simple tasks.
Still, if you don't mind having almost permanently limited knowledge of the world, I suppose you can live in blissful ignorance, idolizing the work of just feeding yourself properly. I could never do that though. The worst aspect of Neo-Luddism to me isn't just how it can affect our duties and responsibilities in a negative way, but how it inevitably associates stress and difficulty with the avenues by which we gain knowledge. Many don't realize it does this, but it can't help but do it. I have so much free access to knowledge because of technology, and my life is greatly improved by my ability to peruse this knowledge and broaden my mind. The more primitive your society becomes, the more difficult it is to live life as an intellectual, and this difficulty is exponentially proportional to the decline of tech. Imagine if carving or painting on stone is the only way to transmit knowledge outside of your clan. Imagine slaughtering 600 sheep to make parchment, cutting down several trees or squashing several thousand insects to make ink, and paying someone to meticulously copy words and pictures into a book the exact same way he did so the last time he followed this process. Imagine if getting a personal copy of a book took enough work from third parties to cost one or more years worth of your own labor.
This idolization of that level of simplicity is just misplaced. It isn't just the ability to survive that is at issue here. It's the ability to thrive, gain knowledge, and grow as an individual.
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