All these people have to worry about is putting food on the table err floor, which means walking in their backyard and retrieving it. No worries of working a low paid job, stressing on how you're going to make your mortgage payment, cell phone bills, insurance, repairing broken down technology, and a host of other stresses that comes with technology along with the responsibilities of being a citizen. Yes alot of things are automated and easier to do, but I don't believe that's what constitutes a "simple" life. Yes, if they want to communicate with others, they may have to make ink and "paper" from scratch, but the difference is, they don't have to communicate or do anything they don't want to do, where as we in the modern world do. To me Life is MUCH More complicated today, than it was even a hundred years ago. (obviously)
racer8dan
That is an extreme simplification of their lives. Feeding themselves is not their only concern. They have many, only most of them are concerned with survival. The absense of food is not the only thing that can threaten life and survival. Having said that, the more primitive your culture is, the more difficult a proposition feeding yourself becomes. Hunter/gathering relies entirely on the proposition that edible food is going to be available somewhere without your human intervention before such harvesting. When that doesn't work out, where does one go?
It's easy to mythologize primitive cultures as simpler and happier. I remember doing it myself for years. Ever since I was a kid and saw "The Gods Must Be Crazy", mesmerized by that opening sequence describing how a society without money, only basic technology, and complete ignorance of the outside world had eclipsed the technological marvels only a few hundred miles away. Then I saw a documentary made shortly after the film was made of what life was really like for the family of the individual who starred in that film. Like me, the documentarian was enamored with the ideas of the film and went out to document them outside of a script. What he found disheartened him. The actor and his family were living in extreme poverty in the Calahari. His wife was close to death from starvation, and he hadn't been able to feed his children in days. The actor put it bluntly that what he had done in the fiml was just what he was told to say, and that nothing of it reflected their lives in the Calahari. It was equally heartbreaking for me to watch it, not just because I hated seeing that level of suffering but because I hated that this fantasy of mine was indeed a fantasy. Thanks to those efforts, some legal avenues were opened so that the actor could get some profits from the film he starred in, and even make more as time went on. His family life improved as a result.
This love of primitivism is a Hollywood fantasy in almost every sense of the word. We have more complexity, but I would not argue that we have more stress, if anything we have much less. And moves back to primitive ideology only increase the stress levels on more fundamental life processes, taking our focus away from intellectual endeavors, forcing us to settle for mythology instead. Yes, we have more complexity, but attached to every one of those bills you touted is something we have come to rely on not because we can't possibly SURVIVE any other way, but because we wouldn't want to LIVE any other way.
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