alt Hacker News> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive.
Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.
> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.
Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!
Replies
> A lot of food was more abundant
That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.
In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.
>pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling
It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.
That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.