Modern life can be pretty great: binge-watching Netflix until our eyeballs bleed, instantly googling anything, anywhere, anytime on a smartphone, refrigeration to keep our food safe for days/weeks/months, hella fun video games with jaw-dropping graphics, flying halfway across the world in half a day, good deals on bulk alcohol at Costco, air conditioning, Star Wars and LOTR and Harry Potter all exist, ordering almost anything online from Amazon and getting two-day shipping with Prime, and abundant free porn...just to name a few examples.
Despite all this awesomeness, sometimes I wish we could just go back to small tribes of 30ish hunter-gatherers. Sure, life back then was dangerous, harsh, and not all that interesting. Modern conveniences make life a lot easier and super rad. But, at the same time, modern life is a lot harder. Our stress levels are through the roof because we have too much to worry about and make way more decisions in a day than hunter-gatherers (hereafter "HGs") did in an entire year. Most significantly, we now deal with existential issues. What is my purpose in life? What is the meaning of life? Do I matter?
While we don't know for sure HGs didn't think about this stuff, I'm willing to bet they weren't suffering existential crises. Their concerns were limited to obtaining food, avoiding getting eaten themselves, avoiding getting screwed by mother nature, having sex to make babies, and maintaining safe places to sleep. Eat, sleep, fuck. As a chronically unemployed, lonely single, and in-between-careers with-no clue-what-to-do-with-my-life person of late, that sounds amazingly simple. It sounds pretty damn good to me, in fact.
Sure, they had a much higher mortality rate, what with all the disease, predators, and uncontrollable natural disasters and change. But, they weren't constantly worried about getting a job or staying employed, the state of the economy, getting stuck in traffic, the other idiot political party winning the election, getting stuck with a bankrupting bill when something unexpectedly breaks down, not having a date for yet another goddamn wedding, not being able to get work done because your computer is being a frozen or buggy dickhole, keeping up with inane style trends, having to get access to HBO again for a new season of "Game of Thrones," choosing the wrong checkout lane at the store, or a billion other things that we stress way too much over, every damn day.
Hunt and gather, eat, have sex, chat, take care of and entertain each other, sleep. Repeat. Damn that sounds nice. I know it's crazy, but sometimes I wish we could abandon all our modern trappings and go back to such simplicity. Yeah, I really need a job and a girlfriend...
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