Living More Like Humans

As mentioned before, we're living in an age of unprecedented prosperity. If we're not quite yet happy, it's a consequence of not having reached the Glorious Transhumanist Future yet, where everyone lives forever, has huge amounts of freedom, resources, and no illness or pain whatsoever. After all, any given time before this one, things have been worse.

Just think of the Middle Ages; farmers toiling away from dusk to dawn, trying to grow something edible, only to die of hunger if crops fail or the neighboring warlord takes it all.

Or the times before then... when we were living in primitive huts in the middle of the African savannah, at the mercy of nature, digging roots out of the earth with sticks, or hunting various kinds of animals, with unsophisticated weaponry, bows and arrows and spears, which... might or might not work, really. In such a world, life was surely more sad than...

... that of our own children, depressed due to not getting enough likes, hating school and its pointless-sounding drills, and sitting home all day, playing Call of Duty with their friends for that sweet 40 minutes that had been allocated for this purpose by their sufficiently thoughtful parents (... or between 3pm and 2am, assuming less thoughtful ones).

Or... are their parents better off? Getting stuck in the traffic jam 1.5 hours each way, every day, only to arrive at the drudgery of their day job, with their boss deriving their enjoyment in life from bullying their subordinates, standing in the cash register for hours, in the depths of a windowless grocery store, smiling at everyone as per corporate policy?

But hey, consider Maslow's pyramid. At least they are not starving or being chased around by lions. And, unlike workers in the 18th century, they have actual nonzero amounts of free time. Progress.

Progress?

Compared to what exactly?

When trying to be at least moderately nice to animals, you generally try to figure out what they're up to in nature, and approximate it with the conditions they're living in. Instead of keeping chickens in tiny cages, you let them roam around and peck at various objects on the ground. Meanwhile, sheep will definitely want to herd together, close to each other; given how this was their defense against predators in the past, they feel better this way.

So... if you were their infinitely powerful alien overlord, how would you keep humans reasonably happy in captivity?

Actually, do we even know how "humans" are supposed to be living like, the way they're actually adapted to?

As it happens, yes, we do; up to the 1950s, tribes of Ju/wa Bushmen were doing pretty much exactly that, in the Kalahari Desert. And, as it happens, we have pretty reasonably good records of how this looked like, before the rest of humanity looted, enslaved and out-regulated them of their original existence.

And in this light... so much makes a lot more sense.

The point here is not even the usual one, "we shouldn't interfere with more primitive people since we're so overpowered that we'll surely exploit them". It's more like... "despite all our power, we somehow mis-domesticated ourselves into something really weird, which we're fairly unhappy about; let's look at examples of what humans are supposed to be like instead".

Not to copy it bit by bit, in cargo-culty ways, but... at the same time, maybe we should still stop drinking Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator and try water instead?

Take the school system, for example. We put immense effort into teaching kids about math and biology and geography; some of them do like it somewhat, but doing homework is still quite an act of willpower, for basically anyone. A whole lot less willpower is required to keep collecting Pokemon cards and play Call of Duty all day. Except...

... consider what hunter-gatherer kids are up to. To begin with, the majority of of their food sources are various plants and roots. Hundreds of kinds of them, actually. Scattered around an area large enough to walk through for days. Yet, Ju/wa people somehow ended up remembering how to find, identify and prepare each kind (imagine digging a foot deep hole to find a small brownish root in brownish soil). Same with animals: they hunted quite a few different types of antelopes, with various behavioral patterns, sneaking up on them, shooting them with poison arrows, and then tracking them for a day more, just based on their tracks, given how slowly the poison works. This is actually hard. And yet... the act of learning does happen, without any kinds of explicit school system having been set up. They play around with hunting and gathering, observing the adults (who are also eager to explain everything).

And yet... what do modern kids do? Collect cards? about kinds of... animals? and play games in which they sneak up on each other, to shoot around various projectiles? as an effortless pastime? This is... very odd.

Consider also "jobs". About which... well, the concept doesn't quite exist among Bushmen. If you're a good hunter, you go on a hunt, which, if successful, will bring a lot of nutritious meat for the tribe; everyone would be pretty happy about this, celebrating success (... not too much though; you'd definitely be mocked copiously if you happen to be bragging about you being better than everyone else. Respect is earned by just... being good instead.)

It's the same with gathering expeditions. A group (always a group; predators do exist, after all) will decide to go for a mission, they'll walk for hours (days sometimes), collect the plants and return. Then, another time, another target. It... resembles World of Warcraft's "collect 40 pumpkins" intro quest more than the average day job.

Also: take our societal structures. Remember those few nights, the cherished memories, together with your friends and family, sitting around a fire, telling stories, playing music? The ones that took weeks of planning so that Aunt Brenda gets her week off and Uncle Glenn's side of the family can also fly in from Missouri? Well... that was, um, life. A group of people, living around a waterhole (the main scarce resource), would camp during the night (because, remember, predators), and... exist. There were also the other camps, a couple days away each; you could just choose to walk over to those instead if you had enough of the people here, if those camps had some of your relatives who could invite you in (which, given how everything worked, they were rather likely to have).

Kids could just roam around the camp freely, too. For the smaller ones, there were adults (and older kids!) to prevent them from doing something stupid. For the older ones... well, as it turns out, kids are a lot more competent if you let them & they have someone to learn from. (Unless... you explicitly prevent them from doing so by separating them into classrooms by age? and banning them from most workplaces?)

Now... was this easy? Definitely not. Probably more satisfying though, with more sense of accomplishment. Because this is what the feeling of "being satisfied" is for. If you're doing all these things, you're doing well, you should feel good about this. (Or, at least, this was true up to until 10k years ago or so.)

I'm also not arguing that we should throw away our rocket engines and go back to hunting antelopes. To begin with, at this point, there are just not enough antelopes for 7 billion people (the population density this old way of living can support is extremely low). Also... shouldn't we be able to build something better, with all this extra power?

It's sometimes as easy as building a space we can hang out in. Third spaces. Or organizing a party. Or building cities with fewer roads and more parks.

Some things will need bigger changes. Yes, kids might gravitate towards collecting things and shooting at stuff... do we know how to generalize this into doing math? Well, we had a successful experiment with chess, after all! Maybe it's less about the actual activity and more about... what you're surrounded with.

The point is though... that it's nice to know how success even looks like. The Polgar sisters all actually enjoyed playing chess, growing up. If you're starting with the mindset of "school has to be necessarily painful to be effective", you have a harder optimization goal: instead of getting practice time for free, you need to spend willpower on it. It might be possible to get far this way... but it's a lot harder.

And we do have examples for how this can look like. This blog post is a little glimpse of what's inside a 400 page book, which itself is just a tiny sliver of context, compared to what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author, got to experience, which still falls short of actually having grown up as a Ju/wa Bushman. (... to be fair, she is in a lot better position to explaining the differences to us though.) And unlike Bushmen, you might happen to have the magic powers to make the actual book appear on your doorstep, by just poking a small box with your fingers, in moderately elaborate patterns.