5.18 Life is tragic  (Page 12/15)

The conclusion reached thus far reveals that most advanced things in life suck, leaving the simple, natural ones natural and true, things like eating and sleeping, do in fact help people and are in fact the only truly enjoyable things there are to do (the simple things that is, like back before modern civilization. This paper argues that all activities humans do in a post hunter-gatherer culture they don’t really enjoy doing, and are deceiving themselves that they like doing it do to societal pressure to conform. 

In the cases where modern society brings peace, that peace is good and you like it, but you only like it more than the alternative, war in a modern society. These wars are enormous and involve systematic organized attacks, in a hunter gatherer society there weren’t anything around the size of today’s nations or even older tribes that formed for organization and cooperation in a war, so there were at most tiny “battles”. That is much, much less scary then having to worry about dozens of people or hundreds forming together to kill you. You basically could be alone and have a chance to defend yourself against any band of humans; the packs they traveled in would be so small, deterring them from attacking any other band of humans, because they were all basically the same size. When a war is fought in large numbers the basic humanity and individuality is taken away, a leader can say, let’s go to war, he says that because he can just hide behind his men in case things go wrong. If he was in say a 10 man pack, he wouldn’t say attack unless it was a life and situation where he HAD to attack, because there wouldn’t be any chance of getting away without horses or cars to escape with. One of the greatest fears of modern society is going to war (the dooms day clock, etc) in prehistoric times you wouldn’t have to worry about that since there weren’t any armies, and the shear brutality of a human to human fight would deter most individualistic competitions. We sometimes think everything sucks, because, sometimes, everything that is happening to you does!

People didn’t evolve for this modern civilization they evolved to live in a hunter-gatherer society. It is very hard to entertain people and get their attention. If you were living under conditions where you had to do stuff, like you had to hunt or you won’t get food and you had to do lots of work just in order to survive, you’d be under constant pressure, and your attention would always be there. You’d certainly always have stuff to do, and that stuff would be entertaining because you’d be giving it your full attention, so it would be fulfilling. Most of our lives is spent in buildings which are extremely boring, I mean what is in a building other than a line of sight of 5 feet or less in each direction! A building is also a hard and cold object but nature is much softer. For some reason I get the feeling that I would be happy just walking around outside without modern civilization to “comfort” me. Test it out, try to imagine how that would feel. It feels much better. The threat of your life being on edge gives you a healthy amount of threat that keeps you on edge and healthy. There is also a lot less to think about so your mind is clear. I don’t think people were supposed to function having to think about 1000 things each day, it takes an emotional toll that people just weren’t designed to handle. If you only dealt with simple things you wouldn’t have a toll on your mind. Of course, it would suck to deal with the bugs and not having a bed, so that really isn’t a good solution either, I was just pointing out that this is a lose lose situation. That’s why life sucks. You have to deal with endless amounts of shit in modern society, and you would have to deal with endless amounts of life threatening shit in pre modern society! But at least the life threatening stuff would be fun and entertaining because your life would be on the line, giving you a healthy amount of anxiety. In today’s world everyone is relaxed and not really interested in anything they do. I can prove that because you could see a glow in someone’s eyes if their life is threatened, unless we are at that level (that glow) then we’re not really entertained. We’re not free at all but burdened by boredom. In pre modern society you’d be free to do what you want, any old time. Now we have the police, government, whatever structure your business or school imposes on you, your family or friends impose on you, etc. If you don’t have commitments and attachments, then you don’t have your emotions being played with and you don’t have anything to lose. The problem with that is that you wouldn’t have any commitments or attachments, so that’s another lose lose situation. Yoda said, “train yourself to let go of anything you fear to lose” that’s good advice, because it's eliminating emotional attachments and clearing your mind, like you would in pre modern society. But you can’t do that in modern society, and in pre modern society you’d be worried about losing your life all the time! Life is just endless loss.