Cross-posted from "No, it's not 'normal'." by @DougHolland@lemmy.world in !aiop@lemmy.world
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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I beg to differ.
An anthropologist should know about food scarcity. For thousands of years the family unit, tribe or village was under extreme competition from neighboring people and animals for resources.
There is a video from cameras on monkeys. They literally spend their whole day looking for food. Or in other words, every waking hour is spent in the pursuit of sustenance. Pre-tractor man was the same. Without modern capitalist agriculture you would be toiling on the farm tending to sheep, chickens, plowing fields, milking cows and all the myriad of tasks needed to fulfill the food groups you so nonchalantly stuff your face with. It be non-stop work for all the variety you currently take for granted.
The world, with low life-expectancies, was hazardous with no medicines, protections from the weather or modern law. Which i think brings a bit of stress when a festering carbuncle could mean your death. But thanks to innovation, it can now be easily cured by companies who seek monetary reward. I’ll take this normal over the other one.
You're severely underestimating the emiseration that happened under capitalism. Yes, peasant work is hard work. But living standards for the proletariat plummeted during the industrial revolution. Peasants didn't have 14 hour shifts in the factories.
And you conflate technological progress with capitalism.
Also: if your environment can sustain a hunter-gatherer mode of production, you actually have quite a lot of leisure time.
You could have agriculture without modern capitalism.
We have people who treat Eve online optimization like a full time job for example. If their needs were met, I think they’d work happily on optimizing tractor schedules and crop rotation plans
I would probably do my job for free if I didn’t have to think about retirement and keeping my house and filling my belly. I just like what I do and I find it rewarding. The problem is still resource allocation.
No, I don’t think centralizing power and central planning will solve this either, I’m just saying people will be productive even without money.
I would probably start 30 unfinished projects.
I’ve learned that some people hate starting projects but really like taking something that’s already been planned out and working it out to completion.
Made me feel better about getting my pleasure from planning and starting projects then losing interest once things started coming together.
Serfs also had to pay like 2/3 of their produce to their lords. When was the last time, humanity really had to struggle for food (and not because they had to enable a wasteful upper class)? Before we settled down, invented agriculture?
The invention of agriculture didn’t end the struggle for food. Early agriculture was a much harder way of life than hunting and gathering at the time. The first agriculturist peoples were severely malnourished compared to their h-g neighbours. They had a very poor diet of limited variety, and a lot less available meat.
Early agriculturists were also easy pickings for hunter gatherers to raid their food stores and plunder everything. Between the poor soil, poor variety of crops, poor nutrition and low protein, infestations of mould and vermin, and constant attacks by raiders, life for these folks was an extreme struggle.
Looking at that situation, it should be a lot easier to see why agriculturalist societies soon developed militaries and became warlike. And why local lords demanding 2/3 of your produce was a fair trade for having a military that would drive its enemies hundreds of miles away from your farm.
Because that’s the foundation of a civilization? When humanity was able to produce more per farmer than they could eat is when society flourished the most. That allows other people to live off the farmer’s back and do other things. That might sound like they were taking advantage of them, but if Pythagoras and Archimedes and everyone else had to spent their days in the field, we wouldn’t have all that we do now. And I’m sure the farmers didn’t mind when those non-farmers came up with the tractor.
Buddy, I grew up in the south where most of our food came from a vegetable garden and canning. We cut firewood for heat and had water from a spring. I can tell you it absolutely does not take all the waking day to tend to all that.
And did you tap latex trees for the rubber? Did you smelt ore for the metal? Did you buy the glass from a company that was used to can those vegetables or did you refine it yourself?
No. The seeds came from a catalog. The hatchet to chop the wood from a store.
Modern conveyance made it so you wouldn’t have to spend all day tending to survival. Yet the author seems to imply that life is harder now, than in the past.
You're intentionally misunderstanding what's being said to strengthen your own argument. Nothing you mentioned is "modern" convenience by the way.
Life is harder now in some ways. The image posted is true in that under capitalism we're subject to its oppression for minimal actual benefit.
Do you know what pedantic means?
Im smelting some iron now to make my first car.
Makes me a bit less proud to be their descendant. Why couldn’t we descend from the stately raven. Corvids consistently show that they have a lot of free time. Same with parrots.
Dr. Agro doesn't reference ancient history. Her work centers contemporary cultures as well as those historically concurrent with capitalism. E.g. within those few hundred years.
Nobody cares if you beg to differ if your examples are all about farming. Farming was historically a last resort when you couldn’t live off the land by foraging and hunting. It was more common in less fruitful locations. Read some anthropology before you speak on it. Or learn more about modern agriculture and how shitty its returns are for the investment. Which is unsurprising considering modern agriculture is just shoving 3-5 crops in a bunch of places where they don’t want to grow and praying there’s enough nitrogen in the soil this year.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.
Don’t know what to say! Branch out maybe.
Of course you’d rather have an easy moment in time than a hard day. If your air conditioned trip to the market is preceded by ten hours combined time commuting to, from, and performing work then I think you just prefer being inside to out. Because that’s a long day for a hunter and not something they’d do five to seven days a week. For a lot of human history people had so much time on their hands that they would throw random festivals, make giant earthworks, form intricate gift giving rituals to keep up relations with faraway tribes. Not everyone, sure! But enough that you know about all of this.
I’d rather gather berries for forty minutes! Or wade around on Californian shores trapping fish in the silty shallows. Or live in a world where we ate what we grew instead of feeding it to cattle or turning it into ethanol fuel. All of which are ways of life that have been practiced before, and ways of life that are perfectly possible, which begs the question, where on earth does the opposition to doing better come from? You’re not a fuckin monkey.
Why do you think we're bothering with all this instead of "gathering berries for 40 minutes"?
People still throw random festivals, make art and spend time interacting with others. I'd absolutely not rather spend 40 minutes gathering berries than work 40 hours a week if the latter means I have a heated home, modern amenities, a computer, no worries about having enough food, etc.
Those things sometimes not being given even with more work is a fucking problem, especially since it's only to make the rich richer, but gathering some food for yourself does not give you access to all the other things that other people made that you use daily.
This is true, but I think that it might also be true that capitalism has gone a bit overboard lately.
And I live in the EU!
Hey, I dont think using slurs is a good thing and while I usually disagree with you, I am suprised seeing you using one, because I thought you can do better.