Item — HN Reader

Exactly that - they talked with each other, told stories, passed on oral histories, and created very high quality crafts.

There was labor, but it was not "brutal". Food preparation, tool/clothing repair, etc took up a lot of time but it was not difficult and could be done while socializing.

In the earliest journals of scholars who visited early Native American cultures, the scholars actually complained about being bored due to actual lack of work that needed to be done. Everyone really was just chilling.

2 comments

Which very high quality crafts are you referring to? Every pre-agriculture artifact I've seen looks to have been made by a modern three year old. The only impressive thing I've seen come from pre-agriculture society is agriculture.

Have you ever done long-distance backpacking or similar outdoorsmanship? Even with modern outdoors tech, conditions are often really rough. Pre-agriculture people were even worse off. It was very much brutal. They also had to contend with unchecked disease, malnutrition, and lethal weather.

Does a life of "just chilling" sound tolerable to you? These people had no intellectual pursuits, nothing to strive for. If certain parts of humanity hadn't developed agriculture and eventually industry, humans would just keep rolling around in the dirt and dying at 50 until an asteroid took us out of our misery.

A lot of work today can be done while socializing as well; it isn't really balanced to discount extra non-hunting/gathering work time because it wasn't their primary role.

I think we can all come together behind the idea that being isolated inside in a cube farm for >8 hours a day with minimal social interaction or variety of stimulus is unhealthy.