If Meditation would solve any problem you would not need to meditate everyday and change would be permanent.
It gives short relief by pausing chronic unhappiness letting body reset, the same way closing eyes and covering with palms give relief to whole day strained eyes muscles.
Happiness should come with no effort, as seeing.
Pulling to one side, pushing away opposite creates a pendulum swing. We strain tired muscles even more and rest less.
Our body isn't aware if we are dumb or not. It doesn't stop us from things never being problems in nature.
What we are adapted to comes naturally.
But in civilization, we get used to unnatural things and we build tolerance to doing things wrong and thoughtlessly. In the end nothing punishes us for it anymore. We don't rebalance to golden middle, we instead use cheat codes, seeking a magic pill or prostetic. Pain lost it's sense either.
Whole Buddhism was about getting permanently detached, nonexistent, still, non-thinking, non-feeling, blissfully dead.
But if millions meditate all the time then by chance or of bordom some one guy will get things right.
Taoism and Stoicism did too.
Probably rationalism born from "fighting animal nature" was the same process. Accepting actual reality and following what effectively works. Pain is part of gain.
Pain is the gain. Both in building muscles and in building memory. Despite the old and the new religions something can't be born from nothingness.
Science and nature give hints:
We behave the same as gas molecules.
We are stuck in groups in our little containers. Each bordering other in one interconnected system.
When other box weights on our, external pressure forces it to shrink, lowering space. Both should find a point of balance as pressure of gas in our box eventually rises so high it pars external pressure.
Constant addition of external pressure is like that constant straining of muscles, chronic fatigue state, decreasing living space, sense of never ending growth of expectations, breeding anxiety.
You can expand the box volume if you decrease the external pressure, giving each molecule more space.
If it will be constantly growing it will be your state of happiness - long term good positive trajectory ( if expected trajectory fails to continue and everyone acted as if it was sure thing - that's what causes ferment and revolutions).
But it can grow different ways too.
You can add more gas (children?) and as sum of unit movements hitting walls will increase, pressure will increase.
You can also heat up the gas in the box. Existing molecules will move with more energy, faster, hitting walls more often, each energising other.
If it's too much box can blow up or expands.
Simple thermodynamics in a system.
Molecules leaving box create the sense of more space and a fake, because external to individual unit, sense of positive trajectory, as long as it lasts. But it inevitably means less summed pressure in the box and in flexible system results in natural expansion of other boxes with higher internal pressure taking away space.
This meditation thing, to me, seems like cooling down gas in the box. Then molecules move less, each pressures other molecule and the box walls less.
But pressure in box lowers as well..
If walls are strong enough other boxes and their molecules can't expand into our box territory but if are flexible or doesn't exist and our molecules hibernate instead of being enough heathen up... well... pantarei
re: the roof metaphor, let us say that the roof was vital to our existence, and indeed having a strong roof was a big evolutionary advantage. In which case, why would our mind want us to ever feel content/fulfilled/happy with its status? It seems like, evolutionarily, the advantage would be to make us constantly worry about it, monitor it incessantly and vigilantly maintain it to prevent leaks.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I'm not sure that long-term happiness is really in evolution's best interests. I view it more of, evolution sets us up to think that "if we achieve X, we will be happy" and then moves the football when we do (hedonic treadmill). When I feel long-term happy, I feel like it is more of a state that I wrested from evolution/nature.
Sounds like we could use a palisade metaphor here! A roof leak is most often a technical question, but enemies leaking through the palisade of a village are certainly evolutionarily damaging. And yes, it would be in the individual's best interest to ceaselessly and a bit anxiously keep inspecting that palisade.
>>I view it more of, evolution sets us up to think that "if we achieve X, we will be happy" and then moves the football when we do (hedonic treadmill). When I feel long-term happy, I feel like it is more of a state that I wrested from evolution/nature.
I think it lies a lot in it, especially the football metaphor. I'm convinced that it is possible to be long-term happy without being calm and content. But that's mostly because I am. Maybe I'm the one who is an anomaly of nature.
I think there are also degrees of happiness, ranging from a feeling of deep depression to a state of mind bordering on bliss. Evolution might not have programmed most people to come close to a blissful state more than very momentarily. But not being deeply unhappy is also a way of being relatively happy. Depressed people don't see that football moving. They enter a state of lethargy because they have no idea in what direction to move from where they are. I imagine that people who see the football moving somewhere are at least above the state of depression.
Definitely, that metaphor is more what I had in mind.
I think that a lot of the vagueness is, as you pointed out above, around definitions/categorization/measurement of "happiness." I consider myself pretty long-term happy (content) but I can definitely feel my instincts trying to tell me "no, you can't be happy now, you still have to achieve X!" and I have to say "no, really, things are pretty good actually, I can relax."
Hm. Yes, it is related. But if I were to translate a text from English to Swedish containing the word fulfillment, I wouldn't have thought of translating it as "lycka" (long-term happiness). I would have translated it as "tillfredsställelse" ("being at peace", more or less).
It's an interesting topic for sure. One thing I'm not certain of though is that individual happiness is particularly relevant to our evolution. It's poetic to imagine that true inner harmony means following our programming - but its also really possible that our programming explicitly prevents us from feeling lingering happiness. Feeling good and feeling bad are tools that get us to behave in ways that maximise survival and spread of genes. So long as the behaviour is completed - is there any evolutionary utility in a lasting sense of pleasure or absence of pain? Human evolutionary programming actually generates suffering. Its a quest that can never be fulfilled. Enough power can never be gained. Enough security can never be found. Enough social recognition never sates the need.
Yes. That is a very interested question. Obviously, being a human is not an entirely pleasant experience. Not even being a reproductively successful human is: All reproductively successful women go through childbirth. In most cases, that is no pleasant experience.
I think happiness has evolved more or less as a counterweight to the immediate unpleasantness of doing certain things. Childbirth is one of them: The happiness a family generates mostly outweighs the pain and danger of childbirth and pregnancy, which makes also modern women with great access to contraception to do it more than once. Labor in general is another example. Work is obviously not entirely pleasant. That's in the sense of the word. And still, many people actually get happy from working hard day after day, as long as their work gives meaningful results. The long-term happiness such a lifestyle generates makes working people overcome a range of discomforts and nuisances every day.
In summary, I think long-term happiness evolved as a feeling that outweighs bad feelings. A feeling of happiness spurs people to do things that are more or less unpleasant in the moment, because it tells them they are nonetheless on the right track.
I agree that good feelings are often associated with doing things that have evolutionary utility but that might not otherwise feel good. Child care being another obvious example. It's such a high cost activity that it just has to be accompanied by feel-good chemicals to stimulate appropriate parenting behaviours.
I think I trip up a bit at the whole concept of "happiness" and particularly long-term happiness. How would you define the term?
>>I think I trip up a bit at the whole concept of "happiness" and particularly long-term happiness. How would you define the term?
Interesting question. I think long-term happiness is contentment coupled with restlessness. People who are happy with their lives tend to be going somewhere, but without feeling bad with their current circumstances. Maybe one could say that happy people are people who are striving for something, but are fuelled by pull-factors more than push-factors.
I think that (long-term) happiness is the feeling that you are in the process of doing what you specifically were meant to do. That you are contributing your uniqueness to the world.
In this sense it feels very closely related to the concept of self-actualization, as coined by Abraham Maslow (especially the part that it is hard to attain before you have addressed the lower parts of the hierarchy of needs).
If we go with the premise that happiness is an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track, the most interesting question following is, what does it take to be on this "evolutionary correct track"? What were the qualities of primitive societies that contributed to their happiness that we are missing out on today?
These societies were all very different, and they all individually had features that we would probably find horrifying today, but they also had a few defining features that seem to have been pretty universal.
One of those, which is so defining that anthropologists almost use it as the indicator of being hunter-gatherer, was them being fiercely egalitarian, the key element of which was personal autonomy. Simply put, nobody had the power to tell anyone else what to do, and there was a huge social resistance to even trying to. People could cajole, try to convince, even threaten you to do something, but there was no police, no soldiers, nobody to enforce it, you could always just walk away.
In our society, one of the most dreamt about things is to have "fuck-you money". To be able to just walk away if someone asks you to do something you don't want to do. Well, hunter-gatherers had "fuck-you knowledge". If things got too intolerable where they were, there was always the option to just walk away. They may not have wanted to, both for social reasons, and because it would be a lot more work, but if things got too intolerable, they could.
I was reminded of this reading about the recent plane-crash in Columbia, where all the adults died and four native children ended up in the middle of the jungle, all alone for 40 days. The amazing thing was that a single 13-year old girl trailed by a group of toddlers, was able to survive alone in the jungle where even special forces soldiers struggle: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/17/1182715412/colombia-rescue-plane-crash-indigenous-children
I think this is one of the key contributors to the perpetual sense of unhappiness and yearning for something undefined that haunts the civilized world. The fact that we are all forced to follow the command of other people to live. Work is not the issue, even a bird has to work to get something to eat, but having to be told what to do to be able to eat, that is something new.
>>hunter-gatherers had "fuck-you knowledge". If things got too intolerable where they were, there was always the option to just walk away.
I'm not sure I totally agree about that. For example, native Australian men maimed or killed their wives if they ran away, according to Carl Lumholz. The fuck-off power of different individuals, also grown-up individuals, differed a lot.
However, I think you're onto something very important here:
>>The fact that we are all forced to follow the command of other people to live. Work is not the issue, even a bird has to work to get something to eat, but having to be told what to do to be able to eat, that is something new.
Also the most oppressed people in more primitive societies, like oppressed women, had greater autonomy over their work than most people today. They might have been held prisoners by violent, jealous and sexually coercive men. But when they worked, they worked in order to perform certain practical tasks. They mostly did not perform rituals someone else has told them to perform as many (most?) workers are doing today. When they worked, they did things in order to get those things done. I think that gave them a level of agency that surpasses what most formally very free modern people experience eight hours a day, five days a week.
> For example, native Australian men maimed or killed their wives if they ran away, according to Carl Lumholz.
Lumholz was with the aboriginals after they had already been decimated by European diseases and forced to uninhabitable parts of the country by settlers, which probably had already changed their behaviour.
If you look at earlier reports from people who lived with aboriginals, they seem to describe the relationship between the sexes as much more harmonious.
> They might have been held prisoners by violent, jealous and sexually coercive men.
It's hard to see how this would work in a hunter-gatherer society. In practical terms, how would they be held prisoners? There is no way to lock them up, and the men are out hunting most of the day. It is true that individual men could threaten that they would follow them and hunt them down if they would leave, but that seem like a pretty hollow threat with a whole world available around them.
That obviously changes dramatically if they are confined to what is essentially an reservation.
Carl Lumholz studied the Aboriginals of North Queensland in the 1880s. Isn't Queensland one if the more habitable parts of Australia? The native population hadn't been crowded together in reservations, but lived from what they could gather and hunt. Agricultural foods provided by white people were considered luxuries (that women normally weren't allowed to eat, by the way). In general I would like to read more about native Australians, but I find it difficult to find any good sources (except the adventures of William Buckley).
I don't see why it would be very difficult for a man to hunt a fugitive girl or woman down. Especially if she tries to take kids with her. Napoleon Chagnon wrote that when some women take the chance to escape unusually brutal husbands, they always try to escape to villages stronger than their own. Otherwise they will just be brought back with military force.
The Yanomamö were horticulturalists, but with villages widely spaced between (hours to days walking distance). But I wonder: Why would hunter-gatherers be surrounded by empty land? Why wouldn't all habitable land be inhabitated? Humans are an expansive species that tends to fill those habitats there are (except maybe in Africa, with its very high disease load). Wherever hunter-gatherers went, in most cases there would be other hunter-gatherers defending their territory. They might have welcomed a fugitive young woman. But only if she was worth the price of increased raiding from her original population.
A funny example of walking away to resolve conflicts between the sexes:
> An amusing incident occurred within a stone's throw of Fort Chimo. An Indian had his clothes ripped from him by his enraged wife. She then took the tent from the poles, leaving him naked. She took their property to the canoe, which she paddled several miles upstream. He followed along the bank until she relented, whereupon their former relations were resumed, as though nothing had disturbed the harmony of their life. The man was so severely plagued by his comrades that for many days he scarcely showed his head out of the tent. - MoMD - p61
Among the Montagnais, the women produce the clothing, shelter and canoes, so she basically just packed up all her stuff and left him to fend for himself.
William Buckley is an interesting character. One of his recorded adventures was travelling alone through the bush and then running into a young woman who had run away from her clan, and who then stayed with him for a considerable amount of time. That at least seem to indicate that walking away wasn't that unusual an occurrence.
Interesting to read about their marriage customs. Seems like they try to add a cost for doing things that could be disruptive to the society but still makes it possible if you really really want to. Like a girl having to run of with her lover if she wants him and the tribe then forcibly "rescuing" her back, but if she does it again, they will be accepted as married. Or a woman if she wants to be divorced from an abusive husband, having to find another man who wants her enough to be willing to fight for her.
Daniel Quinn writes quite a bit about this concept of Tribal Law, where the purpose is less on punishment but more on how to make things work out and restore harmony in the community.
Have you read any of his books (especially the Ishmael trilogy)?They are some of the only books I've read where you felt they actually changed you and you looked at the world differently after reading them.
As I remember it, William Buckley didn't mention gender oppression at all. He said that the wars were extremely fierce and violent and that women seemed to be the cause of them. He also said, very surprisingly to me, that women participated in the fighting when the men have them a signal to do so. But I don't recall any mention from his side of men oppressing women.
There was a word for a runaway wife in Yanomamö, "shuwahimou" (page 126 of Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö). So it definitely was a thing even there. The only question is how dangerous it was to run away, at different times and in different places.
To preface this, I really liked your post. However, the one thing I will nit pick about is about the role of mindfulness.
> "If, for example, you would build a house, you might not feel confident that the roof will resist rain and snow. The good way to handle such fears is to learn about state-of-the-art roof construction. The bad way to handle such fears is to take a mindfulness class where you learn how to feel confidence in the face of the unknown."
Mindfulness is meant for dealing with uncertainty in situations where you cannot obtain certainty. In your example, mindfulness doesn’t make sense because there’s an easy way to obtain certainty (learn construction). That is not what mindfulness is meant for. In general, this example does not account for situations where it’s impossible to obtain certainty. In those cases, you can prepare all you want, but the fear won’t go away. Mindfulness (and similar practices) are the best option to eliminate the fear when this happens.
However, I will say the whole example is actually a false dichotomy where you either take action or numb yourself with mindfulness. Instead, I view mindfulness and taking action as complementary. If you are dealing with true anxiety, it can prevent you from focusing fully on taking action. By using mindfulness, it helps you let go of this anxiety and allow you to refocus on action. I like how the Stoics take the basic view that you should focus only on your actions and let go of any external anxieties. I believe mindfulness allows you to do this.
Yes. I guess I treated the mindfulness concept a bit roughly. If any housebuilder actually goes to a mindfulness class without reading about construction first, I hope there is someone to tell them to do things in the right order instead.
I think you are on to something crucial here. Happiness being an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track explains a lot. It would explain why there was almost no change for the hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of large-scale agriculture. If people were living in a way that we are evolutionarily fit for, they would probably feel pretty content.
It probably also goes a long way to explaining why we are in a wave of depression right now.
I remember the author Daniel Quinn making a similar point in his books "Ishmael" and "My Ishmael" (amazing books btw);
> "I should warn you that people will tell you that the impression I've given you of tribal peoples is a romanticized one. These people believe that Mother Culture speaks the undoubted truth when she teaches that humans are innately flawed and utterly doomed to misery. They're sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with every tribal way of life, and of course they're correct- if you mean by 'wrong' something _you_ don't like. There are things in every one of the cultures I've mentioned that you would find distasteful or immoral or repugnant. But the fact remains that whenever anthropologists encounter tribal peoples, they encounter people who show no signs of discontent, who do not complain of being miserable or ill-treated, who are not seething with rage, who are not perpetually struggling with depression, anxiety, and alienation."
"The people who imagine that I'm idealizing this life fail to understand that every single extant tribal culture is extant because it has survived for thousands of years, and it has survived for thousands of years because its members are content with it. It may well be that tribal societies occasionally developed in ways that were intolerable to their members, but if so, these societies disappeared, for the very simple reason that people had no compelling reason to support them. There's only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle."
>>Happiness being an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track explains a lot. It would explain why there was almost no change for the hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of large-scale agriculture.
Doesn't that make it even more exciting? Isn't there a chance that a few people who broke loose from traditional lifestyles became ancestors of most of us who use the internet today? Exactly those who weren't too happy with staying where they were probably transmitted some genes to us.
I have read a few accounts of lack of happiness in primitive societies. Especially among women. Napoleon Chagnon wrote that Yanomamö women above the age of 30 in general seem wary of men (who don't desire them very much anymore because they are kind of worn out) and mostly speak in a wailing voice. Karl Heider wrote that among the Dani in Papua New Guinea, the women seem much less lively than the men. They toil about in an even and a bit gloomy atmosphere, while the men are much more expressive and cheerful.
I find it instructive to look at the reports from earliest contact, before the primitive societies got too encroached by civilisation. For example when the Jesuits first encountered the Montagnais:
> "The Jesuit marveled at the ease and good will with which the Montagnais hunters of the Labrador Peninsula lived together, with fifteen to twenty people sharing one lodge. He also remarked upon the good nature that characterized relations between women and men, which he saw as based on the autonomy of decision-making in relation to sexual division of labor. [...] Le Jeune recorded many times his commendations of the people's cooperativeness and unstinting generosity. However, he was shocked by and disapproving of the concomitants: the casual, unfearful attitude toward the gods; the sheer love of living, feasting, talking, singing; the sexual freedom of the women (that of the men the good Jesuit apparently took for granted), and lack of concern for legitimacy of "heirs"; the constant banter and teasing, often intolerably lewd to the missionary's ears, that both women and men indulged in (a practice we recognize today as a means of defining and reinforcing social mores in thoroughly egalitarian societies)." - Myths of Male Dominance - page 223
It seems like when primitive societies encounter civilisation, gender relations is one of the first things that take a hit. This also happened with the Montagnais mentioned above, where she describes how traders only wanting to interact with the males and the missionaries avid disapproval of the freedom of the females, quickly pushed the Montagnais toward patriarchy.
With regards to the Yanomano, they are specifically mentioned as an example of a people studied after they had become encroached by civilization:
> "it must be pointed out that the histories of particular peoples are sometimes ignored in sociobiologically oriented studies of human groups. The Yanoama of Venezuela figure importantly as subjects for sociobiological research on biology and social behavior (Chagnon, this volume). This research has been presented in a widely used film as significant for understanding "primitive man." The Yanamamo have been tagged "the fierce people" (Chagnon 1968). Accounts of male-female relations among them stress brutality towards women (Harris 1975: 399).
However, we should be reminded that the Yanoama are on the borders of the Amazon basin, an area in which the estimated sixteenth-century population of 1,500,000 has been reduced by disease, slave raiding, and warfare to just 75,000. In fact, the geographer, William Smole (1976: 15), suggests that the Yanomamo probably first earned their reputation for fierceness in the eighteenth century when they fought off a Spanish expedition that was supposedly chasing fugitive slaves. Smole himself studied a group living in a more secluded area than that investigated by Chagnon, and more protected from incursions from the outside. He found inter-village relations to be more peaceful and male-female relations more egalitarian (31-32, 70, 75)." - TMoMD - page 299
It is really hard to find modern material that is not either just a rehash of the older stuff, or repackaged as pop-science (think "Sapiens").
I think that is just the nature of the beast. If you want to know how people lived before they got influenced by civilization, you have to read the first-person accounts from those who first encountered them, and since these societies are now all either gone or irrevocably changed by having to exist on the outskirts of civilization, those are all from the past.
Yes. Going back to the sources is both exciting and difficult. Most of all, I find it problematic that anthropologists of the past often focused on other things than those I find important. A lot of older anthropology is focused on rules and belief systems of primitive societies. I'm much more interested in to what degree the people actually followed those rules and not and what they did in practical life in general. That is a difficulty in reading anthropology that I'm trying to overcome, not very successfully.
I think that a good forum for people interested in anthropology could be very helpful. Then people searching a certain kind of information about the past could share their advice with each other. There is so much information out there, but each of us only has some scraps of it. Unfortunately I don't know of any such well-functioning anthropology forum.
That's a surprise to me! I also thought it was very interesting and was disappointed to find Avi had no blog, but I figured by the title of his second source you'd already read it and dismissed it.
I only thought of the Montagnais. I only heard about the Jesuits' accounts of them from Avi. I have to admit I know about Marvin Harris but haven't had any plans to read anything by him. My level of text tolerance is rather low, so I focus on the books I hope are the most information-heavy. In anthropology that tends to be books written by people who worked at the field and made first-hand observations.
I'm not convinced. In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years? They had to be ruthless about growing up and begetting offspring to become our ancestors. That ruthlessness involved frequent violence. My assumption has been that to be happy today we need to live in a culture with the right ingredients, such as moral injunctions (like the golden rule, defering gratification) and constraints on the evolution-derived impulses for sex and power. How those cultural ingredients arose is another, doubtless complex question. In more "successful" cultures those ingredients (I posit) are more or less binding on most of its members, for reasons that one can debate, and the general level of happiness is higher. I like the simplicity of the Buddhist moral injunctions, though similar ones exist in many cultures: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't engage in sexual misconduct, and don't take drugs that lead to carelessness. Those injunctions may have existed in hunter-gatherer bands, but surely in weak form, and in some (many?) circumstances they were rejected as positively counterproductive (vide the Yanomamo and many others).
> In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years?
No, that's a common misconception. Under ordinary conditions people commonly survive past 60, though infant mortality is high. And while violence was evidently far more common than today - we don't even kill each other in duels, lately - I doubt violence was an everyday occurrence.
Do you have any sources on human longevity during the stone age? Presumably we have enough skeletal remains. As to violence, there's been considerable documentation on the scale of violence among stone age people and from hunter gatherer tribes more recently. I've seen the figures as high as 30% for the chance of dying from homicide. Stephen Pinker has also documented that the proportion of humans dying violent deaths has been falling for millenia in "Better Angels of our Nature". Also see Tove's comment above on the high mortality rates among the Yanomamo. With high rates of violence, accidents and disease, it seems likely that a lifespan of "past 60" would be the exception, not the norm.
You can see Ageing: The Biology of Senescence, 1964 for historical survival curves. But nothing you wrote is inconsistent with what I wrote. An average life expectancy of 30 doesn't mean our ancestors usually lived about that long over the last 10,000 years. Remember, what you first wrote was:
> In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years? They had to be ruthless about growing up and begetting offspring to become our ancestors.
But the reason the average lifespan without medicine is low is primarily infant mortality - even with the possibility of dying a violent death at some point in your life, if you made it past infancy, you'd commonly see the end of your natural reproductive years.
I think Aché Life History of Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado is good. It is only about one single population of hunter-gatherers, but the study was done very meticulously.
Looks like about 35 percent of females and 25 percent of males lived at 60 (I'm trying to read a small graph, so there is a substantial margin of error here).
Female survivorship exceeded male survivorship only at age 50, due to a high rate of female child murder (not infantice, but murer of children aged 2 to 10).
Wikipedia writes: Major causes of death in the forest period were in-group homicides (especially of infants and children), external warfare, respiratory disease, tropical fevers, and accidents. Over 40% of all adult deaths, and more than 60% of all child deaths, were due to violence by other Aché or by outsiders. In the forest period, about 65% of all children born survived to adulthood (age 15), and life expectancy for those young adults was an additional 40 years on average.[2] 14% of males and 23% of females under the age of 10 were killed, with the victims predominantly being orphans; infants orphaned within the first year of life were always killed.[34]
I'm not sure that actually making war was the most successful evolutionary strategy. Being on the winning side but not on the frontline seems like a great concept too. Especially for women, but also for men. A lot like Westerners today.
Still, I think that genes that thrived under the comparatively peaceful last millennia have been unevenly distributed. I once knew a young man who was anxious and unenergetic at working, but lived up when he got the opportunity to fight. As a teenager, he chose a political ideology that justified raw fighting. Later he got a bit wiser and got into martial sports. I couldn't help speculating that he had gotten too many fighter genes to fit into modern society. Some people just are unlucky when it comes to the genes they have and the environment in which they end up.
I think that the golden rule and such principles increases average happiness. After all, där from all people in the time of our ancestors were happy. Losers had every reason not to be. I think the practical challenge is to emulate our ancestors in as harmless ways as possible. Sports is such a method: Many people, especially males, still have an instinct to compete and fight. Society has invented rather (although not totally) harmless ways for them to do that. Many adaptations to the ancestral mind need to be compromises of that kind.
I think that confidence is one of the things we ought to be pursuing for its own sake. Indeed, I think that one of the problems which we are now facing in the west is that, in a catastrophic case of mistaking co-relation for cause, we decided that _self-esteem_ was the thing we needed to pursue. We have ended up with a lot of people who have way too much self-esteem. An unsustainable amount, especially given that they have done nothing particularly special in the first place -- as is to be expected among the young.
But they end up in a state where they cannot handle being told 'Your work is mediocre. You could do a whole lot better'. Any amount of criticism sends them to the mental health unit. And it becomes rather difficult for them to find something that they care enough about that doing it lets them lift themselves out of themselves. They are stuck -- the focus of their lives is their own selves, and their own self esteem. But what are you supposed to do when you have too much self-esteem? Do people speaking languages which don't have the word 'lagom' even get to think that way?
Confidence is something else, and something that you can cultivate. Learning about state of the art roof construction is all well and good, but you may not be certain that you have understood what you tried to learn. This can produce anxiety and stress, and if you decide to read another book, another 10 books, all the while fretting about roof construction you may never get your house improved.
At some point you need the confidence in yourself to be able to say -- right. Enough research. I think I have learned enough to do this job. I might be wrong. I may make plenty of mistakes as I try this new thing. But. You know what? If I make them I will deal with them as they happen. I have enough confidence in me to get on with doing the job.
So many, many people never get there. When I was learning how to bake bread, several people said that they could never do this because they expected that their first few times would produce inedible or barely edible results. I agreed. My first week went like that. But they said that they would find the failure in some sense 'crushing to the spirit'. They don't want to try because they cannot handle failure.
We need people who are confident enough that they can fail, pick themselves up, and get on with it. Not trapped in a life they cannot improve because they cannot fail at improving.
> we decided that _self-esteem_ was the thing we needed to pursue.
But I wonder how much of modern attempts to bolster self-esteem really did produce self-esteem at the expense of confidence. I absolutely do agree that moderners are fragile and Narcissistic, but is it because we told our children to value their self-esteem, or was it for some other reason that this occurred?
For instance, bullying and social ostracism seemed to work much more strongly in bygone decades; might that have produced people who were more conformist, but also more resilient? Alternatively, it seems an effort has been made throughout school to improve safety, reduce competition, broaden the list of exemptions for disabilities, and lighten punishment. This may have made things much better for the vulnerable, while teaching everyone else that ineffectuality and tears will earn support rather than scorn.
I'm not specifically saying "getting rid of bullies was the problem" or "Trying to help out people with special needs was the problem." But wouldn't people who said things like "I'm afraid to make bread because it might crush my spirit" have once been bullied by their peers and punished by their teachers until they earned to toughen up? Such people do seem pathetic today, but ooh - don't look askance at them when they say it!
I think "adequate" is the correct translation. Swedish has two words for adequate: "Lagom" and "lämplig". In general, "lagom" is used for roughly quantitative issues and "lämplig" for roughly qualitative issues.
I think you have a very good point. Some people are more confident than others, for inexplicable reasons. As I have been building things through the years, I have developed a principle: First, I make a smaller building utilizing a series of construction methods, and only after that I make that big building I wanted. That way, I hope to make most mistakes on the smaller, less important building. I also hope to be one more efficient the second time I do something.
When I read what you write, I realize that some people wouldn't have felt reassured by that method. They would instead have felt so discouraged by their mistakes that they would only have made a small building, or no building at all. It could be that those of us who can read a few books, practice a little and then feel confident doing one thing or another are not completely representative for the human race as a whole.
I think the word in English that gets closest to this is "contentment"? Its not quite correct, but people usually use contentment to refer to a long-term state-of-being. In comparison, "being content" is slightly negatively tinged, as it implies a cessation of the striving to make something better than it currently is.
If Meditation would solve any problem you would not need to meditate everyday and change would be permanent.
It gives short relief by pausing chronic unhappiness letting body reset, the same way closing eyes and covering with palms give relief to whole day strained eyes muscles.
Happiness should come with no effort, as seeing.
Pulling to one side, pushing away opposite creates a pendulum swing. We strain tired muscles even more and rest less.
Our body isn't aware if we are dumb or not. It doesn't stop us from things never being problems in nature.
What we are adapted to comes naturally.
But in civilization, we get used to unnatural things and we build tolerance to doing things wrong and thoughtlessly. In the end nothing punishes us for it anymore. We don't rebalance to golden middle, we instead use cheat codes, seeking a magic pill or prostetic. Pain lost it's sense either.
Whole Buddhism was about getting permanently detached, nonexistent, still, non-thinking, non-feeling, blissfully dead.
But if millions meditate all the time then by chance or of bordom some one guy will get things right.
Taoism and Stoicism did too.
Probably rationalism born from "fighting animal nature" was the same process. Accepting actual reality and following what effectively works. Pain is part of gain.
Pain is the gain. Both in building muscles and in building memory. Despite the old and the new religions something can't be born from nothingness.
Science and nature give hints:
We behave the same as gas molecules.
We are stuck in groups in our little containers. Each bordering other in one interconnected system.
When other box weights on our, external pressure forces it to shrink, lowering space. Both should find a point of balance as pressure of gas in our box eventually rises so high it pars external pressure.
Constant addition of external pressure is like that constant straining of muscles, chronic fatigue state, decreasing living space, sense of never ending growth of expectations, breeding anxiety.
You can expand the box volume if you decrease the external pressure, giving each molecule more space.
If it will be constantly growing it will be your state of happiness - long term good positive trajectory ( if expected trajectory fails to continue and everyone acted as if it was sure thing - that's what causes ferment and revolutions).
But it can grow different ways too.
You can add more gas (children?) and as sum of unit movements hitting walls will increase, pressure will increase.
You can also heat up the gas in the box. Existing molecules will move with more energy, faster, hitting walls more often, each energising other.
If it's too much box can blow up or expands.
Simple thermodynamics in a system.
Molecules leaving box create the sense of more space and a fake, because external to individual unit, sense of positive trajectory, as long as it lasts. But it inevitably means less summed pressure in the box and in flexible system results in natural expansion of other boxes with higher internal pressure taking away space.
This meditation thing, to me, seems like cooling down gas in the box. Then molecules move less, each pressures other molecule and the box walls less.
But pressure in box lowers as well..
If walls are strong enough other boxes and their molecules can't expand into our box territory but if are flexible or doesn't exist and our molecules hibernate instead of being enough heathen up... well... pantarei
re: the roof metaphor, let us say that the roof was vital to our existence, and indeed having a strong roof was a big evolutionary advantage. In which case, why would our mind want us to ever feel content/fulfilled/happy with its status? It seems like, evolutionarily, the advantage would be to make us constantly worry about it, monitor it incessantly and vigilantly maintain it to prevent leaks.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I'm not sure that long-term happiness is really in evolution's best interests. I view it more of, evolution sets us up to think that "if we achieve X, we will be happy" and then moves the football when we do (hedonic treadmill). When I feel long-term happy, I feel like it is more of a state that I wrested from evolution/nature.
Sounds like we could use a palisade metaphor here! A roof leak is most often a technical question, but enemies leaking through the palisade of a village are certainly evolutionarily damaging. And yes, it would be in the individual's best interest to ceaselessly and a bit anxiously keep inspecting that palisade.
>>I view it more of, evolution sets us up to think that "if we achieve X, we will be happy" and then moves the football when we do (hedonic treadmill). When I feel long-term happy, I feel like it is more of a state that I wrested from evolution/nature.
I think it lies a lot in it, especially the football metaphor. I'm convinced that it is possible to be long-term happy without being calm and content. But that's mostly because I am. Maybe I'm the one who is an anomaly of nature.
I think there are also degrees of happiness, ranging from a feeling of deep depression to a state of mind bordering on bliss. Evolution might not have programmed most people to come close to a blissful state more than very momentarily. But not being deeply unhappy is also a way of being relatively happy. Depressed people don't see that football moving. They enter a state of lethargy because they have no idea in what direction to move from where they are. I imagine that people who see the football moving somewhere are at least above the state of depression.
Definitely, that metaphor is more what I had in mind.
I think that a lot of the vagueness is, as you pointed out above, around definitions/categorization/measurement of "happiness." I consider myself pretty long-term happy (content) but I can definitely feel my instincts trying to tell me "no, you can't be happy now, you still have to achieve X!" and I have to say "no, really, things are pretty good actually, I can relax."
As a non native English speaker, I always thought the closest English term for long-term happiness was fulfillment
Hm. Yes, it is related. But if I were to translate a text from English to Swedish containing the word fulfillment, I wouldn't have thought of translating it as "lycka" (long-term happiness). I would have translated it as "tillfredsställelse" ("being at peace", more or less).
It's an interesting topic for sure. One thing I'm not certain of though is that individual happiness is particularly relevant to our evolution. It's poetic to imagine that true inner harmony means following our programming - but its also really possible that our programming explicitly prevents us from feeling lingering happiness. Feeling good and feeling bad are tools that get us to behave in ways that maximise survival and spread of genes. So long as the behaviour is completed - is there any evolutionary utility in a lasting sense of pleasure or absence of pain? Human evolutionary programming actually generates suffering. Its a quest that can never be fulfilled. Enough power can never be gained. Enough security can never be found. Enough social recognition never sates the need.
Yes. That is a very interested question. Obviously, being a human is not an entirely pleasant experience. Not even being a reproductively successful human is: All reproductively successful women go through childbirth. In most cases, that is no pleasant experience.
I think happiness has evolved more or less as a counterweight to the immediate unpleasantness of doing certain things. Childbirth is one of them: The happiness a family generates mostly outweighs the pain and danger of childbirth and pregnancy, which makes also modern women with great access to contraception to do it more than once. Labor in general is another example. Work is obviously not entirely pleasant. That's in the sense of the word. And still, many people actually get happy from working hard day after day, as long as their work gives meaningful results. The long-term happiness such a lifestyle generates makes working people overcome a range of discomforts and nuisances every day.
In summary, I think long-term happiness evolved as a feeling that outweighs bad feelings. A feeling of happiness spurs people to do things that are more or less unpleasant in the moment, because it tells them they are nonetheless on the right track.
I agree that good feelings are often associated with doing things that have evolutionary utility but that might not otherwise feel good. Child care being another obvious example. It's such a high cost activity that it just has to be accompanied by feel-good chemicals to stimulate appropriate parenting behaviours.
I think I trip up a bit at the whole concept of "happiness" and particularly long-term happiness. How would you define the term?
>>I think I trip up a bit at the whole concept of "happiness" and particularly long-term happiness. How would you define the term?
Interesting question. I think long-term happiness is contentment coupled with restlessness. People who are happy with their lives tend to be going somewhere, but without feeling bad with their current circumstances. Maybe one could say that happy people are people who are striving for something, but are fuelled by pull-factors more than push-factors.
I think that (long-term) happiness is the feeling that you are in the process of doing what you specifically were meant to do. That you are contributing your uniqueness to the world.
In this sense it feels very closely related to the concept of self-actualization, as coined by Abraham Maslow (especially the part that it is hard to attain before you have addressed the lower parts of the hierarchy of needs).
If we go with the premise that happiness is an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track, the most interesting question following is, what does it take to be on this "evolutionary correct track"? What were the qualities of primitive societies that contributed to their happiness that we are missing out on today?
These societies were all very different, and they all individually had features that we would probably find horrifying today, but they also had a few defining features that seem to have been pretty universal.
One of those, which is so defining that anthropologists almost use it as the indicator of being hunter-gatherer, was them being fiercely egalitarian, the key element of which was personal autonomy. Simply put, nobody had the power to tell anyone else what to do, and there was a huge social resistance to even trying to. People could cajole, try to convince, even threaten you to do something, but there was no police, no soldiers, nobody to enforce it, you could always just walk away.
In our society, one of the most dreamt about things is to have "fuck-you money". To be able to just walk away if someone asks you to do something you don't want to do. Well, hunter-gatherers had "fuck-you knowledge". If things got too intolerable where they were, there was always the option to just walk away. They may not have wanted to, both for social reasons, and because it would be a lot more work, but if things got too intolerable, they could.
I was reminded of this reading about the recent plane-crash in Columbia, where all the adults died and four native children ended up in the middle of the jungle, all alone for 40 days. The amazing thing was that a single 13-year old girl trailed by a group of toddlers, was able to survive alone in the jungle where even special forces soldiers struggle: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/17/1182715412/colombia-rescue-plane-crash-indigenous-children
I think this is one of the key contributors to the perpetual sense of unhappiness and yearning for something undefined that haunts the civilized world. The fact that we are all forced to follow the command of other people to live. Work is not the issue, even a bird has to work to get something to eat, but having to be told what to do to be able to eat, that is something new.
>>hunter-gatherers had "fuck-you knowledge". If things got too intolerable where they were, there was always the option to just walk away.
I'm not sure I totally agree about that. For example, native Australian men maimed or killed their wives if they ran away, according to Carl Lumholz. The fuck-off power of different individuals, also grown-up individuals, differed a lot.
However, I think you're onto something very important here:
>>The fact that we are all forced to follow the command of other people to live. Work is not the issue, even a bird has to work to get something to eat, but having to be told what to do to be able to eat, that is something new.
Also the most oppressed people in more primitive societies, like oppressed women, had greater autonomy over their work than most people today. They might have been held prisoners by violent, jealous and sexually coercive men. But when they worked, they worked in order to perform certain practical tasks. They mostly did not perform rituals someone else has told them to perform as many (most?) workers are doing today. When they worked, they did things in order to get those things done. I think that gave them a level of agency that surpasses what most formally very free modern people experience eight hours a day, five days a week.
> For example, native Australian men maimed or killed their wives if they ran away, according to Carl Lumholz.
Lumholz was with the aboriginals after they had already been decimated by European diseases and forced to uninhabitable parts of the country by settlers, which probably had already changed their behaviour.
If you look at earlier reports from people who lived with aboriginals, they seem to describe the relationship between the sexes as much more harmonious.
One book that covers this is "Living with the Locals: Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life". There is a short interview with the authors here, where they specifically mentions the good relationship between the sexes (at 06:00): https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/speakingout/living-with-the-locals/8281412
> They might have been held prisoners by violent, jealous and sexually coercive men.
It's hard to see how this would work in a hunter-gatherer society. In practical terms, how would they be held prisoners? There is no way to lock them up, and the men are out hunting most of the day. It is true that individual men could threaten that they would follow them and hunt them down if they would leave, but that seem like a pretty hollow threat with a whole world available around them.
That obviously changes dramatically if they are confined to what is essentially an reservation.
Carl Lumholz studied the Aboriginals of North Queensland in the 1880s. Isn't Queensland one if the more habitable parts of Australia? The native population hadn't been crowded together in reservations, but lived from what they could gather and hunt. Agricultural foods provided by white people were considered luxuries (that women normally weren't allowed to eat, by the way). In general I would like to read more about native Australians, but I find it difficult to find any good sources (except the adventures of William Buckley).
I don't see why it would be very difficult for a man to hunt a fugitive girl or woman down. Especially if she tries to take kids with her. Napoleon Chagnon wrote that when some women take the chance to escape unusually brutal husbands, they always try to escape to villages stronger than their own. Otherwise they will just be brought back with military force.
The Yanomamö were horticulturalists, but with villages widely spaced between (hours to days walking distance). But I wonder: Why would hunter-gatherers be surrounded by empty land? Why wouldn't all habitable land be inhabitated? Humans are an expansive species that tends to fill those habitats there are (except maybe in Africa, with its very high disease load). Wherever hunter-gatherers went, in most cases there would be other hunter-gatherers defending their territory. They might have welcomed a fugitive young woman. But only if she was worth the price of increased raiding from her original population.
A funny example of walking away to resolve conflicts between the sexes:
> An amusing incident occurred within a stone's throw of Fort Chimo. An Indian had his clothes ripped from him by his enraged wife. She then took the tent from the poles, leaving him naked. She took their property to the canoe, which she paddled several miles upstream. He followed along the bank until she relented, whereupon their former relations were resumed, as though nothing had disturbed the harmony of their life. The man was so severely plagued by his comrades that for many days he scarcely showed his head out of the tent. - MoMD - p61
Among the Montagnais, the women produce the clothing, shelter and canoes, so she basically just packed up all her stuff and left him to fend for himself.
William Buckley is an interesting character. One of his recorded adventures was travelling alone through the bush and then running into a young woman who had run away from her clan, and who then stayed with him for a considerable amount of time. That at least seem to indicate that walking away wasn't that unusual an occurrence.
I found a new old source about Australian Aborigines while looking through the references of the William Buckley Wikipedia page! https://archive.org/details/australianaborig81daws
Interesting to read about their marriage customs. Seems like they try to add a cost for doing things that could be disruptive to the society but still makes it possible if you really really want to. Like a girl having to run of with her lover if she wants him and the tribe then forcibly "rescuing" her back, but if she does it again, they will be accepted as married. Or a woman if she wants to be divorced from an abusive husband, having to find another man who wants her enough to be willing to fight for her.
Daniel Quinn writes quite a bit about this concept of Tribal Law, where the purpose is less on punishment but more on how to make things work out and restore harmony in the community.
Have you read any of his books (especially the Ishmael trilogy)?They are some of the only books I've read where you felt they actually changed you and you looked at the world differently after reading them.
As I remember it, William Buckley didn't mention gender oppression at all. He said that the wars were extremely fierce and violent and that women seemed to be the cause of them. He also said, very surprisingly to me, that women participated in the fighting when the men have them a signal to do so. But I don't recall any mention from his side of men oppressing women.
There was a word for a runaway wife in Yanomamö, "shuwahimou" (page 126 of Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö). So it definitely was a thing even there. The only question is how dangerous it was to run away, at different times and in different places.
To preface this, I really liked your post. However, the one thing I will nit pick about is about the role of mindfulness.
> "If, for example, you would build a house, you might not feel confident that the roof will resist rain and snow. The good way to handle such fears is to learn about state-of-the-art roof construction. The bad way to handle such fears is to take a mindfulness class where you learn how to feel confidence in the face of the unknown."
Mindfulness is meant for dealing with uncertainty in situations where you cannot obtain certainty. In your example, mindfulness doesn’t make sense because there’s an easy way to obtain certainty (learn construction). That is not what mindfulness is meant for. In general, this example does not account for situations where it’s impossible to obtain certainty. In those cases, you can prepare all you want, but the fear won’t go away. Mindfulness (and similar practices) are the best option to eliminate the fear when this happens.
However, I will say the whole example is actually a false dichotomy where you either take action or numb yourself with mindfulness. Instead, I view mindfulness and taking action as complementary. If you are dealing with true anxiety, it can prevent you from focusing fully on taking action. By using mindfulness, it helps you let go of this anxiety and allow you to refocus on action. I like how the Stoics take the basic view that you should focus only on your actions and let go of any external anxieties. I believe mindfulness allows you to do this.
Yes. I guess I treated the mindfulness concept a bit roughly. If any housebuilder actually goes to a mindfulness class without reading about construction first, I hope there is someone to tell them to do things in the right order instead.
I think you are on to something crucial here. Happiness being an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track explains a lot. It would explain why there was almost no change for the hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of large-scale agriculture. If people were living in a way that we are evolutionarily fit for, they would probably feel pretty content.
It probably also goes a long way to explaining why we are in a wave of depression right now.
I remember the author Daniel Quinn making a similar point in his books "Ishmael" and "My Ishmael" (amazing books btw);
> "I should warn you that people will tell you that the impression I've given you of tribal peoples is a romanticized one. These people believe that Mother Culture speaks the undoubted truth when she teaches that humans are innately flawed and utterly doomed to misery. They're sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with every tribal way of life, and of course they're correct- if you mean by 'wrong' something _you_ don't like. There are things in every one of the cultures I've mentioned that you would find distasteful or immoral or repugnant. But the fact remains that whenever anthropologists encounter tribal peoples, they encounter people who show no signs of discontent, who do not complain of being miserable or ill-treated, who are not seething with rage, who are not perpetually struggling with depression, anxiety, and alienation."
"The people who imagine that I'm idealizing this life fail to understand that every single extant tribal culture is extant because it has survived for thousands of years, and it has survived for thousands of years because its members are content with it. It may well be that tribal societies occasionally developed in ways that were intolerable to their members, but if so, these societies disappeared, for the very simple reason that people had no compelling reason to support them. There's only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle."
"Yeah," I said. "You have to lock up the food."
My Ishmael - page 95
>>Happiness being an evolutionary signal that you are on the right track explains a lot. It would explain why there was almost no change for the hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of large-scale agriculture.
Doesn't that make it even more exciting? Isn't there a chance that a few people who broke loose from traditional lifestyles became ancestors of most of us who use the internet today? Exactly those who weren't too happy with staying where they were probably transmitted some genes to us.
I have read a few accounts of lack of happiness in primitive societies. Especially among women. Napoleon Chagnon wrote that Yanomamö women above the age of 30 in general seem wary of men (who don't desire them very much anymore because they are kind of worn out) and mostly speak in a wailing voice. Karl Heider wrote that among the Dani in Papua New Guinea, the women seem much less lively than the men. They toil about in an even and a bit gloomy atmosphere, while the men are much more expressive and cheerful.
I find it instructive to look at the reports from earliest contact, before the primitive societies got too encroached by civilisation. For example when the Jesuits first encountered the Montagnais:
> "The Jesuit marveled at the ease and good will with which the Montagnais hunters of the Labrador Peninsula lived together, with fifteen to twenty people sharing one lodge. He also remarked upon the good nature that characterized relations between women and men, which he saw as based on the autonomy of decision-making in relation to sexual division of labor. [...] Le Jeune recorded many times his commendations of the people's cooperativeness and unstinting generosity. However, he was shocked by and disapproving of the concomitants: the casual, unfearful attitude toward the gods; the sheer love of living, feasting, talking, singing; the sexual freedom of the women (that of the men the good Jesuit apparently took for granted), and lack of concern for legitimacy of "heirs"; the constant banter and teasing, often intolerably lewd to the missionary's ears, that both women and men indulged in (a practice we recognize today as a means of defining and reinforcing social mores in thoroughly egalitarian societies)." - Myths of Male Dominance - page 223
It seems like when primitive societies encounter civilisation, gender relations is one of the first things that take a hit. This also happened with the Montagnais mentioned above, where she describes how traders only wanting to interact with the males and the missionaries avid disapproval of the freedom of the females, quickly pushed the Montagnais toward patriarchy.
With regards to the Yanomano, they are specifically mentioned as an example of a people studied after they had become encroached by civilization:
> "it must be pointed out that the histories of particular peoples are sometimes ignored in sociobiologically oriented studies of human groups. The Yanoama of Venezuela figure importantly as subjects for sociobiological research on biology and social behavior (Chagnon, this volume). This research has been presented in a widely used film as significant for understanding "primitive man." The Yanamamo have been tagged "the fierce people" (Chagnon 1968). Accounts of male-female relations among them stress brutality towards women (Harris 1975: 399).
However, we should be reminded that the Yanoama are on the borders of the Amazon basin, an area in which the estimated sixteenth-century population of 1,500,000 has been reduced by disease, slave raiding, and warfare to just 75,000. In fact, the geographer, William Smole (1976: 15), suggests that the Yanomamo probably first earned their reputation for fierceness in the eighteenth century when they fought off a Spanish expedition that was supposedly chasing fugitive slaves. Smole himself studied a group living in a more secluded area than that investigated by Chagnon, and more protected from incursions from the outside. He found inter-village relations to be more peaceful and male-female relations more egalitarian (31-32, 70, 75)." - TMoMD - page 299
Thanks for posting all of this. You wouldn't happen to have any more modern sources, or statistical material, would you?
It is really hard to find modern material that is not either just a rehash of the older stuff, or repackaged as pop-science (think "Sapiens").
I think that is just the nature of the beast. If you want to know how people lived before they got influenced by civilization, you have to read the first-person accounts from those who first encountered them, and since these societies are now all either gone or irrevocably changed by having to exist on the outskirts of civilization, those are all from the past.
Yes. Going back to the sources is both exciting and difficult. Most of all, I find it problematic that anthropologists of the past often focused on other things than those I find important. A lot of older anthropology is focused on rules and belief systems of primitive societies. I'm much more interested in to what degree the people actually followed those rules and not and what they did in practical life in general. That is a difficulty in reading anthropology that I'm trying to overcome, not very successfully.
I think that a good forum for people interested in anthropology could be very helpful. Then people searching a certain kind of information about the past could share their advice with each other. There is so much information out there, but each of us only has some scraps of it. Unfortunately I don't know of any such well-functioning anthropology forum.
Thanks anyway, Avi. You write well; if you have the time, consider starting up a blog!
Eh, an old source is better than no source at all. Now we know the source exist. I didn't know that before.
> I didn't knowthat before
That's a surprise to me! I also thought it was very interesting and was disappointed to find Avi had no blog, but I figured by the title of his second source you'd already read it and dismissed it.
"You have to lock up the food" is basically the moral of https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/human-societies-across-the-world
Whether it's caused by bars, a chain, or the lack of anywhere to run away to, enslavement is what happens when you can't just leave.
I only thought of the Montagnais. I only heard about the Jesuits' accounts of them from Avi. I have to admit I know about Marvin Harris but haven't had any plans to read anything by him. My level of text tolerance is rather low, so I focus on the books I hope are the most information-heavy. In anthropology that tends to be books written by people who worked at the field and made first-hand observations.
I'm not convinced. In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years? They had to be ruthless about growing up and begetting offspring to become our ancestors. That ruthlessness involved frequent violence. My assumption has been that to be happy today we need to live in a culture with the right ingredients, such as moral injunctions (like the golden rule, defering gratification) and constraints on the evolution-derived impulses for sex and power. How those cultural ingredients arose is another, doubtless complex question. In more "successful" cultures those ingredients (I posit) are more or less binding on most of its members, for reasons that one can debate, and the general level of happiness is higher. I like the simplicity of the Buddhist moral injunctions, though similar ones exist in many cultures: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't engage in sexual misconduct, and don't take drugs that lead to carelessness. Those injunctions may have existed in hunter-gatherer bands, but surely in weak form, and in some (many?) circumstances they were rejected as positively counterproductive (vide the Yanomamo and many others).
> In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years?
No, that's a common misconception. Under ordinary conditions people commonly survive past 60, though infant mortality is high. And while violence was evidently far more common than today - we don't even kill each other in duels, lately - I doubt violence was an everyday occurrence.
Do you have any sources on human longevity during the stone age? Presumably we have enough skeletal remains. As to violence, there's been considerable documentation on the scale of violence among stone age people and from hunter gatherer tribes more recently. I've seen the figures as high as 30% for the chance of dying from homicide. Stephen Pinker has also documented that the proportion of humans dying violent deaths has been falling for millenia in "Better Angels of our Nature". Also see Tove's comment above on the high mortality rates among the Yanomamo. With high rates of violence, accidents and disease, it seems likely that a lifespan of "past 60" would be the exception, not the norm.
You can see Ageing: The Biology of Senescence, 1964 for historical survival curves. But nothing you wrote is inconsistent with what I wrote. An average life expectancy of 30 doesn't mean our ancestors usually lived about that long over the last 10,000 years. Remember, what you first wrote was:
> In the evolutionary environment our ancestors lived, what, 25 or 30 years? They had to be ruthless about growing up and begetting offspring to become our ancestors.
But the reason the average lifespan without medicine is low is primarily infant mortality - even with the possibility of dying a violent death at some point in your life, if you made it past infancy, you'd commonly see the end of your natural reproductive years.
I think Aché Life History of Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado is good. It is only about one single population of hunter-gatherers, but the study was done very meticulously.
What was their survivorship curve like?
Looks like about 35 percent of females and 25 percent of males lived at 60 (I'm trying to read a small graph, so there is a substantial margin of error here).
Female survivorship exceeded male survivorship only at age 50, due to a high rate of female child murder (not infantice, but murer of children aged 2 to 10).
Wikipedia writes: Major causes of death in the forest period were in-group homicides (especially of infants and children), external warfare, respiratory disease, tropical fevers, and accidents. Over 40% of all adult deaths, and more than 60% of all child deaths, were due to violence by other Aché or by outsiders. In the forest period, about 65% of all children born survived to adulthood (age 15), and life expectancy for those young adults was an additional 40 years on average.[2] 14% of males and 23% of females under the age of 10 were killed, with the victims predominantly being orphans; infants orphaned within the first year of life were always killed.[34]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ach%C3%A9
Evolution didn't end in the stone age (I wrote more about it here: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosion-the-book) A lot of evolution has been going on for the last thousands of years, both on the male and on the female side.
I'm not sure that actually making war was the most successful evolutionary strategy. Being on the winning side but not on the frontline seems like a great concept too. Especially for women, but also for men. A lot like Westerners today.
Still, I think that genes that thrived under the comparatively peaceful last millennia have been unevenly distributed. I once knew a young man who was anxious and unenergetic at working, but lived up when he got the opportunity to fight. As a teenager, he chose a political ideology that justified raw fighting. Later he got a bit wiser and got into martial sports. I couldn't help speculating that he had gotten too many fighter genes to fit into modern society. Some people just are unlucky when it comes to the genes they have and the environment in which they end up.
I think that the golden rule and such principles increases average happiness. After all, där from all people in the time of our ancestors were happy. Losers had every reason not to be. I think the practical challenge is to emulate our ancestors in as harmless ways as possible. Sports is such a method: Many people, especially males, still have an instinct to compete and fight. Society has invented rather (although not totally) harmless ways for them to do that. Many adaptations to the ancestral mind need to be compromises of that kind.
I think that confidence is one of the things we ought to be pursuing for its own sake. Indeed, I think that one of the problems which we are now facing in the west is that, in a catastrophic case of mistaking co-relation for cause, we decided that _self-esteem_ was the thing we needed to pursue. We have ended up with a lot of people who have way too much self-esteem. An unsustainable amount, especially given that they have done nothing particularly special in the first place -- as is to be expected among the young.
But they end up in a state where they cannot handle being told 'Your work is mediocre. You could do a whole lot better'. Any amount of criticism sends them to the mental health unit. And it becomes rather difficult for them to find something that they care enough about that doing it lets them lift themselves out of themselves. They are stuck -- the focus of their lives is their own selves, and their own self esteem. But what are you supposed to do when you have too much self-esteem? Do people speaking languages which don't have the word 'lagom' even get to think that way?
Confidence is something else, and something that you can cultivate. Learning about state of the art roof construction is all well and good, but you may not be certain that you have understood what you tried to learn. This can produce anxiety and stress, and if you decide to read another book, another 10 books, all the while fretting about roof construction you may never get your house improved.
At some point you need the confidence in yourself to be able to say -- right. Enough research. I think I have learned enough to do this job. I might be wrong. I may make plenty of mistakes as I try this new thing. But. You know what? If I make them I will deal with them as they happen. I have enough confidence in me to get on with doing the job.
So many, many people never get there. When I was learning how to bake bread, several people said that they could never do this because they expected that their first few times would produce inedible or barely edible results. I agreed. My first week went like that. But they said that they would find the failure in some sense 'crushing to the spirit'. They don't want to try because they cannot handle failure.
We need people who are confident enough that they can fail, pick themselves up, and get on with it. Not trapped in a life they cannot improve because they cannot fail at improving.
ps -- Glad Midsommar!
> we decided that _self-esteem_ was the thing we needed to pursue.
But I wonder how much of modern attempts to bolster self-esteem really did produce self-esteem at the expense of confidence. I absolutely do agree that moderners are fragile and Narcissistic, but is it because we told our children to value their self-esteem, or was it for some other reason that this occurred?
For instance, bullying and social ostracism seemed to work much more strongly in bygone decades; might that have produced people who were more conformist, but also more resilient? Alternatively, it seems an effort has been made throughout school to improve safety, reduce competition, broaden the list of exemptions for disabilities, and lighten punishment. This may have made things much better for the vulnerable, while teaching everyone else that ineffectuality and tears will earn support rather than scorn.
I'm not specifically saying "getting rid of bullies was the problem" or "Trying to help out people with special needs was the problem." But wouldn't people who said things like "I'm afraid to make bread because it might crush my spirit" have once been bullied by their peers and punished by their teachers until they earned to toughen up? Such people do seem pathetic today, but ooh - don't look askance at them when they say it!
"Lagom" in English seems to be "enough"
Not the same idea thing at all. Doesn't have the connotation that 'more would be too much'.
I think "adequate" is the correct translation. Swedish has two words for adequate: "Lagom" and "lämplig". In general, "lagom" is used for roughly quantitative issues and "lämplig" for roughly qualitative issues.
I think you have a very good point. Some people are more confident than others, for inexplicable reasons. As I have been building things through the years, I have developed a principle: First, I make a smaller building utilizing a series of construction methods, and only after that I make that big building I wanted. That way, I hope to make most mistakes on the smaller, less important building. I also hope to be one more efficient the second time I do something.
When I read what you write, I realize that some people wouldn't have felt reassured by that method. They would instead have felt so discouraged by their mistakes that they would only have made a small building, or no building at all. It could be that those of us who can read a few books, practice a little and then feel confident doing one thing or another are not completely representative for the human race as a whole.
Glad midsommar!
I think the word in English that gets closest to this is "contentment"? Its not quite correct, but people usually use contentment to refer to a long-term state-of-being. In comparison, "being content" is slightly negatively tinged, as it implies a cessation of the striving to make something better than it currently is.
The Greeks had a good word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
Contentment is underrated. Precisely for the reasons you mentioned.
I guess it was contentment that the writer who escaped from a luxury hotel tried to avoid.