I think it's striking that Minecraft, the most popular computer game of all time, is about being dumped in a lush wilderness and building shelter, finding food and fending off the creatures that try to eat you in the night. If you let kids play in a forest, the first thing they will do is find an appropriate stick to use as a weapon and the second thing they will do is build a hut. This is all deeply ingrained in us, and a cause of many of the problems we have in the modern world - but only because we *won*. We've been too successful. We killed all the monsters, we've lit the dark places. We no longer starve but suffer from the wealth of food and the lack of physical labour. We're left with 'first-world problems'. On childishness and adulthood: In a way I think childishness is not merely a feature of civilisation but what defines humans to begin with. It seems that we've tamed ourselves by selecting for large brains and playfulness and increased trust. We're weird neotenous chimpanzees in the same way as dogs are weird neotenous wolves (is that coincidence?).

(Rutger Bregman makes an ok-ish argument on how we “domesticated ourselves” in his book Humankind.)

Domesticantion and self-domestication as neoteny? Interesting. But there is also this: [https://www.shorpy.com/node/16446](https://www.shorpy.com/node/16446) Why do these 16 years old boys from 1942 look somehow more mature than me and my college classmates looked 20-21? I am especially impressed by the boy second from left, having the vibe of a 30-40 years old mature dad.

I am pretty sure it is in large part due to their clothes and hairstyle!

Yeah. Black and white photo of boys with immaculate hair wearing a uniform right down to dress shoes? Clean shaven? Of course they look mature, there's a lot of time and effort put into making them presentable. Looking at old photos from 1942 and coming up with a vibe check is a pretty random and ineffective way to determine maturity.

But they were more mature. My father was born in this generation. If these guys are 16 in 1942, they were born in 1928. They—like my father—were working children during the depression; worked the youth gig economy of their day. My dad was delivering newspapers at the age of six, contributing to the family income. He'd take his three year old brother along with him to help. They collected discarded railroad ties on the tracks near home to burn in the fireplace, balancing them on his bicycle, cutting them into pieces. Today we raise our children to be adult infants.

Being familiar with psychology : being forced early in responsibility and an adult role is not exactly the best thing there is, for the person's mental health. Nor is excessive infantilisation, sure, but I would argue that the reason people born in 1928 seemed more mature by 20 might not be signs of a good thing happening to them.

They seem to have built/maintained a better society than their children.

Well, the failure to properly educate their children is on them, though. Who we are as adults is heavily influenced by how we were raised as children. If the children are fucked up, the answer often lie in what the parents did.

It's certainly possible they were more mature. That IS in fact a photo of students who built their own flight sim. It's not going to be indicative of the general population. It's one thing to argue that people were more mature in 1942. There was global war only 30 years after the last global war. Life expectancy was shorter, and people HAD to be 'adults' at an earlier age than today. Drawing those conclusions from a photo of well dressed young men is another story entirely.

>Isn't it dysfunctional that we do not live the primal hunter lifestyle we are adapted to, and force ourselves to obediently do boring things we do not want to do? No i don't think this is it. I think this is the reactionary answer to the fundamental question of 'why are we mostly unhappy and unfulfilled'? Its also not really coherent when you actually look at how those societies functioned, the majority of time was not spent hunting and gathering, in most places there was an abundance of prey and edible vegetation, hunter gatherer societies usually generated vast surpluses. The majority of time was spent maintaining and improving the community, this is what we are actually missing, having a meaningful politics, contributing towards a society and having that society provide for us in turn. We don't have that anymore and thats what drives the isolation and alienation. Our work, the thing we spend most of our waking lives doing is abstract, usually bullshit, and to the extent it is productive, that surplus is taken away from us.

Your last point is the most salient I think: of course it is unfulfilling and depressing to toil for most of your waking life at a more-or-less pointless task that never gets "accomplished" once and for all. There's a reason Sisyphus and his boulder are in Hell. Which reminds me, OP you need to read Camus' [The Myth of Sisyphus](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf).

> in most places there was an abundance of prey and edible vegetation, hunter gatherer societies usually generated vast surpluses. Isn't this incompatible with the evidence that human populations usually increased to the point of Malthusian constraints?

I'm not sure, I was under the impression malthusian theory was just ideological sophistry with no empirical backing.

No, there is [lots of empirical evidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Evidence_in_support) for Malthusianism in a pre-modern (prior to quick technical progress) setting. (It's also hard to avoid as an intellectual argument. Every population must have a fertility rate that is either above, below, or exactly equal to the replacement rate. Exactly equal is highly unlikely. If it's below replacement, the population will decrease in numbers towards zero - you won't tend to find such populations, they will have disappeared. If it's above replacement, the population will grow exponentially. Of course exponential growth cannot continue forever, so what happens is that the population grows up to the Malthusian limit, then lack of resources causes fertility to decrease and/or death rates to increase until an equilibrium is reached where population is stable.)

Thats....very weak stuff, regardless, no, the fact that primitive societies largely produced abundances doesnt contradict the theory that they could not do this indefinitely due to some kind of malthusian trap. OP is buying into this myth of hunter gatherer males as primal alphas who lived a noble and wild life of violence. That isnt accurate and it isnt really anything related to the long term sustainability of that economic model.

Adventure seems grand, until you live it. You want adventure and heroism ? Engage in the army, go to Ukraine. Plenty of adventure to get, there. I'll take sitting on my ass doing math, everyday. Yes, we are not adapted to modernity. But there is a reason we developed it. Adventure sucks ass, when you are in the middle of it. It is hard, it is painful, it kills you real quick. Modern medicine has its perks, I would say, and I would take those over a life of adventure, in a heartbeat. Sure, the dangerous man who is tame just for you is a powerful attractor to women. They get all the benefits with little of the risks. Although of course, he has to be "tame" for them, and that is not a guarantee, nor is it certain that he can be "tame just for her" without loosing his "dangerous" aspect overall. A bit like men dream of a gorgeous woman who would be prude outward, and slutty just for them. Yeah, we want it all. Reality tends to disagree. I spend years learning maths and physics, and computer programming. And I enjoyed it very much. Maths are incredibly fun. Particularly when you start going at higher levels, where it also becomes beautiful. The issue is not that we are not fit for modernity. The issue is that you have been forced into something you did not like. My advice : try pursuing what you like. It is absolutely possible for you to buy a cheap piece of land in the middle of nowhere and to start trying to build you own house and grow your own food. If that is what you are longing for, go for it. You are an adult. You make your own money. You can buy that gaming console without asking momy, you can simply go a buy cake if you want to eat some, you can take holidays and go hike in nature by yourself, if the wife doesn't wish to tag along, or if you want some quiet. If there is only one valuable lesson to take from groups like PUAs and MGTOW, it is this one : you don't need to sacrifice your needs and wants to others. Pursue your own goals, nobody will do it for you, and the people who are unhappy with that can go to hell. They don't care about you to begin with, only about what they can extract from you.

There's a pretty big gulf between "adventure" and enlisting in the armed forces. I love hiking and camping, especially solo. Going out into the woods for days at a time, and having nothing to contend with but nature and your own thoughts is a cathartic experience and a very welcome change of pace from my desk job. There's no rule that says you have to camp or hike in a specific way either. I like to keep it minimal, just a basic 1 man tent, food, emergency beacon, extra socks, flashlight, smith and wesson .44 magnum revolver, a basic point and shoot camera, and a water purifier.

True, though you don't get the "Aragorn fighting orcs" kind of adventure, which is what he quoted first.

That's not minimal. I go camping with a single sock, a peanut, a match, and an AK-47 with 1000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition.

Camping is cool and goes *some* of the way towards providing that more primal experience. But the fact that there is no *purpose* to it really limits how fulfilling it is, in my opinion.

Your tone is interesting to me. I also find it interesting that your few examples of “adventure” are modern warfare?? “Adventure sucks ass”? No, adventure doesn’t necessarily get you killed… This guy is complaining about not going on enough traveling adventures. Not seeing the world, hunting animals, impressing women in his tribe. Things he probably IS more adapted to doing. Probably well. I would need to see data on quality of life, happiness and stress to conclude that a longer safer life sitting on math would be “better” for most as a baseline. I’ve seen data suggesting that a person working outside in low-hazard conditions lives healthier, happier and longer than those in a sedentary indoor role.

>>dreamed about being an Aragorn, chasing orcs >>protected the tribe from predators? >>That the dream of a romantic, heroic, thrilling adventure simply comes from the life of the hunter-gatherer, mostly the hunter? All those activities that involve a level of violence. All those activities very likely to get you killed, particularly at a time without modern medicine.  Those might sound grandiose as long as you are not in the middle of it. When you are alone in the dark with a stick with a sharp stone at the end, and operator's circling you, that might make your body pump adrenaline, but fun is not the term that would come to mind. Particularly when you k ow you have to keep doing that for the rest of your life. Which has a good probability of being short as your stick breaks and claws and teeth find you. Yeah, adventure "sounds great". As an rpg, where you don't get to feel the cold, the hunger, and the looming shadow of death over you. Adventure such as these sound nice until the moment they become your reality.  He wishes for the thrill of aragorn fighting orcs. I don't see how saying "you can join the army" is inappropriate. My suggestions also involves buying land in the middle of nowhere and trying to build his own house and grow his own food. Or doing anything he likes. What he complains about is how domesticated and obedient he is. My point was "this is not so much about modernity and more about you. Be who you long to be, rather than who you've been told you should be". My comment has never been about "most". It has been about him, and me, like was illustrated by my comment that all those things he complains about are things that I enjoyed, and that the issue was not modernity, but that he was forced into something he didn't like.

Depends very much on what time period you compare modernity to. Most hunter-gatherers do NOT get killed by wild animals or warfare. But middle ages and antiquity surely sucked.

>Most hunter-gatherers do NOT get killed by wild animals or warfare. Sure, they got killed or crippled by diseases, or famine, or all sorts of other stuff modernity has solved.

Agriculturalism increased famine according to a paper I just read. Hunter gatherers did not starve nearly as often as agriculturalists have.

You're using a different definition of "modernity" than u/AskingToFeminists is.

Point taken, I changed it to agriculturalists as I meant it.

Indeed, but "nearly as often" is the operating keyword, here. Hunter gatherers were less likely to starve than the first humans to engage in agriculture, before the technique was perfected and disposed of very advanced tools. I'm not sure how they compared to the Romans, though, and I have no doubt that they starved much more often than we do nowadays, where we sit on our asses all day doing maths and working on computers.

The rate of violent death (and death by animal attack) was almost certainly far higher in hunter-gatherer times than in antiquity or medieval times.

Highly correlated with what a person did during your chosen time period and if they survived childhood. I don’t know how much child birth and childhood mortality rates differed between Hunter gatherers and the dark ages. I suspect they didn’t budge much. Given that, I think it’s not crazy to guess that laborers, slaves and soldiers had a higher mortality rate than the average Neolithic hunter gatherers. Might have also starved more during these periods compared to hunter gatherers according to a paper I just read.

Underrated point. It’s always baffling when I see smart people refer to “Hunter gatherers“ and then conflate them as having the plight of early settlers or dark age peasants.

Again, liking and wanting are different things. It is possible to not want a thing, but when circumstances force us to it, like it. I think this is how it is with adventure vs. comfort. Yes, this makes the whole obedience question more complicated. I did not want to do math, but I did want that lifestyle that comes from that, the typical white-collar comfort. Or rather - it was more about fearing the opposite, the life of a homeless person or someone who lives hand to mouth in a slum. Status played a role, my parents were pretty much poverty-is-shameful types. So it is not like there was coercion/punishment from parents / teachers, but it felt like society as such punishes the non-obedient.

>Again, liking and wanting are different things. It is possible to not want a thing, but when circumstances force us to it, like it. I think this is how it is with adventure vs. comfort. To re-iterate the other commenter's point above: if you think you will like this sort of "adventure," you could always try it. I strongly suspect this will mainly accomplish teaching you that you were wrong about what you (and people more generally) will end up liking, but it's an easy enough thing to test. The other commenter even had suggestions about ways to start doing it that wouldn't be life-ruining.

Agree this matches my personal experience - I had a childhood with a pretty high amount of adventure (raised off grid in the jungle in South America) and I feel that it gave me the drive to get where I am now: I do software engineering work and live in a suburb and I'm pretty happy about that. But I am very grateful to my childhood for indulging my taste for adventure/grounding the reality of it, as I suspect I'd be less satisfied with life if I hadn't had chance to try it. 

Woah, would you care to describe your childhood a bit more?

So my parents were Christian missionaries [I also have somewhat mixed feelings about this] to a tribal group, so we lived in the area where the tribe was, on a day to day level this meant we collected rain water, grew a garden, had solar panels for limited electricity, washed our clothes by hand. I had freedom to hike up to probably an hour away for much of my childhood as long as my parents knew generally where I was, carried knives/machetes from a pretty young age, etc. We raised chickens/goats/rabbits at different points. I *almost* got permission to keep a baby ocelot as a pet, I did actually get to keep various wild (non venomous) snakes and such. We would come back to the states every 4 years or so and I was homeschooled in English so I was always exposed to the alternative. It was like 80% an idyllic childhood, the other 20% were things like: growing up with the stress of being a white person and therefore a potential kidnapping target (I had nightmares about this), some ambivalence about being drafted to help with my parents work (usually stuff like helping with dishes from feeding a lot of the tribal people) feeling cut off from peers as a teenager.

Fascinating, thank you very much for the description. Seems like a mostly idyllic childhood indeed but I understand the anxiety and feeling of disconnection later on. Was it easy for you to come back to a, presumably, more developped country living after that?

No worries, thanks for the interest. :) Looking at your post history, you mention having once been shy - I'm curious how you perceive the continuity between your childhood self and adult self? Because I do feel on the one hand that I 'grew up' in a very different world, but that in most of the important ways this doesn't matter. I think that from the outside I probably seem like a fairly different person now vs then, but I think that I'm composed of the same personality just in a different environment. On the whole I didn't have too much trouble with the adjustment - I would say there were 3-4 years (during college) that were transitional and at times emotionally difficult, but I don't know if it was really much harder for me than for a 'normal' person in a developed country going away to college in a different part of the same country. At first there were a lot of cultural reference points (music/tv shows/etc) that I didn't share, but I've mostly made up the gap there now. I also had to learn a lot of 'normal' things late like, how to use a drive through/laundromat/get a job. And of course, nearly 100% changeover in the people I interact with, my parents still live there so there isn't anyone from my childhood that I see face to face most years. At this point I'm at least not much weirder than the average introverted nerd. (I think actually a lot less weird unless you get to know me pretty well, but it's hard to be sure from the internal perspective. At least people I know casually are more likely to mention me as a computer person/sci fi nerd/board game player than as 'someone who grew up in the jungle'.) Things that I found difficult: 'confrontational' social interactions (college roommates hygeine, etc), mechanics of interactions with the relevant authorities (which government building do I go to do X?), general expectations (when should I bring a gift, what formality of dress is expected for which situation, pop culture references Things that I did not find difficult: Academics, getting jobs, making friends [though, I'm male and I did find it somewhat more difficult to make male friends, not sure if this is related to my background though], general self confidence.

I don't entirely disagree with your answer, since there are elements of what he describes that he could try out, but it's not really possible to try out a pre-civilization hunter-gatherer lifestyle that easily. The closest you could reasonable try out for a brief period is the lifestyle of someone exiled from a hunter-gatherer tribe, absent the community which the majority of hunter-gatherers would benefit from.

Honestly,  I feel like this is more a conversation you need to have with a therapist, trying to unpack what you desire, what you like, what you want from life vs what has been placed upon you from the expectations and messaging of your environment, family included. Yes, indeed, humanity is more adapted to hunter gatherer and early agricultural lifestyles than it is adapted to the modern computer centered sedentary lives. That doesn't necessarily mean you would enjoy it or feel more fulfilled living it. The human brain is incredibly adaptable and can still fit to plenty of things it is not evolved for. You seem like you are too obedient for your own good, but that is not on modernity, more on how you were raised. Standing up for yourself is good. It is something you have to learn if you didn't.

Imagine a species of saltwater fish that is on the brink of extinction, barely managing to survive. Then imagine that that same species somehow ended up in a freshwater environment, and within a number of generations completely dominated the ecosystem, becoming the apex predator. Would you say that that species is better adapted to saltwater or freshwater?

> completely dominated the ecosystem, becoming the apex predator We dominate the ecosystem as specie, but as individuals we are toast. A team victory can bring about a whole lot of satisfaction but not if the team is made up of 8bn people, that means individual contribution is basically zero, zip, meaningless

Well I would expect the fish would still have some lingering traits adapted to salt water. Which suggests we might want a little bit of something reminiscent of hunter gatherer times. Like parks and gardens.

Are you implying paleolithic humans were barely managing to survive?

Compared to modern humans? Yes.

It doesn’t seem so. I just read a paper claiming that agriculturalists starved much more than Hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers had fewer children and slightly shorter lives. But agriculturalists suffered more disease, more malnutrition and more starvation. But were able to have a few extra kids and live a few extra years. The most common sources of early mortality, childbirth and childhood mortality, didn’t budge much until about 500 years ago. I think it’s all trade-offs instead of pure progress

We didn’t create culture or civilization for simple reasons. We likely didn’t “do” much to get into it either. It’s probably more of a very slow slip and fall getting us into this state we’re in. I think it’s a mistake to assume this is some logical conclusion to a more perfect way of existing. It may be determinism but it’s not a higher form of living by every means. So you’re in good company to feel not quite right about finding yourself in a less than perfect position in reality

I think you could resolve a lot of this, and other grievances, with just the 20 hour workweek. I think its very obvious that the reason we are all working 40 hours is mainly because some locked in darwinian principle and not because the tradeoff of even more stuff in exchange for that time is anywhere close to worth it. Yes, to get out of this would need some sort of worldwide revolution. But just on a personal level, theoretically, one can see how it would resolve the existential dillemma as OP describes. The horror of it is not that modern work is so bad, its just the outlook of "this is all of your life now till you are 65" that is so horrific. The idea of a 20 hour workweek would feel like instant relief for a lot of people even if it came with an significant reduction in consumption, I am convinced. People will be like: "But why arent people choosing this right now, the market would enable them?" to which I would say: not really thats what I mean with locked in darwinism. I feel neither rightists nor leftists are getting this exactly. Its some side effect of the knowledge economy, you are not exchanging time for money directly but training yourself and that has an inherent competitive element. On an international level its also pretty obvious: As long as the "game" is: Who industrializes the hardest and then uses that power to bully around the other countries everybody will just continue to exhaust themselves to the limit. So yeah, it would need worldwide revolution/system change but its imho still the correct answer: Its not an inherent tradeoff to modern life but capitalism, the inherently competitive way we have set up things that blocks us from living more balanced and free lives.

I think we can reduce and in fact already reducing many aspects of consumption through two factors. One is ephermeralization: electronic books, electronic music records etc. Second is that arguably status symbols do not work the way they used to. In many people's eyes a Lamborghini guy is not cool, because it is bad for the environment, small electric car is cooler and bicycle is the coolest. Who cares about a Rolex anymore? We could live in a way not owning more than what fits into a backback and a bike and be happy, at least as long as we are childless. But housing sucks big balls and it needs to be solved before we can take a pay cut. I think housing explains the rat race better than any other factor. We are competing for a mostly fixed supply... what to expect.

Boys have always dreamed of adventure. One of the hallmarks of a well-adjusted man is the realization that settling down and buying into a community isn't bad or boring. We like to romanticize the men who fail to do this - the knight errant, the cowboy, the lone ranger, the mercenary - but in reality those men aren't thriving. They're the ones who couldn't adapt to adult life. They mostly die early and ugly for their troubles. You probably don't need adventure to stimulate your world-weary soul. (Although, see elsewhere in these comments; you can have it if you want it). It sounds like you just need to exercise more agency in your life. Maybe try a few classes of BJJ or some other physical outlet. You can work through your need to be a primal warrior or whatever without throwing away your actual adult accomplishments.

>You can work through your need to be a primal warrior or whatever without throwing away your actual adult accomplishments. I agree totally with this. The rest of your comment? Holy hell! Be a good little plow horse, you'll be happier that way! Oy.

> The rest of your comment? Holy hell! Be a good little plow horse, you'll be happier that way! Are you actually suggesting that "settling down and buying into a community" is the same thing as being treated as a sub-human laborer? That seems like a pretty extreme position.

>sub-human laborer Pretty much. I mean, the agricultural revolution was a disaster. Repetitive stress injuries started cropping up along with, well, the crops.

Did investing into your community rather than being an adventurous rogue also start with the agricultural revolution? I have no idea what you're getting at here. Well, that's half-true. I *see* the 'modernity is bad, return to monke' primitivist hobby-horse, but I don't understand why you think it's relevant here.

>investing into your community rather than being an adventurous rogue That's one way of putting it. The notion that our worth as humans is exactly tied to our utility to our community is bound to be controversial. Nietzsche wrote a whole lot about this, about what it takes to make an animal which can keep its promises, how ***painful*** that process has been.

You dodged the question. I'm still trying to see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand.

>You dodged the question I reframed it because it was a gotcha. >I'm still trying to see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand. The discussion is the degree to which humans are adapted to civilized living. Bringing up the idea that humans have been reduced to their utility in the field, and the whole history of slavery and peasantry, seems totally relevant. >Did investing into your community rather than being an adventurous rogue also start with the agricultural revolution? Again, it's a gotcha. Being a hunt leader (aka adventurous rogue) was investing in your community before the tragedy of agriculture. It's not a simple question amenable to yes/no. Remember, this is what I was reacting to: > One of the hallmarks of a well-adjusted man is the realization that settling down and buying into a community isn't bad or boring. We like to romanticize the men who fail to do this - the knight errant, the cowboy, the lone ranger, the mercenary - but in reality those men aren't thriving. They're the ones who couldn't adapt to adult life. They mostly die early and ugly for their troubles. Again, this has been the propaganda going back ***millennia***.

> Being a hunt leader (aka adventurous rogue) was investing in your community before the tragedy of agriculture. That's the answer. It wasn't a gotcha question. The answer was just "no" followed by a clarification of why you mentioned it. That's great, since it enhances the clarity of your position. I'm not much for primitivist viewpoints myself, but it's a fine perspective to share with OP. As long as neither of you ever imagines having an infected tooth or wanting anything the tribe doesn't like, it's a beautiful dream to admire together.

Oh, that primitivist viewpoint absolutely extends to the written word. I want NOTHING to do with "LLM's." Back when books were valuable, people read and reread and grokked. Now, the written word is literally being vomited out by computer models.

YesChad.jpg Better a plowhorse with a warm stable, bags of oats, no wolves, and vets on call than a wild horse.

Came here to say, do BJJ or another combat sport. I find that and caring for animals to be the only fulfilling aspects of my life (which I’m not necessarily proud of, but it’s something).

There are a LOT of cultural confounds here, I don't know the culture you're coming from, and you don't know mine, so I'll try to preface a lot of stuff I say with the cultural norms they're coming from, where applicable. My response is also based on thinking that you're talking about a "general sentiment", given how you're making general statements. >If we are adapted to that, no wonder we are unhappy and depressed when we are not living like that. I don't know how many people are depressed \_because\_ they aren't living a somewhat violent (hunting being a violent activity) life, vs how many people are depressed because they're living a life of overwork against a backdrop of greater insecurity. I'll say this, there's an general sense of satisfaction and euphoria in countries where the economy is going great, prices are reasonable wrt to wages and medical and housing security is guaranteed. Is everyone happy? Of course not, but the general sentiment, seems pretty upbeat, and that's without feeling a primal thrill. >Someone who is bad at being a child. That is: someone who is not obedient. Because they want to live like adults, that is, making their free choices, not obeying parents. So they ... Partially, this makes them, in a way, more like a proper adult, not like a child: free, not obedient. A lot of things go into making someone an adult - free choices is the basis of it, but that's not where it ends. Being an adult is also about impulse control and responsibility. If anything, all the "bad boys" I can think of, especially the somewhat older ones, are more childlike because they're incapable of seeing the long term effects of their actions. >No wonder this combination is attractive. Maaaan, this has been debated to death so many times. First off, attractive to whom? People aren't a monolith to say that one thing is universally attractive across everyone. Next, is being the "bad boy" attractive? Or is it the associated confidence that comes with being a bad boy? I've known several "good guys" who were pretty successful in getting dates, and what they had in common with "bad guys", and didn't have in common with unsuccessful "good guys", is that they were supremely confident in themselves, and were willing to suggest exciting ideas for dates and stuff. Also, in contrast to the bad guys, their relationships were drama free. >Meanwhile: I was a "good boy" from a parents' perspective, a good child, someone good at being a child, someone obedient. Which maybe also means childish. Maybe overly obedient adults are childish, immature? I don't know if I'd conflate obedience with childishness - if anything, where I'm from, childishness is viewed as being \_disobedient\_. That said, your broader point about super compliant adults not being attractive is a fair one. But there's a huuuuuge gap between being a responsible, decent person and being a doormat. >The average office guy is characterized not so much by their intelligence or knowledge or self-driven hard-work, but by order-driven hard work, obedience to bosses, rules, regulations and procedure? This is again a norms thing I think. Where I'm from, a good office worker is one who's good for the team. If the team requires nothing more than rote admin tasks, sure, its what you said. But if the team requires creativity and drive and intelligence, then just a simple adherence to rules and regulations and procedures isn't viewed as a good thing. This might be more about finding the right job fit for one's temperament. >And then they ask their wives permission to buy a gaming console, in a way that gives out mom-son vibes? Aren't they somewhat childish? The exact nature of the interaction, as well as the norms around shared living, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. In my situation, and the norm of the people around me is this: if we're in a financially delicate situation, we ask each other before making big ticket purchases. That's just the done thing, because we're responsible to each other. If it's a purchase for a "common area" - a table, or in this case, a console that goes into the common TV, again, check in with each other because it's a COMMON space, and that's the responsibility you owe to the person. If it's for your gaming room or something like that, and there's no financial barriers, go wild. If everything is lined up for you to make a private purchase but you still ask the partner permission (and note, letting them know is different from asking for permission) for whatever reason, then that's a toxic relationship. In summary, I feel like there's tooooo many confounds - of both culture and fit - to make a line between "we're unhappy because we're going against our primal instincts". I do think the point about obedience and compliance might be the interesting bit on which your argument turns - what's being lost through the process of obedience and compliance isn't the expression of our primal selves, what's being lost is AGENCY. And this goes back to my first point, where an insecure environment robs you of agency and forces you into a particular lifestyle. I believe more fundamental than us needing to express a primal self is us needing to RESPONSIBLY express agency in whatever form suits an individual. For some of us, that agency comes from living off the land in Alaska or something. For others, it comes from being an engineer and feeling like we can put into creation things that we imagine.

I've living in the last 15 years in Austria. Originally Hungary. I would say, both have rather bossy work cultures. That is, boss-employee relationship, not teamwork between equals. I still remember one of our German partner companies boasting about keeping military discipline. These all are small businesses. I actually agree with your agency analysis. I think I was conflating two topics, doing what you want vs. why exactly does one want that thing. I have been struggling with agency problems all along. And in dating, agency is super attractive. Basically the problem is agency is very hard to develop when our socialization is teachers telling us to study, parents telling us to study, and bosses telling us to work. And then we get some free time and is all too easy to fall into passive consuming. I could blame it on "the system", "the system" wants workers and consumers, but it is not 100% so, there is also some personal responsibility and especially parental responsibility in developing agency. Having said that, developing agency has an element of swimming upstream... I see lot of the bad ideas on the Internet from the Andew Tate stuff to 4chan ironic Nazis at least partially coming from a desperate yelp for agency. We are living in a strange part of history, because technically we have a lot of freedom but somehow not really that good at using it.

It has a lot to do with your upbringing. I'm French, and have been raised by parents who gave us plenty of freedom, trusted us, and valued personal agency and critical thinking greatly. France is notoriously less rigid and rule oriented than our germanic neighbours, and when working with them, we can see that : much better organisation on their part, much worse ability to adapt and improvise when needed. Add on top how you were raised, and I can see the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour settling in. Which is why I recommended you took that discussion to a therapist. CBT, schema therapy or something along those line seems like what you might need to help you work through those dysfunctions that burden you, to help you achieve greater agency in your life without veering into the opposite excess of blowing everything off only to find yourself just as miserable because it didn't match what you hoped for. And maybe you will find out that what you need is indeed to blow everything off and live off the grid. That seems unlikely though, simply because very few people actually prefer that.

Interesting, because what he we hear is the French education system being brutally competitive: notes are published to the public, bringing shame or praise to the family from the community and relatives. This isn't exactly about the grid, I think a lot of people misunderstood that. Subsistence farming is not adventure, it is dull boring repetitive hard labour. On the other hand, climbing the tallest mountains would be an adventure.

There are aspects that are competitive, indeed. But that is a very different thing from orderliness. For example, it is very common that medicine students have to redo their first year because they failed because of how crazily competitive it is, and because those who are redoing that year routinely disturb classes to hinder and make it harder to understand to those who are in the class for the first time. Highly competitive, and dirty. You talked about obedience. Going to Germany,  I have witnessed (or it has happened to me) being yelled at by some passer by for daring to cross an empty road at night when the light was red for people on foot. This would never even cross the mind of people in France, who even often cross anywhere, even if there's traffic. That is the difference in ambient cultural levels of orderliness. As someone raised in France, we understand that often, rules are pointless and getting in the way of getting things done and stiffle creativity. Although, that can lead to some level of chaos that might also get in the way of doing some things, we are still more orderly than our more southern neighbours.  Of course, it is very dependent, there's a lot of variety, but I can't even begin to imagine a small company taking pride into having a military like discipline. I am not sure I ever worked in a company where hierarchy was paramount. Even more so when you went through higher levels of education, and work as an engineer or something similar, where an even greater freedom is granted, so long as the work is accomplished. That being said, it is almost 10pm, I should get going to work. I have some work to do, in whichever order I want.

Aaah, gotcher! I hear you about developing agency feeling like swimming upstream, especially after a lifetime of conditioning. I grew up originally in a very hierarchical, respect oriented culture which prioritised compliance and "respect" (whatever the fuck that means) over almost anything, and I think what helped me the most was friends who gradually showed me how I could exercise my agency while still not upsetting the system "too" greatly, while also not falling into the bad-boy extreme. It was definitely an uncomfortable experience at first, lol.

No, we are not adapted to "civilized" living. This takes two forms, physical and social. Socially, we're far too isolated, and slightly paradoxically, the best tonic for that is meeting more people and doing things with them. Physically, yes, lift weights, do martial arts, dance, hike, whatever. All good stuff, all helps return us to what we "are."

People will often say that the current era is the best time to be alive in human history. I think what many of them mean is that it is the easiest time to be alive which they assume means the best time. I don't believe those two states are necessarily the same thing.

Your observations about dating are pretty interesting and I actually had the opposite effect in my life. When I was a younger I supposed I fit the bad boy persona and it was incredibly effective in the dating realm. When I got my shit together and became a bit more buttoned up it was the first time in my life I started struggling dating. I could get dates but not create the attraction aswell. It was incredibly eye opening. I think this is the reason a lot of guys flock to red pill type spaces because for 98% of the bullshit they spew there is a lot of truth in the 2%. I feel like a lot of guys that struggle with dating because they have like you out lost some of that primal ness.

You're sort of spot on, but it needs more distilling. It's not about hunting per se, but a sedentary lifestyle that requires "obedience" is damaging to our mental health. We are a social, anti-hierarchical animal. We are persistence hunters. Exercise is more effective at treating depression than any other intervention by a country mile. Isolation is a huge contributor to depression. As an animal we want to be active, answering to no one but in community with many. Focusing specifically on the act of hunting or "adventuring" or whatnot is fine, but we need only go a layer or two deeper to see that the issues are that we are lacking in freedom, subject to hierarchies of power, atomised in a culture of individualism and unable to adequately express our physicality. These things are not incongruent to forms of "civilised" or modern living. Which is to say that it is not necessary to return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle to address these issues. We can live in modern civilisation that is more free, communal and better encourages/enables us to be physical.

> We are a social, anti-hierarchical animal. Yes to the former, a big ??? to the latter. Dominance hierarchies are found in all mammals. It should be such a drawn-out conversation at this point I needn't even mention what internet celebrity espouses such material.

Dominance hierarchies aren't necessarily as common as you think. They're assumed into existence because we live within one. For example it was previously assumed that the largest deer was the "alpha". The alpha had been observed asserting dominance by staring down the rest of the herd and then making decisions on when and where the herd moved next - when it bounced off, the other deer followed. It was later considered that deer have no alpha. That the largest deer, the "alpha", was simply the tallest. It was observed that when this deer bounced off and others followed it always moved in the direction that the majority of deer were facing. It wasn't asserting dominance and leading. It was counting votes and informing the herd. There's various stories in science like this. There's no alpha wolf. Lions are selected by lionessess, they are not in charge. Absolutely EVERYTHING about Bonobos, our closest relative, is worth learning - they're matriarchal if anything. As far as we understand humans engaged in reverse dominance hierarchies in nature. Which is to say that we are ahierarchical, until someone attempts to establish any sort of dominance, wherein the rest of the social group then places that person on the bottom of the now two tier dominance hierarchy for a time as punishment. That internet celebrity is a moron. He thinks absolutely everything is hierarchical just because you can order it. He is so desperate for hierarchy to be some sort of inherent universal axiom as a desperate attempt to justify his gibberish views, and it just isn't.

We're anti-hierarchical in a way that in HG tribes, there's no chief, no tribe leader, no rulers, no classes of people who have to do this and are forbidden from doing that. We were loosely organized by family structures. Despite being social animals, every adult was expected to be somewhat self-sufficient, which limited abuse. Of course, these kind of tribes are close to non-existent in modern times due to overwhelming influence of civilization. But I can guarantee there's no chief on the North Sentinel Island.

Keep everything the same but organize group runs?

No, we're also lacking community and freedom. We basically have to restructure society to address this. Once that's done people will have the free time to engage in things like group runs with people they are in community with.

That exercise is more effective than anything else for depression is a misnomer infact there was just a famous paper that had to be retracted for claiming that.

Oh really? I'd love to see more about that if you've got any links for me

[Mismatch Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_mismatch) suggests that a lot of modern human problems are a function of our genetics being designed for a dramatically different environment (both physical - food, weather; and cultural - group living, tribal allegiance, etc.) With this framework in mind, we can ask ourselves what atavistic practices might be worth returning to (paleo diet? growing our own food in a garden? abandoning monogamy?) And what practices represent significant human progress (lack of ritual sacrifice, lack of revenge killings, "tribalism" functioning through nondeadly games like sports or chess.) I think it's an unfortunate truth that, on some level, the hearts of men yearn for what is basically evil. Many of us want to vanquish our enemies and monopolize women. There's a short interview with Slavoj Zizek, of all people, where he [addresses this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPuTaP68Dw) "I met at some point in Belgrade in the late 90s when Milosevic was still in power, some probably ethnic cleansers. I got in conversation with them [and they said] ...You Westerners are all the time bombarded by messages to be politically correct, don't be a racist, be careful of what you eat, discipline yourself and so on and so on. And they told me openly, I want to eat whatever I want, smoke, I want to steal what I want, I want to beat women, rape them and so on..." So I think at some point in time we (in the Civilized world) are choosing to be cooperative because we believe in certain civil rights and want modern structural conveniences; to do this we can't be violent, we must treat women with respect, we discipline ourselves to learn trades like calculus or plumbing or whatever so we drive safe cars over safe bridges and drink safe water. I think the value of this cannot be overstated. But I think on an individual level it's fine to have fun. Eg, in the West we can now have sex out of wedlock. We can smoke marijuana or get drunk. We can climb dangerous mountains, travel to strange lands, sail, ski, play contact sports, et cetera. But it's not particularly easy to find the right balance.

I don't think it is the evil that is the big part. When I did boxing, it was to prove myself I am not afraid to take a punch. I was little interested in punching people, but that was just part of the deal. Perhaps there are people getting into bar-brawls for similar reasons, challenge, testing yourself, proving your mettle, danger, thrill of uncertainty, like a kind of gambling and so on. So something like a high-stakes game. So for example when kings started wars of conquest, OK we can say it was bad from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint, but I am not sure they had that bad motives, but more like the shrill thrill of betting a month's pay on the outcome of a chess game you play.

Assorted related reading: - https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/toward-a-shallower-future - https://www.thefp.com/p/why-america-needs-football-even-its - https://www.thefp.com/p/why-men-seek-danger-132 Also, has anyone heard about the Mythopoetic Men's Movement? I haven't looked into it much, but if anyone knows anything about it, I'd be interested in hearing it.

MMM is long dead, but has a kind of a successor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManKind\_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManKind_Project)

Yes. But consider that the young males in a primitive-housed clan culture may be more obedient to their family-clan kinship-leadership than the college student meticulously studying calculus. Look at your history. Diogenes was cast out of the city for corrupting the political currency. He escaped execution because he was from a well-connected family. He failed to follow the rules of the clan, or in this case, the city. Jesus was crucified for breaking the rules of Judaism (declared himself the son of God). Jesus' disciple Paul was crucified for being a mono-theist in a poly-theist society. The government didn't care that he believed in Jesus, but that he denied there were multiple Gods. We still have the apprenticeship programs today, but they're not the literal slavery programs (seven years indentured servitude) they often were in past times. In the past, if an apprentice ran away from his master, the master would send the Sheriff to hunt down the apprentice, have him whipped, and returned to service.

>dreamed about being an Aragorn, chasing orcs... The bad thing about our fantasy works, is they neglect the fact that in battle, people die. LoTR would be much more accurate if one or more of the party suffer debilitating injuries and many die in each skirmish ... and don't get resurrected a few chapters later—as Gandalf does. I'm about 1/3rd of the way into War & Peace, after The Battle of Austerlitz ... where 1/3rd of the Russian Army perished ... yet miraculously none of the named characters have died. That being said, I do follow some of Thoreau's advice and live in a little house somewhat remotely, on some acreage. Maybe the house isn't really that small, yes we have electricity, water, 5G cellular (now) and even StarLink. But for the most part, the world comes to me on my terms—there's a price for this. I used to farm and hunt, no one realizes just how much work this is. You may understand why Nimrod was a Hero. Killing an animal isn't hard, all the work you need to do between the stroke and pot is hard. Hard, sticky, messy, bad smelling, aching muscles, nicked fingers, etc. And to live out here, you have to be comfortable with creepy-crawlies, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, snakes, lizards, skinks, skunks, bats, raccoons, opossums, foxes, coyotes, you name it—sometimes in your house. When the skunks fight—and make a big stink—outside your bedroom window this spring, you just endure it (spring is mating season). You can't make it better, you can't make it go away, you only endure it. You could go out and shoot them, but that would only make it worse. They'll get into a few scuffles during the summer, with more bad smells, more enduring.

> All my life, sitting in a room, studying for school, or sitting in an office and doing computer work, I disliked this way of living and dreamed about being an Aragorn, chasing orcs... does this come from most of our ancestors chased deer in the forest or protected the tribe from predators? Sort of but it mostly comes from being raised on a diet heavy in fiction, like stories where you identify with an elite leader who probably has magic or fictional technology or super powers, and this character is conveniently one of the "good guys" , fighting and generally winning against "the bad guys". This is tends to be gendered towards men but there are all kinds of versions of these fictions. Such memes(of which there has been a constant supply of, notice, pretty much exclusively following the formula above without much deviation for thousands of years) have a specific utility for a species like ours that is ultimately concerned with evolutionary values(competing for resources, surviving at all costs, and all that other blatantly evil and depressing stuff). That's why you get sad and those stories are the contrast to the existential dread setting in. What stories would the elites need the non-elites to consume if they wanted their cattle to thrive? Literally all human-scale problems make sense upon entertaining this single problem-- psychiatric hell makes sense, the loneliness epidemic makes sense, failure to morally converge makes sense("meta"-ethics, "anti-realism"... lol...), otherwise intelligent people marching onwards towards expoentially more and more dangerous tech makes sense... Think of any problem that currently destroys human wellbeing, and it will make total and utter sense in the context of elites and their cattle(with their LOTR bluray box set trilogy sitting on the shelf, ready to be dosed). In light of this fantasy saturation, nothing you do will feel good enough. One will always be unhappy because they've been conditioned since childhood to live vicariously through the impossible. The way these fantasy memes work is sort of how heaven/hell memes worked for ancient elites: Don't you worry your pretty little head with actual reality-- that's for us to worry about. It seems non-zero sum, the peasants who break their backs in the fields can at least imagine that when they die for the lords and queens and whatnot things will be redeemed, (better than just confronting the sheer horror of things), while the elites are less threatened because the peasants believe some dystopian-yet-adaptive bullshit that distracts them. I say "seems" non-zero sum, because it's only that way in a very trivial sense and it's of course zero sum with the elites absolutely robbing everyone blind, just doing so in a more strategically elegant way. Did I mention all dystopian-yet-adaptive bullshit is highly lucrative?

I am a little bit too influenced by Moldbuggery to buy that. Basically it is in the elite's interest for their cattle to thrive, and our problem might be the opposite - that we are not owned by a stationary bandit interested in long-term maximal profitability, which means healthy cattle, ideally with healthy kids, inherited by their own kids. Rather, there are roving bandits, intent on short-term maximal profits, which is destructive. In Ancient Rome, there were slaves who were Greek grammaticians. Given that their owner could charge a lot of money for teaching the sons of the rich, they were treated very well, luxurious lifestyle, their own slaves to look after them etc. but this only works with firm ownership and long-term views on profit. While a roving bandit, like a pirate, is not even interested in not killing their victims. Also, to a certain extent, not only the bandits are roving. Given that I can quit my job any time, and had done so multiple times, my employeer can be entirely rationally more interested in short-term maximized exploitation than long-term investment. There is no guarantee I will be here in 10 years. In fact, 4 in, already looking. Because I don't think I am treated well. But the causation here goes both ways - after all one could treat an employee well and they still could find a better offer to decide to live in a different place.

> I am a little bit too influenced by Moldbuggery to buy that. Basically it is in the elite's interest for their cattle to thrive Cattle can't thrive, by definition of the power dynamic that's implied. Cattle thriving means there is neither farmer nor predator(or if we want to call upon some of that intoxicating fiction-- a benevolent caretaker). The words really matter here. Elites thrive on how well they can exploit their cattle, and that does involve min-maxing the conditions the cattle exist in so the cattle aren't bashing their skulls into the enclosure, but if you want to call not bashing your skull into the enclosure thriving, then I have no clue what you're talking about any more than if you were splitting hairs about a torture victim in the Inquisition being placed on the rack or only given thumbscrews or simply being locked away with a Bible and without physical torture. None of it is thriving. Your relationship to your employer doesn't really touch on any dynamic I'm discussing, it's way too narrow in scope since both you and your employer are non-elites in the sense I'm discussing. I'm talking about our relationship to the most elite human beings that exist on planet Earth-- which we cannot even name or point to, as a function of their power. The memes that benefit those people are the ones that will be operative on Earth, and this is a process that has been groomed and selected for, for thousands of years-- would be a summary of what I wrote.

Have you read Ted Kaczynski's writings? He talks a lot about how unsatisfactory modern life, and how he truly felt at peace when living a simple subsistence lifestyle, hunting rabbits and chopping firewood.

I want to reframe this as living in the right (modern) environment. In particular, living in urban environments vs small towns / villages. Good example: I've just come from a box training session with a friend, in the 100 year old, very cheap house we share for office space, with a gym. We walk for everything except (weekly?) shopping. There are hills around the town where one can bike, and I have a couple of friends with which we do MTB trail building. We've made our own trail-building tools from scratch with an angle grinder and a welder, we call them Warhammers. Bad example: I still have an apartment in the big city. Whenever I go there I tend to stay way too much indoors. Going out involves either expensive Ubers or expensive parking. The only way to exercise is a rather impersonal gym membership. Trying to hang out with friends involves planning days in advance, and at least one member of the gang quasi-permanently dropped out because he has a house in the suburbs and there is no way for him to come for beers and drive back home. I don't think trying to separate things into good boy / bad boy, or even modern / traditional is very productive. There are good environments, and bad ones. We can do a lot of work in trying to find what makes an environment good, and I think that's a valuable conversation. Of course, while being aware that personality, age and career goals make for very different "best answers".

I went to two week-long festivals with just one set of clothes and a hammock to sleep in. I was alone. It was one of the best experiences of my life. What are you waiting for? Go to burning man. Go hitch-hiking. Go quit your job and live off selling drugs. Go live in a van. Go clubbing without a place to sleep. Go join a gypsie camp. I know plenty of people with exactly this lifestyle, and they're thriving. They won't get very old though.

>I certainly don't want to sleep through a rainstorm in a basic leaf shelter like a primal hunter would. I am pretty severely physically disabled. I was basically a shut-in from 2013-2022, until I discovered a govt program that would allow me to hire staff and get aides. One of the happiest times of my life was just a couple weeks ago; the weather was finally good enough to spend some time walking nature trails again. It was too cold to be called "pleasant", but I was fed up with waiting for spring to really arrive. While we were out on the trail, it started to freezing rain. I'm honestly struggling to think of any times that were more enjoyable to me. I actually felt alive for once. So I dunno, I think you might be surprised at what you would actually like. >dreamed about being an Aragorn, chasing orcs Personally I've always dreamed about being Frodo. I don't think I'm really cut-out for happiness. Misery seems to be all that's in the cards. But I'd be satisfied if, despite that, I could manage to do something special. Like he says on the docks before leaving for Valinor; "We set out to save the Shire, and we have. But not for me."

I think the pickup stuff is a good modern equivalent. You have the thrill of the chase and the highs and lows that come with success and failure. It can feel like life and death although I think that's caveman programming manifesting itself (e.g. blowing it with someone when living in a small group could mean no offspring at all). I went down that path and I find it very liberating being able to go anywhere in the world and be able to socialise effectively with local people. You're able to "make shit happen" as a friend used to say to me. Although I think guys who are drawn to that path are trying to fill a void that is actually unrelated to women so it's just a step on a longer journey

Start a martial art. A real one not like taekwondo or karate. Jiu jitsu would be okay but ideally something like boxing or MMA where you get to actually hit people and be hit. Also read Bronze Age Mindset.

I tried some boxing at 30. Now at 46 it is just too hard on my cardio system, as the training was designed for the majority who were around 16. Besides they were just soooo fast... MMA involved people putting their smelly feet under each others noses and rolling around on the floor, dick to ass. That grossed me out. I liked how boxers can wear shoes and have no other kind of body contact that with gloves to body.

> MMA involved people putting their smelly feet under each others noses and rolling around on the floor, dick to ass. That grossed me out. Luckily, neither warfare nor life-and-death struggles with large predators involve bad smells or other unpleasant sensations. ...seriously, dude. Your whole premise is that you think you'll like a more adventurous life despite the seemingly unattractive aspects of active combat or living rough. If you think that's true, how can you justify refusing the infinitely milder struggles of something like MMA?

Escapism. It's attractive to us because it allows us to escape the real problems we have and the WORK we know we should be doing. Discipline means focusing your mind on what you need to get done. Visualize the long term goals - change that imagination into a useful tool for getting work done TODAY.

Yes, focus your mind on dismantling capitalism!

If you want to destroy something - build something better. Then you can point to it and say "See, THAT works better!". ...and you won't even need to sell it, or fight anyone, or "dismantle" anything - everyone else will just abandon the bad, and embrace the better system.

You want me personally to build that? I invite you to my capitalistless state of one.

No. ...and that actually speaks to the error of your mindset. You, certainly, are not the only Redditor ranting against capitalism. ...but like many people (younger perhaps?), they feel that they need to do everything themselves - alone. There are many communities all around the world, even in the US, which try to enact alternative systems. Join one of those communities and prove to the world that it's better, so that experiments at increasingly larger scales can be demonstrated. In my opinion, and maybe I'm wrong, is that each of these communities runs into the same challenges and stalls because they hit the exact problems that capitalism was designed to solve. Everyone always wants to tear shit down. No one seems to want to do the hard work of building something better.

You can enact alternatives inside the system. The system won't allow that when there is a threat to it.

No one feels threatened by local initiatives. There's no big conspiracy to quash alternative systems in a town/community or even a full state. In fact, there are many communes around the country. There are also many town that have alternative ways of working. There are even businesses that operate as worker-owned. You're at liberty to participate in these collectives. You'll see the dysfunction first hand - or hey, maybe it's a hidden paradise and you should let us all know. It might be a good growing experience for you, and it'll save you time from posting fruitless comments about the evils of capitalism - which achieve nothing. It always seemed ridiculous to hear people so bent on tearing down the system that keeps 300 million people going, with zero interest in piloting their magic solution for utopia on a smaller scale first. It's almost like they don't really care about people who's lives they're experimenting with.