Comment by abdullahkhalids

This is not supported by anthropological facts in the slightest.

First of all, the argument conflates hunter gatherers, nomadic tribes, and farming societies. The mean and variance in food supply in all three across the world and time varied quite a bit. Were the numbers so bad uniformly that people had no time for leisure activity!?!

Across history, there is evidence of people having huge celebratory festivals, involving excess food, dancing, and other rituals. People have been building for thousands of years humongous temples and pyramids and other structures requiring decades of continuous work, most of them without slave labor but voluntarily. Spending significant part of the day praying to the gods has also been the hallmark of humans. Do any of these strike you as low energy activities?

Or take a look at biology. Most animals with some intelligence spends a non-trivial amount of its time in play. Why would humans not?

wrycoder 4 days ago

Do what humans usually did - hunt some dinner, hang around, maybe go aggravate the neighboring tribe a bit, if you’re feeling feisty.

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seadan83 4 days ago

How do you hunt for dinner in a cold winter? I appreciate your glibness, I was equally glib when I wrote "everyone"

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- wrycoder 4 days ago
  
  Well, you put on your furs and go hunting. Tracking is easier in the snow. Or you stay in your shelter and eat some jerky. And, I'm not being glib - life was simple and you did what I said.
  
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  seadan83 3 days ago
  
  Okay, and when your feisty neighbors take all your jerky and have hunted all the animals that are not in hibernating - then what?
  While "simple", that does not equate to abundant nor easy. Or, would you agree that there was plenty of abundance even during northern winters?
  If there was such abundance, and things were as simple as hunting every now and then- why so many famines in history [1]? Surely any cause of famine could be remediated by going out and doing a little more hunting?
  [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
  
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seadan83 4 days ago

Not in the very slightest? Didn't most early american colonies die of starvation and disease?

I feel you completely discounted this: "Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure." And instead responded to only the following simplification as if it were an absolute point: "In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve"

Though, let us both stop nitpicking. It is hard to convey the full nuance, particularly when tapping this out on a phone.

In fairness, I did conflate a few concepts and did not convey some nuance. Though my point that humans are not adapted for our current lifestyle remains.

(1) serfs were not voluntarily lifting weights for leisure.

(2) humans were not historically jacked. They were lean. They looked like thru-hikers, or marathon runners. It is the reason why having fat was a beauty standard. Onky the rich could have that many excess calories and not be M tan from working. The body does not choose to put on unnecessary levels of muscle without training and constant nutrition

I did not mean to convey as was read into my statements that humans did zero leisure. It is an absurd claim. Though, running a marathon for the hell of it is likely well out of the cards for most people, particularly in a winter climate. To which my point, the need to go for intentional walks was less than what it is today. Not zero, but less.

As for the conflation, the lack of nutrition was particularly salient in WWII when most Americans were not getting enough calories.

"LeBlanc argues that the U.S. military’s interest in nutrition research exploded in the 1940s, after it began seeking healthy recruits to deploy in World War II and found a male population physically weakened by years of malnutrition during the Great Depression." [1]

Celebrating during a harvest makes sense. A lot of that food is liable to go bad. It is a time of plenty,in contrast to long winters before canning was invented.

My point is the need for recreational leisure amongst adults was less than compared to present day in "post industrial countries" for two reasons: (1) substance living intrinsically involves physical activity. (2) food scarcity. Yeah, it is easy to strawman my argument as if there was no excess expenditure of energy. I'll re-iterate my point is that subsistance living is not conducive to a lot of excess calorie expenditure. Second to that, the number of people who were at a subsistence level was historically far higher. Third, a lifestyle where time is measured more in months and seasons, where one needs to do "everything" manually - is fundamentally different then the lifestyles of today (where with $100, today you can eat as well as did the King of France)

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/01/historian-traces-m...

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