This seems a potentially valuable exercise for sharpening our understanding of what the future might look like. A couple of comments.
You don’t say what you mean by ‘better’. What do you mean, exactly? Sorry if you said this elsewhere. Without that criterion specified, it’s hard to interrogate the analysis. I’m inclined to understand better by ‘happier’, that is, with an improved balance of pleasure over pain, and imagine you probably mean something like this too.
Assuming we’re thinking in terms of happiness, I’ll flag now what I hope the future posts contain—I note you’re just giving your answers here, and not your reasoning.
One thing is an understanding of the role happiness plays in evolution, that is, as a mechanism rewarding or punishing for the things that help and survive and reproduce. So, one would want to say why, given the sort of creatures that we are, we’re better/worse living our lives in one sort of societial configuration than another.
The other piece is to focus particularly on time use—how people actually spend their lives—rather than just imagining their lives in snapshots. Psychological research shows that we make predictable mistakes when engaging in ‘affective forecasting’. On such bias is ‘focusing illusions’, where we let our judgments be driven by the stuff that’s easy to imagine. Another is ‘duration neglect’, where our judgments of how good/bad things are pay very little attention to the passage of time.
Taking this together, how would we go about answering your question? In short, you’d want to know how good/bad the average, ordinary day in someone’s life is. Hunter-gatherers seemed to have things pretty good: I can’t immediately remember where I read this—maybe Sapiens—but I understand hunter-gatherers don’t spend very much time working, ie looking for food, and do spend lots of time socialising. In the agricultural and industrial ages, people spend many more hours working, and the work was less fun—tilling fields and working looms vs gathering berries and hunting. It’s not so obvious to me that modernity is better than all that came before: as a result of technology, we increasingly live desk-bound, socially isolated lives.
I might add I haven’t thought lots about this historical comparison piece, so this is not a ‘cold take’.
Interesting add, I guess the one thing that comes to mind is people tend to perceive work that is different as more fulfilling (due to diminishing marginal returns). So, the assumption that gathering berries and hunting is more fulfilling than a desk job is in part driven by most people’s experience working at a desk their entire professional lives. It seems less obvious to me that hunting and gathering is an inherently more fulfilling type of work, but rather is such a different experience than a desk job that it would be more satisfying in the short-term. My guess is that this fulfilment decreases once you have been doing it for a long period of time.
As someone who is clearly not a hunter-gatherer, I wouldn’t say I have good intuition regarding the long-term fulfilment of such a job and it could be that it is more rewarding. My main point is that at least some of the “Eden” myth is driven by the frame of reference. If people believe humans now are unable to appreciate the benefits of modern society from a happiness standpoint, why would we be more likely to appreciate the benefits of a pre-agrarian society? Would we not also take certain things for granted and want more than we have? (this question is only in part rhetorical and if anyone has ideas I would love to hear them)
This seems a potentially valuable exercise for sharpening our understanding of what the future might look like. A couple of comments.
You don’t say what you mean by ‘better’. What do you mean, exactly? Sorry if you said this elsewhere. Without that criterion specified, it’s hard to interrogate the analysis. I’m inclined to understand better by ‘happier’, that is, with an improved balance of pleasure over pain, and imagine you probably mean something like this too.
Assuming we’re thinking in terms of happiness, I’ll flag now what I hope the future posts contain—I note you’re just giving your answers here, and not your reasoning.
One thing is an understanding of the role happiness plays in evolution, that is, as a mechanism rewarding or punishing for the things that help and survive and reproduce. So, one would want to say why, given the sort of creatures that we are, we’re better/worse living our lives in one sort of societial configuration than another.
The other piece is to focus particularly on time use—how people actually spend their lives—rather than just imagining their lives in snapshots. Psychological research shows that we make predictable mistakes when engaging in ‘affective forecasting’. On such bias is ‘focusing illusions’, where we let our judgments be driven by the stuff that’s easy to imagine. Another is ‘duration neglect’, where our judgments of how good/bad things are pay very little attention to the passage of time.
Taking this together, how would we go about answering your question? In short, you’d want to know how good/bad the average, ordinary day in someone’s life is. Hunter-gatherers seemed to have things pretty good: I can’t immediately remember where I read this—maybe Sapiens—but I understand hunter-gatherers don’t spend very much time working, ie looking for food, and do spend lots of time socialising. In the agricultural and industrial ages, people spend many more hours working, and the work was less fun—tilling fields and working looms vs gathering berries and hunting. It’s not so obvious to me that modernity is better than all that came before: as a result of technology, we increasingly live desk-bound, socially isolated lives.
I might add I haven’t thought lots about this historical comparison piece, so this is not a ‘cold take’.
Interesting add, I guess the one thing that comes to mind is people tend to perceive work that is different as more fulfilling (due to diminishing marginal returns). So, the assumption that gathering berries and hunting is more fulfilling than a desk job is in part driven by most people’s experience working at a desk their entire professional lives. It seems less obvious to me that hunting and gathering is an inherently more fulfilling type of work, but rather is such a different experience than a desk job that it would be more satisfying in the short-term. My guess is that this fulfilment decreases once you have been doing it for a long period of time.
As someone who is clearly not a hunter-gatherer, I wouldn’t say I have good intuition regarding the long-term fulfilment of such a job and it could be that it is more rewarding. My main point is that at least some of the “Eden” myth is driven by the frame of reference. If people believe humans now are unable to appreciate the benefits of modern society from a happiness standpoint, why would we be more likely to appreciate the benefits of a pre-agrarian society? Would we not also take certain things for granted and want more than we have? (this question is only in part rhetorical and if anyone has ideas I would love to hear them)