If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools"
read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.
What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.
Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.
That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.
You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)
There is a minority of people where higher amounts of money does not buy more happiness, usually in connection with emotional pain or struggle: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
A more interesting question might be, "What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):
> Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines.
Why? We already have plenty of materials that can, are close, or have potential pathways for functional substitutes depending on the application? We are already pretty reliably able to print metal with machines no bigger than a fridge.
What happens when a curable resin or impregnated plastic can sufficiently replace steel/aluminum/copper for functions? Why would a steel foundry be needed for the desktop then? There are more theoretical materials that haven’t been discovered than there are atoms in the universe or something crazy like that, so it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility or even likelihood. Especially if AI helps accelerate that discovery, as it seems to be doing already according to a recent Faraday talk in a Royal Institution video — "How AI is Reinventing the Battery".
It also used to be that you needed a large machine to make a plastic part…now I print some in 20 minutes with something that sits on my desk. If one thing is true, it’s that materials and technology constantly change and (generally) improve.
Well, that is going at the problem from the wrong direction - you should use a 3D printer not to print everything, rather to print tools and fittings to manufacture what you need from local resources.
In this case for example a saw making tool & make the beam from local wood using 3D printed gauges.
Wood you harvest and cut yourself is not going to match an I beam on strength, you need engineered wood for that, which involves adhesives and composites.
Not to mention, lots of places on earth don't have local wood suitable for construction...
I'd beg to differ, I think the idea of reaching pastoral life in suburbia comes down to one's personal perception, I live in suburbia and I for the most part from the outside in would have everything the average person would like for a comfortable life but I am actively looking to scale, happiness comes from retaking ones independence and reducing reliance on the services provided in the comfort of suburbia, supermarkets, grid power etc.
Maintenance is a concern yes, but self perpetuating finances = free time and to quote Socrates - It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.
As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!
Tribal hunter gatherers cultures (and not agrarian cultures) are very egalitarian. Social mobility is not relevant at all because there is no stratification. You are just you and I think this is some of the beauty we in modern world yearn for. Not only people today but also pre industrially. In Europe we left this hunter gatherer lifestyle several thousand years ago...
All based on some extremely shoddy writing from 1993:
> The origin point for nearly all of those “you work harder than a medieval peasant” memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Schor bases her estimates of medieval working hours on a 1935 article by Nora Kenyon,1 and an unpublished article by Gregory Clark,2 and in both cases ignores the authors’ careful efforts to distinguish between total days worked and instead just cherry-picks the lowest number, even as the authors caution that those numbers likely don’t represent someone’s total employment. Kenyon notes a set of day-laborers working 120 days per year which makes it into Schor’s work, but Kenyon’s final suggestion that the normal annual working year was 308 days does not, for instance. I can’t get at an unpublished article, but Clark has continued to write on the topic and in his 2018 “Growth or stagnation?” presents a detailed argument for a 250-300-day work-year with no sense that this is a revision of his previous positions, leading me to suspect similar cherry-picking as with Kenyon.
If you're going to smelt aluminium on your desktop you're definitely going to want three phase power into your house, and probably some sort of asbestos tile to put it on.
Probably quite a good extractor fan too, Shake'n'Vac isn't going to shift that odour.
I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools.
I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or movie.
I also want freedom from work, but I wouldn't use that freedom to "live simply" or get away from technology.
> Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city without sewage system and finding it nostalgic.
From somebody else's post, to be clear. So the point is ... the coal-smoke environments of the industrial revolution, which replaced natural environments, were also awful, being full of grime and cinders instead of sweat and insects. For this reason we progressed even further. You might observe that we're never satisfied, but that doesn't mean that all situations are equivalent and activity is futile.
The "cut and die" part is happening rather quickly, and you're done with it. But you might be hungry for weeks and have to watch your crops grow. Probably really boring and uncomfortable.
Have you spent lots of time out in the wilderness before? Those you describe aren’t pleasant, but you learn to accept and deal with. I’m sure the are all kinds of unpleasantness in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
I once spent a week hiking and camping in a rain forest. The first day I was trying to keep dry and comfortable as much as possible, and I was miserable.
The second day I realized I’m just not going to be dry, and I accepted it, and being wet didn’t bother me again the rest of the week. At the end of the day you hang you socks and clothes up near the fire and dry your boots.
Being hot and sweaty and dealing with bugs are irritating, but it’s just part of being outdoors and if you spend significant time outside doing stuff you stop noticing it and just accept it as a part of life.
Don’t let a little discomfort stop you from enjoying nature. You might even start to notice the discomforts of modern life that you’ve accepted as a part of life.
I don’t disagree that I could survive without the comfort, and I would probably get used to the discomfort after a while and wouldn’t think about it as much.
What I don’t understand is why it is bad to have gotten used to modern luxuries, or why my life would be better if I gave those up and lived more primitively.
There is a reason we created all of these creature comforts for ourselves, and why very few people actually go through with giving it all up and returning to a more primitive lifestyle. Those things are nice, and most people want them. That is why they were invented in the first place!
> in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
But I don't have any of those for there's a whole spectrum between "go one week hiking" and "live in a city".
Ah, you must live in Paradise! Really though, I'm sure there are some drawbacks in your living arrangement that you have adapted to. Nothing is perfect.
I have spent enough time in nature to know what what I like and don’t like. I am 43 years old, and grew up with a family who went camping multiple times a year all through my childhood. I have some good memories, but I always looked forward to going home to my air conditioner and computers.
I enjoy some time in the forests, especially here in California, and I enjoy short hikes and mountains and the ocean (although I really hate sand.)
Part of it is allergies; I recently was finally tested, and it turns out I am severely allergic to almost all trees and grasses, which explains why I always get so itchy when I am out in nature. I am doing weekly shots to help, and have taken allergy medicine for years (even before I was tested), so we will see if that gets better.
I don’t know what to say about the hot and sweaty and bugs other than to say I think I know myself, and tried for decades to push through those feelings because everyone told me the same thing as you, that being in nature was so great and those things are just part of it and to power through. It never happened for me, and I find the opposite to be true for me… I can power through the discomfort for a while, but eventually it gets to be too much and I need to get away somewhere cool and clean.
I get that you are trying to be helpful and are sharing your experience, but the idea that I am somehow just not understanding how to enjoy nature properly a bit condescending. As I said, I am 43 years old and have spent a ton of time in nature. I have young children, and want them to be able to experience nature, too, so I do spend quite a bit of time in nature these days, because I do think it is important for them.
I have lived in large cities and suburbs, I know the trade offs for both. I agree about the annoyance of traffic and other attributes of the city.
However, you don’t really suffer many of them while you are inside of your house. I have a perfect little personal bubble, where I control the temperature and sounds and light levels. I just like being inside my house, I have infinite things I want to do here.
I have also learned great ways to enjoy nature in my own manner over the years. Our family doesn’t camp, but we do love to rent cabins in the woods. We can go on hikes, the kids can play around in the trees, but then we can go inside and turn on the AC and take warm showers and sleep in nice clean beds.
That is how I like to enjoy nature, on my terms.
I used to feel guilty about this (and a lot of my other preferences that always made me feel like I was doing something wrong or not enjoying life properly, like my dislike of crowds and partying), but as I have gotten older I have become a lot more comfortable with myself and who I am, and no longer feel the need to try to fit in with what I am supposed to like. Finding my wife helped a lot, because she is similar to me and we are very compatible in our lifestyles. Now that I found a partner and have my own family, I no longer feel the need to fit in with how others think I should live my life.
So I hope you really enjoy your trips in nature, and continue to experience it however you want. I will do the same.
It's actually not that hard to return to this lifestyle. Maybe easier than ever before. Just buy an old farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and do your thing. There are many regions in the world where farmland is really cheap and nobody will bother you.
I am 43 years old and have been to many countries and locales. I have enjoyed nature plenty of times. I like short hikes, and pretty views, and seeing different types of nature. I just like to go home to a nice air conditioned room, with a warm shower and clean bed afterwards, and I only want to spend a smaller fraction of my time out in nature.
I live in Southern California, where the temperature is amazing all year round. It doesn’t matter, I still get sweaty and sticky when I am out in nature. We don’t even have many bugs here, it is nothing like when I visit family in Wisconsin or New York, so I don’t know of many places I can go that it will be better.
The amazing thing technology brought me is that I can now have optic fiber in my house in the middle of nowhere. I'm literally typing this while hearing the sound of waves and if I look above my laptop's screen, I see the reflections of the (near full apparently) moon on the sea.
It's a bit of a remote place (closest village is a 10 minutes drive and closest highway is a 45+ minutes drive) so I've got to fix many things around the house myself. My new toy, a 3D printer, is helping me with that: today the wife asked for me to fix the parasol (she wanted to enjoy being outside, without getting sunburned), which I did by 3D printing a few parts. I'm in the middle of nowhere but I'm hardly a luddite.
This afternoon we walked to the beach and my daughter caught two crabs and played with them for half an hour before releasing them: you can have both actual nature and technology: those aren't mutually exclusive.
P.S: my SO needs a lifelong treatment (nothing life-threatening as long as she gets her medication) so the "no tech" / "no modernity" stops right there for me.
That sounds nice. Which parts of the globe do you recommend for such a lifestyle? I assume your not a digital nomad but rather deeply embedded in your environment?
Would love to learn more about this lifestyle. Want online resources you can recommend?
your experience is not applicable to others, thanks for your feedback and we appreciate it. Lots of people understand that nature is a part of life just like you are and live accordingly.
I 100% agree with this, and I fully support people who want to live their lives however they want to. I have no delusions that my preferences are universal.
I just want others to accept the same about me and my preferences.
“ The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.”
The conundrum, as I see it. To master our environment and achieve comfort, we needed the "congealed intellect of our multi billion population". But we also had to trash ecosystems, on which we remain stubbornly dependent (if not for literal survival then certainly for our quality of life). With 8 billion of us, we now have no option but to pool our impacts and live in massive anonymous cities. Even that is damage control. Notwithstanding the fantasies of tech utopians, the only possible solution to all this is to get humanity's population back down to a sustainable level. At which point we can have all the "cobbled villages" we apparently want.
Population density is the problem/challenge I think more so than absolute population. For cobbled villages, there are farms in Japan that use Yamamoto Transport to move fresh produce across the country overnight, cheaply, and now across Asia overnight too. Can also use it as an inexpensive door-to-door parcel delivery service.
That could also become a robotic service too.
But to really zoom out, as someone else pointed out:
"What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
I am thinking here about more than just infinite intelligence, but infinite power. Science fact presenting itself as science fiction. And for that you'd need locked-up and hidden technology. Also ways to deal with all the waste and by-products of human evolution. Well said. Supporting the environment that supports us.
So Hub-and-Spoke layouts over Megacities. Providing breathing space for land and people. As much DIY as possible using scalable best-practices with commodity items. Censorship-resistant. Free-flowing funds, energy and information. Protected whistleblowers using a local-first Fediverse that can toggle anonymity on/off. Harnessing waste streams and up-cycling them, and doing the full "Earth shift" while still reaching for the stars!
This makes me think back to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Whether or not you agree with all his points I do think he has one very good point that’s worth reflecting on: the way we currently live is not the only way to live.
I think another important point to take away from the book is that even if we are not currently on the right path, agriculture and civilization are not inherently exclusive to living in such a way that is in harmony with the world.
There is a world that is possible where we live as good citizens of nature while still retaining civilization and agriculture.
So tying it back to article I think a middle ground is possible, but whatever that might look like, there are other ways to live.
I think that's pretty blatantly obvious there are other ways to live. After all, there are still millions of people surviving on subsistence agriculture in fairly primitive conditions. Still people leading mostly-pastoral lifestyles herding animals. Still millions living in small isolated villages with few modern amenities. Still millions of people living in crowded dirty cities and working in dangerous factories for long hours the way people did in London of the late 1800's. And everything in between. It's funny how so few people voluntarily leave the wealth post-industrial regions to live in any of those, eh?
And the other key theme of the book is that our current trajectory is seemingly heading us straight toward ecological disaster, regardless of how comfortable our current way of life might be.
Besides, his point is not that we need to return to barely living off the land, but to live with the land and with nature, not against it.
I want to be able to freely move around the globe in a floating glass orb with its own WiFi and power outlets, and enough room to put some entertainment stuff in.
There is a persistent point that this article makes really well: numbers. And here, bigger seems to be worse. More people equals feebler interactions, worse social life, more alienation between citizens and government. It's not the full story, but this simple rule is a very solid first approximation that has worked fine for me. The relatively small country where I moved has an ok government. Personally, I've found that small towns work well for me, and I've chosen job and residence based on that principle. I wouldn't mind a countryside cabin for hunting-gathering with friends during weekends :-) .
At the same time, I like global shipping, the Internet, good highways, and I definitely hate tariffs. I don't think we need to be disconnected to be happy. We just need to make the right choices where it matters.
Makes me think of the short story "With friends like these..." by Alan Dean Foster, in which one aspect of the story has people on a future Earth living what appears externally to be a very simple (maybe hunter-gatherer) lifestyle, while still having (hidden) powerful tech
Them damn gen alphas having no sense of punctuation! Back in my day, which was when Millenialism was at its heyday, we used to put commas everywhere we, well, damn, pleased!
Honestly I'm so old that I'm not sure if this remark is satire or an actual attempt to tell me that I'm out of touch. Is writing like this considered normal now?
They are not well structured. They are syntactically correct. But, if a person wrote them, you would say they are badly structured. I have seen tripple negatives and sentences that should be split into four.
Took me a few reads too. I think the intended meaning is:
"There are those who are convinced that there is more to things; they spend their time chasing that 'more' but typically don't find it. And there are those who are convinced there isn't more to things; they find themselves frustrated at the abyss."
Unless you have some super-science auto-fab this is basically a tourist with better equipment, fully dependent on normal society for all the tech and its maintenance.
What we yearn for is probably rather the social aspect of hunter gatherer life plus the proximity to nature rather than the technological. Wondering if there any life designs that work to bring both things together?
Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.
One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"
Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.
Unlike the hunter-gatherer concept, medium sized cities can work. But they don't.
Cities in the 50,000 to 250,000 population range are not doing that well.
That's what drives population to mega-cities. This, when you think about it, is strange. A city in that size is big enough to support multiple factories, large retail establishments, fully equipped hospitals, entertainment businesses, repair services for all key technologies,
and an airport.
So why don't such cities outperform mega-cities, where the friction costs of scale start to get in the way?
This has been studied. Search for "medium sized cities" "problems". The phrase "urban shrinkage" is used in Europe. In most of the developed world, medium cities are not doing well. What seems to happen is that young people leave, the average age becomes older, a smaller fraction of people are in the workforce, factories close, and a slow death begins. Those forms of decline feed each other.
Japan is furthest along this path. Only Tokyo and Osaka grow; the rest of the country has hollowed out. It's a big issue in the US and in Germany. Don't know about other countries.
Without growth, medium sized cities age and die. Yet population is leveling off. Now what?
With the difference that the larger the cities, the less we know the people around us and socialize with them. Totally different if you live in a tribe of 200 people or a mega city with 20 million people around you.
Yes, but the size of community matters. In a 100 people tribe everybody knows everyone else. In 1M city most people are strangers, a.k.a. competitors, enemies even.
I don't hate it, but at the same time things like the power grid and semiconductor manufacturing have supply chains that easily have 100 million people each in them if you follow it down enough. That's probably underestimating it, even. Modern society is super complex like that, however I don't think it's accurate to say that electricity and the internet have not brought any benefits to humanity.
I get it, it can be alienating to live in modern society. But you can create meaning and community even today. Probably not if you spend 80 hours a week in the office, but if you put in the effort to get to know your neighbors, join local sports clubs and keep up with the friendships you've built over the years, having a social group is not out of reach. It's just that you can't maximize for two different goals at the same time.
I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.
I feel the issue we experience in the modern world that it just feels unnatural and alienating to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of people we don't know at all and who don't know us. In a small tribe you have the comfort of knowing everyone around you fairly well. The modern world is so anonymous.
It just depends how far through the eye of the needle we already went, and how far we have to go. I don't want to go backwards. Humans are adapting, always locally, and never uniformly.
But can't sustain itself. The larger it is, the larger the diffuse buffer it needs to support itself, and this diffuse buffer naturally spreads out as well. It's the natural flow of things to do so.
>We want to live in a hunter gatherer mode where we get to follow our curiosities and our ambitions and our vibes and our likes until it reaches the natural conclusion
Title is unrelated to content.
If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.
What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.
Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.
How does the author propose that this work?
That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.
You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)
> You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness.
This has been proven false for most people - money does literally buy happiness for the majority of people: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
There is a minority of people where higher amounts of money does not buy more happiness, usually in connection with emotional pain or struggle: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
A more interesting question might be, "What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):
https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision
> Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines.
Why? We already have plenty of materials that can, are close, or have potential pathways for functional substitutes depending on the application? We are already pretty reliably able to print metal with machines no bigger than a fridge.
What happens when a curable resin or impregnated plastic can sufficiently replace steel/aluminum/copper for functions? Why would a steel foundry be needed for the desktop then? There are more theoretical materials that haven’t been discovered than there are atoms in the universe or something crazy like that, so it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility or even likelihood. Especially if AI helps accelerate that discovery, as it seems to be doing already according to a recent Faraday talk in a Royal Institution video — "How AI is Reinventing the Battery".
It also used to be that you needed a large machine to make a plastic part…now I print some in 20 minutes with something that sits on my desk. If one thing is true, it’s that materials and technology constantly change and (generally) improve.
...this commenter has never worked in manufacturing or studied materials science, and it shows.
Or, I'd wager, dropped a 3D printed resin part on a hard floor and watched it shatter like glass.
I-beam made from PLA with 3D belt printer.[1] Can be looked at.
I-beam made from steel with rolling mill.[2] Can hold up large building.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ-h-ErqrEg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfaqrVFnQBQ
Well, that is going at the problem from the wrong direction - you should use a 3D printer not to print everything, rather to print tools and fittings to manufacture what you need from local resources.
In this case for example a saw making tool & make the beam from local wood using 3D printed gauges.
Wood you harvest and cut yourself is not going to match an I beam on strength, you need engineered wood for that, which involves adhesives and composites.
Not to mention, lots of places on earth don't have local wood suitable for construction...
yup. haha.
imagine 3d-printing a TEU. Or a container hauler.
I'd beg to differ, I think the idea of reaching pastoral life in suburbia comes down to one's personal perception, I live in suburbia and I for the most part from the outside in would have everything the average person would like for a comfortable life but I am actively looking to scale, happiness comes from retaking ones independence and reducing reliance on the services provided in the comfort of suburbia, supermarkets, grid power etc.
Maintenance is a concern yes, but self perpetuating finances = free time and to quote Socrates - It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.
As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!
The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "so, TFA wants us to become the Yautja?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species)
(btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)
Brett Devereaux's series of articles "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" is a must read for anyone who benefits from modern technology, IMO: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
Pre-industrial life was dominated by labor, struggle and death. There was virtually no social, intellectual or economic mobility. It sucked!
Tribal hunter gatherers cultures (and not agrarian cultures) are very egalitarian. Social mobility is not relevant at all because there is no stratification. You are just you and I think this is some of the beauty we in modern world yearn for. Not only people today but also pre industrially. In Europe we left this hunter gatherer lifestyle several thousand years ago...
You have people right on this website who are convinced medieval peasants lived a life of leisure and worked 100 days a year.
All based on some extremely shoddy writing from 1993:
> The origin point for nearly all of those “you work harder than a medieval peasant” memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Schor bases her estimates of medieval working hours on a 1935 article by Nora Kenyon,1 and an unpublished article by Gregory Clark,2 and in both cases ignores the authors’ careful efforts to distinguish between total days worked and instead just cherry-picks the lowest number, even as the authors caution that those numbers likely don’t represent someone’s total employment. Kenyon notes a set of day-laborers working 120 days per year which makes it into Schor’s work, but Kenyon’s final suggestion that the normal annual working year was 308 days does not, for instance. I can’t get at an unpublished article, but Clark has continued to write on the topic and in his 2018 “Growth or stagnation?” presents a detailed argument for a 250-300-day work-year with no sense that this is a revision of his previous positions, leading me to suspect similar cherry-picking as with Kenyon.
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an...
> Those don't scale down well to desktop size.
If you're going to smelt aluminium on your desktop you're definitely going to want three phase power into your house, and probably some sort of asbestos tile to put it on.
Probably quite a good extractor fan too, Shake'n'Vac isn't going to shift that odour.
We made some commemorative coins from lead, melted in a microwave oven & poured into silicone mold. The mold was created from a 3D printed mandrel.
I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools.
I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or movie.
I also want freedom from work, but I wouldn't use that freedom to "live simply" or get away from technology.
> Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city without sewage system and finding it nostalgic.
From a post earlier today
From somebody else's post, to be clear. So the point is ... the coal-smoke environments of the industrial revolution, which replaced natural environments, were also awful, being full of grime and cinders instead of sweat and insects. For this reason we progressed even further. You might observe that we're never satisfied, but that doesn't mean that all situations are equivalent and activity is futile.
The title says hunter gatherers. That's totally different from life 150 years ago. It's even different from the medieval or agrarian iron age times.
>> The title says hunter gatherers.
Right, and also adds "with space age tools".
Aww, you don't get it - steam trains are so cool! :)
Just don't get the embers into your eyes and it will be fine. :)
I get the nature thing, but people just don’t ‘play the tape until the end’. It’s all nice until you get a minor cut and die from a simple infection.
The "cut and die" part is happening rather quickly, and you're done with it. But you might be hungry for weeks and have to watch your crops grow. Probably really boring and uncomfortable.
Have you spent lots of time out in the wilderness before? Those you describe aren’t pleasant, but you learn to accept and deal with. I’m sure the are all kinds of unpleasantness in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
I once spent a week hiking and camping in a rain forest. The first day I was trying to keep dry and comfortable as much as possible, and I was miserable.
The second day I realized I’m just not going to be dry, and I accepted it, and being wet didn’t bother me again the rest of the week. At the end of the day you hang you socks and clothes up near the fire and dry your boots.
Being hot and sweaty and dealing with bugs are irritating, but it’s just part of being outdoors and if you spend significant time outside doing stuff you stop noticing it and just accept it as a part of life.
Don’t let a little discomfort stop you from enjoying nature. You might even start to notice the discomforts of modern life that you’ve accepted as a part of life.
Love it and totally agree. The comfort we think we need is nothing else than hedonic adaptation.
I don’t disagree that I could survive without the comfort, and I would probably get used to the discomfort after a while and wouldn’t think about it as much.
What I don’t understand is why it is bad to have gotten used to modern luxuries, or why my life would be better if I gave those up and lived more primitively.
There is a reason we created all of these creature comforts for ourselves, and why very few people actually go through with giving it all up and returning to a more primitive lifestyle. Those things are nice, and most people want them. That is why they were invented in the first place!
> in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
But I don't have any of those for there's a whole spectrum between "go one week hiking" and "live in a city".
Ah, you must live in Paradise! Really though, I'm sure there are some drawbacks in your living arrangement that you have adapted to. Nothing is perfect.
I have spent enough time in nature to know what what I like and don’t like. I am 43 years old, and grew up with a family who went camping multiple times a year all through my childhood. I have some good memories, but I always looked forward to going home to my air conditioner and computers.
I enjoy some time in the forests, especially here in California, and I enjoy short hikes and mountains and the ocean (although I really hate sand.)
Part of it is allergies; I recently was finally tested, and it turns out I am severely allergic to almost all trees and grasses, which explains why I always get so itchy when I am out in nature. I am doing weekly shots to help, and have taken allergy medicine for years (even before I was tested), so we will see if that gets better.
I don’t know what to say about the hot and sweaty and bugs other than to say I think I know myself, and tried for decades to push through those feelings because everyone told me the same thing as you, that being in nature was so great and those things are just part of it and to power through. It never happened for me, and I find the opposite to be true for me… I can power through the discomfort for a while, but eventually it gets to be too much and I need to get away somewhere cool and clean.
I get that you are trying to be helpful and are sharing your experience, but the idea that I am somehow just not understanding how to enjoy nature properly a bit condescending. As I said, I am 43 years old and have spent a ton of time in nature. I have young children, and want them to be able to experience nature, too, so I do spend quite a bit of time in nature these days, because I do think it is important for them.
I have lived in large cities and suburbs, I know the trade offs for both. I agree about the annoyance of traffic and other attributes of the city.
However, you don’t really suffer many of them while you are inside of your house. I have a perfect little personal bubble, where I control the temperature and sounds and light levels. I just like being inside my house, I have infinite things I want to do here.
I have also learned great ways to enjoy nature in my own manner over the years. Our family doesn’t camp, but we do love to rent cabins in the woods. We can go on hikes, the kids can play around in the trees, but then we can go inside and turn on the AC and take warm showers and sleep in nice clean beds.
That is how I like to enjoy nature, on my terms.
I used to feel guilty about this (and a lot of my other preferences that always made me feel like I was doing something wrong or not enjoying life properly, like my dislike of crowds and partying), but as I have gotten older I have become a lot more comfortable with myself and who I am, and no longer feel the need to try to fit in with what I am supposed to like. Finding my wife helped a lot, because she is similar to me and we are very compatible in our lifestyles. Now that I found a partner and have my own family, I no longer feel the need to fit in with how others think I should live my life.
So I hope you really enjoy your trips in nature, and continue to experience it however you want. I will do the same.
It's actually not that hard to return to this lifestyle. Maybe easier than ever before. Just buy an old farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and do your thing. There are many regions in the world where farmland is really cheap and nobody will bother you.
> I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs
To me, it sounds like you haven't been in nature at enough places to find the one that talks and belongs to you.
Travel more.
I am 43 years old and have been to many countries and locales. I have enjoyed nature plenty of times. I like short hikes, and pretty views, and seeing different types of nature. I just like to go home to a nice air conditioned room, with a warm shower and clean bed afterwards, and I only want to spend a smaller fraction of my time out in nature.
> I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs
Maybe go somewhere colder, or in a different season.
I live in Southern California, where the temperature is amazing all year round. It doesn’t matter, I still get sweaty and sticky when I am out in nature. We don’t even have many bugs here, it is nothing like when I visit family in Wisconsin or New York, so I don’t know of many places I can go that it will be better.
The amazing thing technology brought me is that I can now have optic fiber in my house in the middle of nowhere. I'm literally typing this while hearing the sound of waves and if I look above my laptop's screen, I see the reflections of the (near full apparently) moon on the sea.
It's a bit of a remote place (closest village is a 10 minutes drive and closest highway is a 45+ minutes drive) so I've got to fix many things around the house myself. My new toy, a 3D printer, is helping me with that: today the wife asked for me to fix the parasol (she wanted to enjoy being outside, without getting sunburned), which I did by 3D printing a few parts. I'm in the middle of nowhere but I'm hardly a luddite.
This afternoon we walked to the beach and my daughter caught two crabs and played with them for half an hour before releasing them: you can have both actual nature and technology: those aren't mutually exclusive.
P.S: my SO needs a lifelong treatment (nothing life-threatening as long as she gets her medication) so the "no tech" / "no modernity" stops right there for me.
That sounds nice. Which parts of the globe do you recommend for such a lifestyle? I assume your not a digital nomad but rather deeply embedded in your environment? Would love to learn more about this lifestyle. Want online resources you can recommend?
Good thing your ancestors did not think like that!
I'm sure they did.
Buddhist's view everyday existence within samsara (the cycle of rebirth) as inherently marked by dissatisfaction, pain, and impermanence.
Those kinds of beliefs reflect the lived reality of our ancestors.
Try traveling to countries and cities where you can live with all modern comforts in your hotel/Airbnb room and still be close to nature.
Green mountains, fresh air, and still get 5G and order food or taxi to wherever you are.
your experience is not applicable to others, thanks for your feedback and we appreciate it. Lots of people understand that nature is a part of life just like you are and live accordingly.
I 100% agree with this, and I fully support people who want to live their lives however they want to. I have no delusions that my preferences are universal.
I just want others to accept the same about me and my preferences.
“ The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.”
Except none of that ever existed
I don't agree. It's a description of a simple hunter gatherer life. Why do you say this has never existed?
The conundrum, as I see it. To master our environment and achieve comfort, we needed the "congealed intellect of our multi billion population". But we also had to trash ecosystems, on which we remain stubbornly dependent (if not for literal survival then certainly for our quality of life). With 8 billion of us, we now have no option but to pool our impacts and live in massive anonymous cities. Even that is damage control. Notwithstanding the fantasies of tech utopians, the only possible solution to all this is to get humanity's population back down to a sustainable level. At which point we can have all the "cobbled villages" we apparently want.
Population density is the problem/challenge I think more so than absolute population. For cobbled villages, there are farms in Japan that use Yamamoto Transport to move fresh produce across the country overnight, cheaply, and now across Asia overnight too. Can also use it as an inexpensive door-to-door parcel delivery service.
That could also become a robotic service too.
But to really zoom out, as someone else pointed out:
"What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
I am thinking here about more than just infinite intelligence, but infinite power. Science fact presenting itself as science fiction. And for that you'd need locked-up and hidden technology. Also ways to deal with all the waste and by-products of human evolution. Well said. Supporting the environment that supports us.
So Hub-and-Spoke layouts over Megacities. Providing breathing space for land and people. As much DIY as possible using scalable best-practices with commodity items. Censorship-resistant. Free-flowing funds, energy and information. Protected whistleblowers using a local-first Fediverse that can toggle anonymity on/off. Harnessing waste streams and up-cycling them, and doing the full "Earth shift" while still reaching for the stars!
Isn't this solarpunk in a nutshell?
This makes me think back to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Whether or not you agree with all his points I do think he has one very good point that’s worth reflecting on: the way we currently live is not the only way to live.
I think another important point to take away from the book is that even if we are not currently on the right path, agriculture and civilization are not inherently exclusive to living in such a way that is in harmony with the world.
There is a world that is possible where we live as good citizens of nature while still retaining civilization and agriculture.
So tying it back to article I think a middle ground is possible, but whatever that might look like, there are other ways to live.
I think that's pretty blatantly obvious there are other ways to live. After all, there are still millions of people surviving on subsistence agriculture in fairly primitive conditions. Still people leading mostly-pastoral lifestyles herding animals. Still millions living in small isolated villages with few modern amenities. Still millions of people living in crowded dirty cities and working in dangerous factories for long hours the way people did in London of the late 1800's. And everything in between. It's funny how so few people voluntarily leave the wealth post-industrial regions to live in any of those, eh?
And the other key theme of the book is that our current trajectory is seemingly heading us straight toward ecological disaster, regardless of how comfortable our current way of life might be.
Besides, his point is not that we need to return to barely living off the land, but to live with the land and with nature, not against it.
Excellent article, largely agree. Another related issue is that we are not evolved for the modern stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo
I want to be able to freely move around the globe in a floating glass orb with its own WiFi and power outlets, and enough room to put some entertainment stuff in.
There is a persistent point that this article makes really well: numbers. And here, bigger seems to be worse. More people equals feebler interactions, worse social life, more alienation between citizens and government. It's not the full story, but this simple rule is a very solid first approximation that has worked fine for me. The relatively small country where I moved has an ok government. Personally, I've found that small towns work well for me, and I've chosen job and residence based on that principle. I wouldn't mind a countryside cabin for hunting-gathering with friends during weekends :-) .
At the same time, I like global shipping, the Internet, good highways, and I definitely hate tariffs. I don't think we need to be disconnected to be happy. We just need to make the right choices where it matters.
Makes me think of the short story "With friends like these..." by Alan Dean Foster, in which one aspect of the story has people on a future Earth living what appears externally to be a very simple (maybe hunter-gatherer) lifestyle, while still having (hidden) powerful tech
What’s that first sentence? I can’t find the breaks.
Sure sign of llm free writing, baffling sentence construction.
Them damn gen alphas having no sense of punctuation! Back in my day, which was when Millenialism was at its heyday, we used to put commas everywhere we, well, damn, pleased!
So did Edgar Allan Poe. As a non-native speaker, it's, to say the least, a challenging read.
Honestly I'm so old that I'm not sure if this remark is satire or an actual attempt to tell me that I'm out of touch. Is writing like this considered normal now?
I meant it as satire, yes.
Not normal but some people just can't leave Reddit.
I dunno, claude generates pure linguistic puzzles in javadoc.
Funnily enough, the underlying signal is what’s nonsensical; the individual sentences are always well structured
They are not well structured. They are syntactically correct. But, if a person wrote them, you would say they are badly structured. I have seen tripple negatives and sentences that should be split into four.
Took me a few reads too. I think the intended meaning is:
"There are those who are convinced that there is more to things; they spend their time chasing that 'more' but typically don't find it. And there are those who are convinced there isn't more to things; they find themselves frustrated at the abyss."
I had 0 issue reading it. Actually that's how I write as well.
Unless you have some super-science auto-fab this is basically a tourist with better equipment, fully dependent on normal society for all the tech and its maintenance.
What we yearn for is probably rather the social aspect of hunter gatherer life plus the proximity to nature rather than the technological. Wondering if there any life designs that work to bring both things together?
Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.
One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"
Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.
> Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.
Unlike the hunter-gatherer concept, medium sized cities can work. But they don't.
Cities in the 50,000 to 250,000 population range are not doing that well. That's what drives population to mega-cities. This, when you think about it, is strange. A city in that size is big enough to support multiple factories, large retail establishments, fully equipped hospitals, entertainment businesses, repair services for all key technologies, and an airport. So why don't such cities outperform mega-cities, where the friction costs of scale start to get in the way?
This has been studied. Search for "medium sized cities" "problems". The phrase "urban shrinkage" is used in Europe. In most of the developed world, medium cities are not doing well. What seems to happen is that young people leave, the average age becomes older, a smaller fraction of people are in the workforce, factories close, and a slow death begins. Those forms of decline feed each other.
Japan is furthest along this path. Only Tokyo and Osaka grow; the rest of the country has hollowed out. It's a big issue in the US and in Germany. Don't know about other countries.
Without growth, medium sized cities age and die. Yet population is leveling off. Now what?
Even for the social butterfly, the number of others someone can actually communicate with is capped at a reasonably low number.
With the difference that the larger the cities, the less we know the people around us and socialize with them. Totally different if you live in a tribe of 200 people or a mega city with 20 million people around you.
Yes, but the size of community matters. In a 100 people tribe everybody knows everyone else. In 1M city most people are strangers, a.k.a. competitors, enemies even.
People competed all the time within tribes, even to the point of violence. Myths like Cain and Abel didn't come from nowhere.
We also don't want to die of pneumonia at 11.
People in villages of 1000 don't die of pneumonia at 11 either.
We can let the weirdos that want to live in huge cities make the anti-pneumonia medicine and use it elsewhere.
I don't hate it, but at the same time things like the power grid and semiconductor manufacturing have supply chains that easily have 100 million people each in them if you follow it down enough. That's probably underestimating it, even. Modern society is super complex like that, however I don't think it's accurate to say that electricity and the internet have not brought any benefits to humanity.
I get it, it can be alienating to live in modern society. But you can create meaning and community even today. Probably not if you spend 80 hours a week in the office, but if you put in the effort to get to know your neighbors, join local sports clubs and keep up with the friendships you've built over the years, having a social group is not out of reach. It's just that you can't maximize for two different goals at the same time.
I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.
I feel the issue we experience in the modern world that it just feels unnatural and alienating to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of people we don't know at all and who don't know us. In a small tribe you have the comfort of knowing everyone around you fairly well. The modern world is so anonymous.
True, but also small town life sure isn't for everyone. Megacities exist because a lot of people actually like living in them.
It just depends how far through the eye of the needle we already went, and how far we have to go. I don't want to go backwards. Humans are adapting, always locally, and never uniformly.
Humans weren't built at all.
i like breaking bad in RimWorld
Centralizing populations helps with energy and transportation efficiency, which is important if you care about the environment.
But can't sustain itself. The larger it is, the larger the diffuse buffer it needs to support itself, and this diffuse buffer naturally spreads out as well. It's the natural flow of things to do so.
It’s far more sustainable than the suburbs
No need for a lot of transportation as we have good communication.
What about physical goods?
Localize production where possible. Forget about scaling at all costs, because some costs aren't worth it.
We have to move to stars, maybe not all at once.
I don't know about all this. I want a society where I have healthcare and can safely eat a salad.
Haha. That was a funny juxtaposition.
>We want to live in a hunter gatherer mode where we get to follow our curiosities and our ambitions and our vibes and our likes until it reaches the natural conclusion
We don't all want that.
isnt it a major part of a star trek movie too?
The one with the purple space bazooka
What we want is The Culture, or, more precisely: fully automated luxury gay space communism
I definitely dont want any of that.
Nonsensical drum circle naivety.
Go to some of the poorer parts of the world and live the life of a subsistence farmer for a while.
There is a reason people move to cities, and it generally involves their children not starving to death.