Makes sense to me. Their "work" was essentially just ... living life!<p>Now, living life is what you do with about 5-15% of your time. The rest is work/red tape/...
If hunting/gathering is play and since that's basically what all animals do, then the blog's title, "play makes us human" is totally incorrect. Of course other animals play, we've all seen it.<p>It seems the opposite: toil makes us human. Our inability to accept what can be foraged has pushed us into working.
I don't think theres one simple conclusion to this ongoing general question of pre-history vs modernity but I remember coming across the infanticide and geriatricide rates in pre-agricultural societies (not that they were / are all the same) at some point and having it complicate my thinking pretty drastically.<p>I believe it was in here, its a quick interesting read in any case.<p><a href="http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scan...</a>
If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was play, it for sure was closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun.<p>Also, sharing of work was already a thing back than: hunters hunted, others went gathering, again others built tools...<p>Damn it, and I swore I wouldn't read stuff from substack again...
This resonates very strongly with me.<p>When I lived in the Yukon working as a Software Engineer I got into moose and bison hunting, I help friends build off-grid log cabin houses, I harvested wild berries, caught a freezer full of salmon every year and tried to live the "homestead" life as much as possible. I packed these adventures into weekends and time off.<p>These activities are physically demanding, cold and arduous. They were also some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life, and they are extremely strong memories that I often talk about and long for.<p>There is something about working for my own survival that is way, way more deeply satisfying than simply going to work to earn money to pay for my survival.<p>I wrote about my first ever moose hunting experience here: <a href="http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting</a><p>Salmon fishing always involved grizzlies: <a href="http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haines-alaska" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haine...</a>
All is fun and games until you face and evetually get wiped out by more advanced farmer-based societies, with specialized labor (army), more developed tools (weapons and cavalry) and much more sophisticated social structure (elites deciding where to expand). Jared Diamond wrote a lot on this subject.
One thing that many modern takes on hunter gatherers gloss over is the way women were treated. There was profound sexual inequality.<p>Often hunter gatherer societies practiced polygyny. Women were mainly valued for their ability to bear children. Women were often seen as a possession - first to their fathers who would sell them (bride price) to their husbands. Often there was no consent.<p>In addition, the modern states that these hunter gatherer societies are a part of don’t allow them to practice unrestricted warfare quite like they used to. So bands can’t go around killing all the males and taking the conquered tribe’s women and supplies. Because of this, looking at hunter gatherer societies that exist now is not necessarily reflective of how it actually was.
The author ignores most of the differences between primitive life and modern life.<p>Gathering nuts is not as much fun when you have a infected foot and an infected tooth.
> Boston College research professor Peter Gray specializes in the nature and value of play.<p>Of course Peter finds play in everything because that's his frame of looking at things.<p>The entire thing is a bit of a joke in how simplistic and fallacious it is.<p>Work is not play because it's unpleasant but the HG work is play because it's fun (not much, it's social, is challenging/not routine/boring and it's optional). It has to deliberately dismiss the need of survival as "well, but they were many so some could avoid working for a month and all would be good " so the reward (food for survival) was not the goal and the goal was play.<p>If there's an abundance of resources that allow you to survive and you don't have a high demand, then you'll have less stress than in other scenario. How is that not Economy 101?<p>There's this fetichism for "the simple life" from people that, I'd conjecture, clearly don't like theirs that much and project it unto others, where they get surprised at "those basic people" having skills, proficiency and actual culture and the capacity to be happy. How can they be happy without competing for a Tesla to make the neighbour jealous, seems to be the silly type of thinking. One of "ignorance is bliss".<p>Extremely poor article in every sense. He should read more or actually engage in anthropology. Surveys don't cut it, I'm afraid.<p>The cherry on top is: "machines should work for us, I don't want to have to produce the drivel for my work, please someone release me from my 'toil' so I can just drink wine with my friends."