How to Live Like a Hunter-Gatherer in the 21st Century
By: Escape Pod
Tags: Agriculture, Economics, Food, Sustainability, Environment

“We need to stop telling ourselves that we exist to dominate the planet’s resources,” I wrote a while back in “Is your work truly essential?” Like every other organism on the planet, I continued, we need to “live within the life cycle of the ecosystems we occupy. Just because we can hack down every tree and extract every thimble of oil doesn’t mean we should.”

And in order to tell that new story, I proposed, “I’ve come to believe that we need to simulate fully post-consumerist, post-labor living” — not because that’s definitively our goal, but because it because “it could be our goal.”

Jim Latham, who’s become one of my most valued readers on Medium, highlighted “post-labor living,” and appended to it the following challenge:

Maybe we need more labor, not less? If we spend all day behind a mule plowing the field, we won't burn as much electricity at night making and uploading TikTok videos. [Editor's note: RIP TikTok ?]

“This might be an important semantic distinction,” I replied to Jim.

I define “labor” as work with a market value. So doing more of our own subsistence work, and doing less subsistence labor (in other words, working less for owners) is probably our goal? But I also believe that machines will help smooth the transition. And I’m going to get into this more in my next essay. [You’re reading that essay, btw] 18th Century farmers (and factory workers) labored horrid hours. But our hunter-gatherer ancestors took it pretty easy. Which is why there’s a direct correlation between agriculture and the brutal work day (not to mention the rise of large civilizations, class stratification, slavery, and large-scale war). When people are active, spiritual stewards of the land (see: all the tribes of “California” pre-Junípero Serra, for instance), people didn’t toil eight (or 14) hours a day in the sun. They knew the food rhythms of the season. They hunted and trapped year round. An Ohlone deer hunter might spend five days just sweating and fasting before he went out to kill one deer. Acorn harvesting season was a concentrated few weeks of work. But it was also a party. Everyone from all the tribelets that shared a grove would dance and sing their way through it. Work, but joyful. Long story short, I think we need to be a lot more like our living-in-harmony-with-nature hunter-gatherer forbears. But the land won’t support the eight (or 10 or 12) billion people who live on earth, anymore, without some really concentrated, dare-I-say artificial calorie production. That’s where I think things like vertical agriculture and even food printers and meat labs and cricket farms might play a role in semi-automating — de-laboring — subsistence work. Not because it’s better if machines do it. But because intensive subsistence work seems to always beget stratification in the anthropological record. If you need to tend a field all day for 2/3 of the year, someone will figure out a way to become a lord and exploit some serfs to do his farming for him. But if you live in a culture where your spiritual life is about collecting acorns every fall, you don’t scheme to get someone else to gather them for you.

And Jim wrote back:

My apologies. I read it when I was at work, but with switching to nights then days my recall of what I read at work is HORRIBLE. I think your reference to the deer hunter is especially relevant. Since moving to Alaska I've hunted, which I never did growing up, and fished for reasonable percentage of my yearly calories. There is an undeniable feeling of connection with the larger world when you spend four days stalking a moose prior to shooting it and then work for a day to butcher it and carry it on your back to the trailhead. Or when you pull salmon one by one from a river, knowing they left this river years before to travel the oceans before returning. Farmers and gardeners report the same thing, as you note. What I was fumbling at in my previous reply is that I think expending effort that is directly linked to our calorie intake is fundamentally beneficial to humans in the same way that walking in a forest is.

(I just want to take a moment and point out that I don’t believe there’s anywhere else on the internet that better facilitates the kind of conversation — the “I take issue”-to-mind-meeting journey — Jim and I had. When I talk about Medium with friends who spend a lot of time on Twitter, I describe it as a place where a “hot take” usually begins with, “I truly appreciated this article, but I do take issue with how you characterized [blank]” 😂😂😂. It’s not that everyone agrees on this platform; but people sure as hell are a lot nicer!)