Sublime

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look

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The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety—there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity.

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because th... See more

Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

The Ju/’hoansi, for example, were often content to spontaneously take a day off from foraging simply because they didn’t feel like it. Even if they were hungry, they knew that putting off the food quest for a day would not have any serious ramifications. For farmers, by contrast, taking a day off just because they need a rest is rarely an option. N

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