š§µ View Thread
š§µ Thread (28 tweets)
none of these things is a substitute for a functional social fabric https://t.co/WnHDwXwpOx
we lived in a very nice house but we didnāt talk to each other at the dinner table. i didnāt care how nice the house was in the slightest *except* when i had friends over, because then it was nice to be able to entertain them with the xbox or whatever
by far the most important pieces of technology in the house were the ones that let me talk to my friends (phones, computers with internet access), and i used those when it was less convenient than hanging out irl but hanging out irl was much much much better
followup: @s_r_constantin makes an impressively strong case that life is about having appliances https://t.co/SOvAkXkQ6i
so def relevant here that women have historically (and today) been more responsible for the domestic labor that keeps a household running; from that pov not surprising that women (and their mothers and grandmothers) would be more keenly aware of the value of labor-saving tech https://t.co/Ak3ZxtI6eW
hmmmmmmm https://t.co/tI1h5L7VA8 https://t.co/Zfjvtlnp4w
@QiaochuYuan Ugh I have SO MUCH TROUBLE discerning between those takes, and this: Can a historian or anthropologist pls weigh in???? https://t.co/gTavBFrS5c
@CXGonzalez_ You know, Idk! I was raised to believe that historical lives sucked, and also every so often I come across something like this. āAlthough hunter-gatherers lived in the harshest environments on earth, they spent less time working than any typical nine-to-fiver.ā https://t.co/lhiBlGwWol
@QiaochuYuan Ah yep, I raise a similar thing here. Yes many tribes feel stilted and trapped in amber of their customs - and the west has spiritual illness many of them never did. Probably the sacred path lies somewhere in the middle. https://t.co/4DwumgPPfd
@QiaochuYuan Notice that many comparisons in the āthank god for washing machinesā vein...are to, slightly earlier western cultures. We could be comparing against VILLAGES, indigenous cultures. Who didnāt have so much shit needed washing, & are so different from us we can barely comprehend.
@QiaochuYuan Reminder-to-self, to find my screenshots of pages from a book where Malidoma Some describes how his Dagara tribe would spend 2/3 of all āworkā time chanting with the community, bc they understood they could only sustainably create from a place of spiritual fullness
@QiaochuYuan Notice that many comparisons in the āthank god for washing machinesā vein...are to, slightly earlier western cultures. We could be comparing against VILLAGES, indigenous cultures. Who didnāt have so much shit needed washing, & are so different from us we can barely comprehend.
i like this subthread https://t.co/q5bvTxOrMl
this is an example of the sort of thing i was trying to gesture at wrt like āwhat we mightāve lost in modernityā https://t.co/9Onyxqis75
really shouldāve remembered that this thread existed https://t.co/4eq8cpEgyi
ah i was looking for this tweet earlier to add to this thread too https://t.co/blm7zv1HCM
the flip side of it being easier than ever to literally physically survive in the sense of acquiring food and antibiotics is there are probably people alive experiencing unprecedented levels of mental / emotional / spiritual anguish, who in an earlier age would have died by now
@QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin I think there's a component missing in this analysis. Even if the conditions of the modern world are improving many aspects of peeps lives, it's doing so by creating an environment increasingly divorced from the evolutionary context and that's stressful to the human animal.
@QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin Being able to drive to the store and buy shirts and not have to spend all day looming should be better than the alternative, but the alternative is still closer to what we evolved for and it's the setting our mental firmware comes the most pre-equipped to navigate.
@QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin There's an externality created by the cognitive load associated with understanding and navigating an increasingly outside context world which offsets the benefits of a given change to that world. Anything good can also be a source of stress depending on the context.
@QiaochuYuan https://t.co/vSi36FdHFE
@QiaochuYuan I believe it's totally possible to have both a functional social fabric *and* appliances. Those things do not contradict each other. While the absence of certain appliances may be an impediment for some social interactions or a particular level of social comfort.