How to Live Like a Hunter-Gatherer in the 21st Century
Believe it our not, your ancestors were pretty chill
“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…
