Living a Good Life Is About What You DON’T Have
Would you be happy owning nothing?
“You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” World Economic Forum
It all went wrong when we started farming
In his wildly popular book on human history, Sapiens, Noah Yuval Harari argues that unlike dogs, horses, and pigs, humans didn’t domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us.
It bewitched us with the promise of easy, reliable calories to move out of the forests, out of the caves, to start tending fields in the blazing sun and digging for our daily bread and beer.
In doing so, wheat became one of the most successful species on the planet, grown everywhere humans go. Which is everywhere.
But for our ancestors, farming was a trap.
The reliable calories it provided enabled populations to grow. That was the door of the trap, slamming shut behind us. Growing food is far more labor intensive than hunting and foraging for it. People who hunt and forage for a living usually spend only two or three hours a day meeting their caloric needs. And yet the prehistoric hunters were in far better shape than their farm-based descendants.
When humans started farming, their health declined. Teeth began to decay. Diets became much poorer, often based…
