Guardian:
Were we happier in the stone age?
...From the viewpoint of individual happiness, the "agricultural revolution" was, in the words of the scientist Jared Diamond, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
...Evolution
has no interest in happiness per se: it is interested only in
survival and reproduction...Evolution makes sure that no matter what we achieve, we remain
dissatisfied, forever grasping for more.
For
two thousand centuries (current best guess)
we
hunted and gathered with minimum stress.
We
thrived. Some did. (Well, more or less.)
We
settled down. We started farming.
Turning
wolves into to dogs, I suppose, was thought charming.
Chopping
trees, draining bogs we start global warming.
At
most, we've been “civilized” (maybe) twelve thousand years.
Our
numbers have grown. (Along with our fears.)
Have we advanced? Are we more in arrears?
“Civilization”,
I guess, has made a mess.
We created a rat race to pursue happiness
and
thus far we've not had that much success.
Some say “compete”, others say “share”.
And then they argue about which is fair.
Forget happiness. Let us despair.
If
what we're pursuin'
leads
to our ruin,
it
's all our own doin'.
See
also: New Yorker: The Case
Against Civilization
...the
agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through
it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for
agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers.
Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they
were sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close
proximity to domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the
species barrier, wreaking havoc in the densely settled
communities....Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the
worst mistake in human history.” The startling thing about this
claim is that, among historians of the era, it isn’t very
controversial.
