We're all cut off from nature. Seasons barely mean anything. We live our lives moving from one almost - hermetically sealed bubble to another. A morning coffee on the back deck, maybe a weekend hike? It doesn't matter how nice the zoo enclosure is, it's not the real thing and the animals inside know it.
We're cut off from each other. We all know about capitalist alienation here. We live in cities great and small and barely speak to anyone. Too tired and beaten down to go meet people in real life, we resort to choosing madness by arguing politics online. Our need to connect will prevail, even if it's forced down the most twisted paths.
We're cut off from ourselves, our own inner lives. How many of us feel like spectators to our own lives? More and more we have to choose life paths and ever-lengthening careers to avoid starvation and misery. Less and less time is left to us to think and feel and ponder and reflect. What little time we do have, we frantically rush to avoid thinking by endlessly scrolling and/or binge-watching. Our fountain of inner life ebbs to a trickle.
I don't know my neighbor and "nature" is a local park or that cold white shit on my car. No wonder we're all going fucking insane
Agriculture was a mistake.
I mean basically, yeah. Humans had a pretty great thing going for a few hundred thousand years prior to settled society. As the author of "Civilized to Death" notes, agriculture and farming doesn't seem to be an inevitable development. It was usually a last-ditch effort to avoid dying to famine or some other catastrophe. We don't like farming, we're a wandering species that enjoys leisure. And I see no way to go back. There's not even anything resembling an intact Earth to go back to!
I crown you queen of coming to the wrong fucking conclusion
Goodness
There is still plenty of intact Earth to hunter-gather in although it would be difficult to go there, avoid the law, and find others to do it with you. Personally I do not think I am cut out for hunter-gathering and quite like agricultural society, although its benefits are definitely squandered due to class society. Sorry you feel this way though. :meow-hug:
I'm not so sure about the "plenty of Earth" part. We're looking at a near-complete systems collapse of the biosphere as a whole. Wildlife and life in general is dying off in astonishing numbers, and human civilized encroachment continues to push past the brink. As the societies created by the industrial revolution push forward with their agenda of reducing the biosphere down to its component chemicals, the idea that we could collectively throw up our hands and "return to the forests" so to speak grows ever more far-fetched.
And anyway, as I said earlier, that's not even necessarily what I want. Maybe a possible (if not plausible) future would be something along the lines of solarpunk inspired; I'm not an anprim precisely because there are huge advantages that living in a modern and technological society do confer. But it's come at a huge cost and we've rushed too quickly into it without consideration for what we've left behind.
Oh yeah I was not suggesting this. Even 20,000 years ago (before agricultural, horticulture, etc) there wouldn't have been enough land for 8 billion people. I just meant enough for people who really want to. And of course that will keep decreasing...