logoalt Hacker News

agumonkeyyesterday at 12:40 AM4 repliesview on HN

i don't know much but 90% of medical advice is basically, drop modern life on a regular basis (walk, stay outside, hug, lift, touch, eat raw, eat few)..

it would be weird if the complex biosphere environment that made our ancestor struggle was also a key balancer that we can't replace


Replies

dividedbyzeroyesterday at 2:37 AM

The "eat raw" part seems at least partially misguided, since our ancestors apparently started cooking the heck out of their environment pretty early, didn't consume much unprocessed dairy until very late, and the raw food they did consume tended to carry less pathogens than modern mass-produced food.

The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.

But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.

At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.

show 3 replies
riskableyesterday at 6:28 PM

Hey now... We have to evolve somehow. The folks that continue to reproduce in this technological dystopia are passing on their "just ignore social media" (or more likely, "get bored with social media") genes to the next generation.

In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.

Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.

micromacrofootyesterday at 3:35 PM

right essentially drop everything that's short circuiting our pleasure centers and do it the old fashioned way

we evolved to live in our environment and modernity has involved a lot of removing ourselves from it