I didn’t know anyone who would trade modern life for being a caveman again, or even one if someone from a hundred years ago.

For the rekkid, there never really was a "caveman." IMO that's more of a bumbling, modern trope which essentially allows us to more-easily persuade ourselves that previous human states were necessarily miserable or inferior compared to our own.

Haha, I'm not saying that it's an EITHER/OR, but moreso that it's a nuanced collection of pros & cons, and that we modern, naked apes have a natural bias for interpreting our state of being as 'superior.'

I mean, whole treatises on psychology have been dedicated upon that phenomenon, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, but no-- I'm pretty sure there are various, flourishing cultures of people who want nothing whatsoever to do with our so-called 'modern life.' These range from Amish / Mennonite-types, to the last few, surviving tribal peoples here and there, to monks of different religions in their monasteries to... various communes (more or less), to some folks intentionally living that lifestyle, to whoever else that might be...

Now, I think part of our faulty thinking upon all this tends to run along the lines of: 'we've accomplished so much' and 'we have and can enjoy all these various amenities & privileges,' sort of looking past the fact that living in this fast-changing, hyper-competitive situation, absolutely overloaded with other humans is in fact stressful and worrying, as per what humans ACTUALLY SAY when polled, and when responding to studies.

So there's the rub, so to speak.

we aren’t ever going to get the toothpaste back in the tube with the environment. Mankind could get better at what we do, but we’re not realistically going back to natural living.

For sure. Which is why... welp.

Thanks for the interesting comments, matey. Let's see... (and pardon, kinda in a rush here)

In reading comments from some other articles, other people refer to us humans as well.

Hmm, not sure I got that part?

If you’d look at humanity in the pre-industrial age,

So to be clear, across ~99.8% of our history.

...you’d say we needed much more space to live so we could run our marginally productive farms and to hunt game,

Given our population density across the 2Myrs of Homo, I'd argue that we barely needed any space at all, being in our traditional clan/tribal state, which naturally shifted with the seasons and such. As for agriculture? I believe modern science estimates it's only about 10Kyrs old. Again, just a blip in human history.

but now we can live in multi-story buildings in huge cities and technically thrive better than ever in history.

I think it could potentially work, but under the capitalism model, is proving to be an absolute disaster, directly leading to the current, ongoing mass-extinction event. (r/collapse for more info than you might want to know)

Is that different than reducing the animals’ habitats while providing them with superior nutrition and medicine?

As a former zoo-worker, I believe in zoos at the BEST of times. Unfortunately, that's not necessarily the case when you look at situations around the world. In any case, above all-- other animals don't need special care from us in the slightest, generally-speaking. They simply need their habitats *not* to be messed with, critically.

Wow. Cool post & article that brings up a lot of great points.

I found the bit about interpreting animals' emotions particularly interesting. I.e., there's no question to me that we naked apes can easily misinterpret or ascribe false emotions to (other) animals, yet there's also the seeming fact that given exposure-time, we can also learn to gauge them with some accuracy.

Given that Homo is 2Myrs old, and that the overwhelming majority of that time was spent in the wild, there's no question to me that our ancestors were likely vastly better at such interpretation. Along those lines, I wonder if some of the "feral children" in history who eventually learned to speak a language had something to say about such things...

Sort of a 'West Netherlands?'

I liked my original Mac too, but certainly missed the deluxe keyboard and two-button mouse. :S

Fun fact: altho the early (and average) A2600 carts were 4k, they could actually be much larger, such as 16k, or even 64k, as with the later "Megaboy" by Dynacom. The key factor of course was the cost of memory at the time, and with more memory, that's how you get more sprawling games like Pitfall 2.

So yeah, Pitfall 1 was 4k, while Pitfall 2 lazily only used 11k of it's physical 16k or ROM size.

Oops, late reply. But yeah, that rings a bell!

Indeed, I recall reading a fascinating article about their rise & fall, along with Sierra Online I think it was. Maybe over at The Dot-Eaters or such. [link]

I don't know what it is, but these histories, what with their twists, turns, ironies, and terribly-made decisions, are downright fascinating to me.

Okay, thanks for explaining.

As has happened before, I'm frankly a bit grouchy upon criticism of my AI-aided content. I do feel the post as it stands is relevant to this sub, as it's based on a real phenomenon (the definition of a group of owls) applied to a famous place which bears that definition, and then populated by the actual subjects of this sublemmy. In short, it's a simple joke / riddle combining those different elements.

I came up with this idea myself and I wrangled ChatGPT until it came up with the final image I was (more or less) pleased with. Otherwise, if my health wasn't so shitty, I might have taken the time and effort to do a watercolor on the concept, but realistically that's not possible anymore. Cheers.

This is really the zinger you finally settled on after all that?

Hah, I think it was moreso my catching myself and changing course. If an apology is in order, then I hereby offer it.

The problem on my end is that I like contributing where I can (on top of running my community) but am almost always working through a level of pain & fatigue, having a pretty much fatal disease in CFS/ME.

Admittedly, I have a short fuse when it comes to what I perceive as low-effort critique, even if it's just me mistaking the situation and replying inappropriately. I'm generally at the end of my rope at that point, and should undoubtedly be doing something else, even if it's just to ignore replies(!)

I've also been stung like this before when contributing occasional AI-aided content. A common thing seems to be people assuming I put zero creativity or effort in to coaxing out something which I thought was fairly amusing after my work and final edits. [for example]

OTOH, this has been about my sixth post across about two months in this particular sublemmy, and all have gone well so far until this one, which perhaps did slightly-less-well. "Anon6789" has been going above and beyond, and seeing that, I've wanted to help out when I can.

the sheltering and the big disaster

Okay, I'm listening!