> Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years.
Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.
These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.
That doesn't mean it's false though? The parent seems correct that human beings are capable of subsisting and surviving for many many generations on very austere conditions.
From reading these comments you’d think that human beings were miserable and incapable of any happiness or meaning until someone invented air conditioning and sewage systems.
Yes, life used to be more difficult. No, that doesn’t mean such a life was without meaning.
Only by means of statistics - they had so many children that it compensated for high mortality rates.
As recently as in the early 20th century the fertility rate required to sustain population numbers in Germany was over 2.5 - and that was well into the industrial era.
Before such obvious to us things like antibiotics or doctors washing hands it was likely much higher.
Well, that and survive yourself through said childbirths, which was (and indeed is) never guaranteed for approximately half of humanity. Childbirth is dangerous! Obviously, humans have always had more than enough children on average, but the burden of it is quite high.
It does, but the parent poster who lives in a van does not do it, and therefore he's not really surviving anything. And as the first reply to the van implied, he would not be boasting "spiritually" if he had to deal with children in his van.
psychologically, though, it’s much easier to suffer hardship. If everyone in your community is also suffering the same hardship. Making unilateral choices to deny yourself, creature comfort doesn’t seem all tha likely to succeed as a strategy.
Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.
These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.