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Excellent point...
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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The reason why civilization is what it is today is because people didn’t like what civilization was before. (Yes, drastic simplification and yes we have lots of problems today, but at least everyone is less likely to die of disease and starvation.)
Interestingly we still have hunter/gatherer tribes around today, but only in the lush rain forests. I always feel like the progress (especially towards agriculture and thus permanent settlements) only happened with migration to colder climates. Which makes sense, as it sucks being a hunterer/gatherer when there's snow.
You can even experience it today: in the rain forests there's shit growing everywhere. Hungry? Walk around randomly for 5 minutes, there's bananas, or mango, or star fruit or whatever.
So the real question to me: why migrate in the first place?
Being nomadic hunter/gatherers was so amazing, we invented subsistence agriculture just to get away from it. And people would abandon subsidence agriculture in favour of a career as a beggar/day laborer.
So yeah, have fun going back to that.
David Graeber and David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything) disagree. It was always very labor intensive with significant drawbacks (especially during seasons where crops won't grow), to the point that many groups openly dismissed the idea of being farmers of any kind. It took ages to get "large scale" (plots larger than 1000m²) agriculture "right" enough for it to actually be worth the time spent.
The reason for the insistence on agriculture, despite all the hardships, among groups with all sorts of hierarchical organizations, is the real million dollar question.