#axen #humans #ancient #short

about when your stomach is full and you're safe. And people didn't go to sleep and stay asleep the way you do now. Historical records from medieval Europe and sleep studies from the 1990s confirmed that before artificial light humans slept in two phases, first sleep for about four hours, then a wakeful period of one to two hours in complete darkness, then second sleep for another four hours. So here's what a full day looked like, about four to six hours securing food or making tools, about six hours in social interaction, storytelling, grooming, playing about eight hours sleeping in two separate phases, and the rest resting, sitting, watching clouds, doing nothing in particular, existing without needing to justify your existence through productivity. Then about 10,000 years ago, something changed. Humans in the fertile crescent began planting seeds and domesticated animals. Agriculture and agriculture is a trap. Once you start farming, you can feed more people. More people means you need more food. More food means more farming, within a few generations, populations exploded and there was no going back because now there were too many mouths to survive by hunting and gathering. You were locked in and farming required far more labor, plowing, planting, weeding, harvesting, storing, defending crops from animals and raiders. The skeletal evidence is unambiguous. Early farmers worked harder, eight worse, and died younger than the hunter-gatherers who came before them. But the population kept growing, and with larger populations came specialists, tool makers, potters, weavers, inventors, then soldiers, priests, administrators, and eventually jobs, employment. The idea that your time belonged to someone else in exchange for resources. By the time we built cities, the original human lifestyle was gone, replaced by schedules, obligations, the need to work most of your waking hours just to survive in the system we created. Today, you spent 90,000 hours working. Your ancestors spent way less. You sleep in one block and call waking up at 2 a.m. in Somnia. They slept in two phases and used the middle hours for reflection. You spend your life chasing an illusion of greatness, achievements, wealth, and success by standards society invented. They woke up every morning already free, already enough in that piece with nothing to prove to anyone. They didn't need to become successful. They were already living the life you're working your entire existence to retire into. You make art if you can find time after your job. They made art because they had time, and that's what humans do. We're not a different species, but we live so differently from how humans lived for 99% of our existence that we might as well be. We traded freedom for food security, leisure for population growth, time for productivity, and most of us have no idea what we gave up, because we never knew it was there.