Agriculture: Humanity's Best, Worst Invention

For nearly 300,000 years, we went where we pleased, whenever we pleased. We explored a world mostly untouched by human hands. We ate a wide variety of rich, healthy, fresh-picked food. And without work to tie us down, we spent almost all our time with the people we loved the most. But then things changed. The simple act of putting a seed in the ground freed humanity from that fate. It promised us stability and control. Why did we do it? Why did we created agriculture, even though it made our lives considerably worse, at least at the beginning?

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[stevencase]

one of our ancestors really planted a seed and now i have to pay taxes

[itzsigh]

To be fair humans didn't actually invent agriculture, ants have been engaging in farming ever since the dinosaurs. Leafcutters for example gather leaves which they feed to a fungus they grow in their nests (which can only be found within their nests) of which they then eat. Other ants such as wood ants keep aphids which they basically milk, they rub the aphids so that they excrete a sweet liquid called honeydew which the ants eat/drink. So agriculture in and of itself is not a bad thing and technically natural. The problem is that we are trying to remove ourselves from the ecosystem even though that is impossible. The iconic words of Ian Malcom are true, "Life finds a way".

[fayaZZayaf]

It's mentioned in the book Sapiens. I really like your content. Will watch this one too. Need calmness and undivided attention.

[serbanandrei]

Bro why are you making me cry in the airport, people are watching

[MRK-.]

So where is the balance? Where is the point in witch modern person lives a life suitable for our not modern brain?

[rupeshtashildar]

this can be applied for all of our inventions ie all of our technology

[yunseiprod]

You know what’s crazy?
We have been thinking about the same things for the past 3 years. It’s absolutely uncanny. I think about something for a week or so and then out of no where there’s an aperture video about the same thing I’m thinking about. I never commented it tho cuz I wanted to see if it would become a trend. At this point it’s getting weird

[rosengrenj]

In my opinion, agriculture marked the beginning of a painful transition period that we’re still going through. We came from a world we evolved to live in, so we were happiest and healthiest in that world. But it was unpredictable, and we wanted stability, so we chose to work harder, be less happy, and suffer more to be more safe. We now have incredibly high living standards, but horrible mental health on average. Despite being safer than ever, people are miserable compared to our ancestors. I think that in maybe a few thousand years, we’ll find a way to make the best of both worlds by designing a society that is both safe and healthy. Living in the wild is dangerous, so this society might protect us. But a life that’s too easy and to reliable is miserable, so this society might provide us with new experiences and connect us with people. It’s a utopian idea, but I think it’s achievable. If humanity can make it for at least the next few thousand years, I think we can do it.

[valentinbonnarde]

What we should aspire toward is a world with a lesser need to work.
The consequences of lessening work load for a majority of people would be awesome.
That will hopefully come with automatisation.
I'm aware that most jobs aren't fully automatisable or automatisable at all.
But it would allow us time to have more fulfilling affective lives, more leisure options, more time to travel, more social events... We would have more of an ability to be ourselves, not this ersatz of a human trying to find fulfillment through power and possessions, sacrificing most of our lives to this pursuit in hope that we'll be loved in return (at least that's how a lot of men think)

[codboss]

This was a good video. but i have to say i completely disagree.

I doubt that a hunter gatherer life style would be as ideal as you described, as if it would be so simple to catch some fish and then you just go to a campfire with your loved ones and stare at the sky, that would be an overly romanticized scenario. in reality a hunter gatherer lifestyle would have been much harder, modern humans probably wouldnt imagine how much effort, planning, timing, had to go into hunting down a large prey that would feed a tribe. not to mention the constant stressors of predators, cold, travelling thousands of kilometers for better prey, enemy tribes, etc. that wasnt a peaceful ideal life, that was a true hardcore life, nature is brutal, you cannot live peacefully in nature.

As you said in the video We often forget the past, one thing that we might have forgotten is just how merciless and brutal nature is, most modern humans seem to idealize nature as this beautiful paradise filled with millions of species that all live in harmony. nature isnt all rainbow and sunshine, its also a gigantic competition engine where every species is fighting for survival just to out compete eachother.


Agricultural life stlye protected us from the hazzards of nature. also i would hardly call agriculturalist tribes mallnourished if their population was constantly growing, we see that every time a culture goes from hunter gatherer to agricultural its population explodes, this is because theres more food, so it can feed more people, thats how the earliest cities started, that started civillization.


not saying agriculutralism or civilisation doesnt have its backdraws. nothing is prefect afterall and you made good points in your video. but i highly doubt that hunter gatherer life style is the true healthy one for the only sole reason because "thats natural" or "the original"

[hactrixed]

This is honestly an amazing video! The amount of effort put into this video is outstanding! . Wish every YouTuber out as much effort in, as you do.
Thanks for the Amazing content :D

[gsyt]

"While the physical conditions of our lives have improved, these changes have actually caused our mental lives to suffer"

Personally, this felt kinda relatable.

[SC-zqcu]

i think hunter-gatherer lifestyles were far more dangerous than you paint them to be. yes, humans were more healthy than farmers but a hunter-gatherer that lived to adulthood was an exception. most kids would have died as infants. hunter gatherers were not so healthy on avg. just because they had a variety in diet, its also because one had to be that much healthy to survive into adulthood. its a bit of survivorship bias - we only see the healthy ones because they are the only ones that could survive, the rest died as infants.

[valentinbonnarde]

11:45 The amount of light from a computer or phone screen is far from sufficient to prevent melatonin from being produced. Just check with your phone how much light comes from your screen with a luxmeter app, and then compare with actual sunlight during the day. The sun is incomparably brighter than your screen and the brain just isn't that sensitive to light. Even hunter-gatherers were exposed to moonlight during the night and it most likely didn't prevent them from sleeping soundly. The reason you struggle to sleep is probably psychological rather than physiological. It's probably a matter of fight-or-flight system activation, you would need to relax in order to fall asleep. Most insomnia is a result of mental health issues like anxiety disorders or depression.

[StuffandThings_]

It would be fine if we didn't explode our populations to compensate. It seems like every time humanity invents a new technology to make food and other goods easier, instead of using it to support higher quality of life we just breed more. With farming it only takes a little bit of land to feed a lot of people, but now that there are almost 8 billion of us that means a *lot* of land. When will we learn...

[etherealtranslationtm]

You've spoiled me with these consistent uploads, I'll usually just take a nap and listen to your podcast from Spotify, so don't stop creating new content ❤️.

[alterworlds]

Younger generations today have a lot of change to make, and most of them understand many of the changes we need to make the world sustainable in all ways, improve societal structures so our mental states are not so broken and finally embrace the future of technology and free ourselves forever from the mundane world of working for a living like Agriculture began in the first place. That doesn't mean we do nothing at all, but the all-day-every-day lifestyle we live these days would be over, and we would successfully have the benefits of an agricultural society without the lifestyle of one.

We have so much in our way to fight though. Money'd interests first and foremost use propaganda to trick the broken and generally unintelligent parts of our society to fight back against change for the better. Greed manipulating us all in everything we see or do to try and prevent these changes. If people no longer need to work for a living, the rich essentially cease to exist. Money straight up would be unnecessary when society it set up by default to be sustainable and automatically provide for us. Our own egos and laziness to accept modern niceties are also a danger preventing us from making this final hurdle into the future.

I suspect once the older generations who didn't grow up with technology as we do these days are gone, we will make a lot of progress quickly. Without the generations with brains that didn't develop to handle this world of information being around, it would leave far fewer people who fall for the propaganda used to keep us in line and working. As they die out and we replace them in governments, the march forward can begin in earnest. Just hope they don't force the house of cards to fall rather than allow the world to make this final big step. Greed is a hell of a thing and the greedy see no value in the lives of others if they do not benefit from it directly. If we make this final step they become obsolete and they won't let that happen without a fight.

[jamesdealino]

Hello aperture!, I'm James, I am a fan of yours. I just want to request, can you talk about Socrates the man who said "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." I just want to hear from you his story because I like how you talk, please.

[centercannothold]

The agriculture revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity.

[cecilebleuse]

Couldn't go past the third minute of the video. The description of the typical day before and after agriculture was invented doesn't lead us anywhere. It's not fair to mention death and disease only in the second, as if these problems didn't exist before human societes based on agriculture. However besides theses imaginary portrayals, the advantages of agriculture were pretty well explained. Then why use such a deceptive way to describe each type of society ?