r/HonestHotTakes • u/ChocolateCake16 • 8h ago
serious hot take The single biggest reason for the mental health crisis is the fact that we've made nomadic existences nearly impossible for the vast majority of people
Humans are physically built for endurance, hence why our species is primarily an endurance predator. Migration is one of the most basic behaviors we've witnessed in the vast majority of animal species, and yet in humans, we've made it normal for people to live in one place their whole life, and we've made it much harder to live outside of the place you were born in. (Not without jumping through a million hoops and checkpoints to get approval, anyway).
One of the biggest things people say they would do if they had money is to travel more, which I think says something about the innate human desire to wander. We also know that exercise, including just walking a certain distance every day, is essential to maintain the human body. Early humans were extremely migratory, very often moving from place to place whenever the need or desire arose, until we started building walls and laws to restrict people's movements.
People want to think we're in some way greater than other animals on earth, but we're really not. People need enrichment as much as an animal would, and the "zoochosis" theory that some people have about modern people is just a symptom of living in captivity. I also think social media addiction is a symptom of this suppression of natural instinct. People want to feel like there's a wider world, and they can't do that in real life, so they experience it through the internet.
I know a lot of modern systems would collapse under the idea of too much migration, but I actually think this is evidence that the systems themselves need to be rebuilt to better suit the innate human desire to wander, rather than used as a justification for limiting people from doing what they're biologically hardwired to do.
3
u/OldVacation4205 8h ago
I wouldn't say it is the single biggest reason by any stretch, but I can definitely see it being one of the factors.
3
u/UtterlyUpsetUnicorn 8h ago edited 8h ago
Meh, i call BS.
Certain individuals are nomadic but many are not. Genes transfer around the globe and stay put locally, both are true. If we were completely nomadic there wouldnt be differences between races. Its more akin to you move when you have to but you desire to find structure. Traveling with structure is really only possible in the modern day.
I for one think the whole trope of everyone loves to travel is BS. People need to get away occasionally but traveling is kind of miserable. The world as a whole is hot and muggy and filled with beaucratic BS. Landmarks and nature are cool but after a few its all jade to me. People and cultures are cool but lets face it you probably just go to resorts anyway.
But i do think you hit the nail on the head sonewhere. The issue people are more drpressed is meaning. When exitstence is your meaning you get enveloped by it. When existence is easy but your job or relationships become the meaning but your exustence is meaningless to those same job and friends... thats why we are more depressed.
1
u/That_Boysenberry4501 4h ago
I think modern travel is entirely unique in that the ability to fly across the world with just some of your positions and be in a totally new climate and culture and language is a very new phenomenon. I believe it is an inherently stressful experience (despite modern luxiries available). Travel in nomadic communities in history would almost never have been solo—youd have a whole tribe, and it would be on foot or horse and slow. And within the same continent/region, often migrating for seasons or game, or resources.
It is super jarring to be transported to a totally new place on the planet without most of your possessions and knowing no one and just figuring it out. I wouldnt say this modern travel is biologically fulfilling us, per say (not saying it cant be enriching if one makes it). Before planes and trains, I imagine most people settled into one area and it would be rare to go too far from it.
But as someone who solo travels car camping out my vehicle around the western US for a good part of the year, the travel i do is less stressful and more fulfilling. I move with seasons/climate, travel slowly (though still faster with a vehicle ofc), and i camp in nature and am acclimating to living partly outdoors. The only unnatural thing is I am alone. But I sleep and wake with the sun, I wake up in nature, cook outside. My mind isnt full of modern worries. I care only about animals, weather, the sun, and shelter.
2
u/HumiliationSlut34 8h ago
Nah, we’re just actually diagnosing it now
1
u/ChocolateCake16 8h ago
That's also true lol but I've heard from many therapists that they're struggling to help some of their clients because their mental struggles are just appropriate responses to the environment they're living in, so the environment/society they live in is definitely still contributing to the mental health crisis to some degree.
2
u/Prof_PotatoHead 8h ago
I think basing your whole argument on historical and pre historical behavior is inherently flawed and toilet paper flimsy at best.
Migration is strongly linked to fluctuating resources. Eliminate the fluctuation and naturally you see settlers rise. Even ignoring the hyperbole, there's a lot of people who are completely happy living in one square mile
2
u/PunkPirate56364 7h ago
But nomadic tribes traveled together.
Also people living in stationary tribes are not suffering from these levels of anxiety and depression.
I think you are just trying to use an existing problem to solve your desire to move around.
But a backpack and start backpacking.
1
u/AutoModerator 8h ago
Hello! I’m AutoMod, and I’ll be hanging out in the comments on every post. Be sure to give our rules a quick read, and most importantly, have fun in the subreddit! Feel free to join our discord! https://discord.gg/EGXtuyUC
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
1
-1
u/HeroOfTheProphecy 7h ago
What an absurd claim.
Human endurance adaptations make far more sense in the context of foraging and persistence hunting than as evidence that humans are somehow psychologically designed for perpetual migration, Lol.
I would argue almost the opposite.
One of the major problems with modern society is that these huge, artificial systems constantly weaken the local communities, kin networks, and social bonds people actually evolved around. Rapid demographic change, ethnic fragmentation, anonymity, and weak social cohesion can absolutely reduce local trust and community solidarity depending on the context.
And that is just one of many problems with this modern idea.
Actual natural behavior?
Tribalism.
Kin preference.
Valuing your own family more than strangers.
Humans repeatedly show in-group favoritism, assortative social behavior, stronger obligations toward closer relations, and preference for familiar social groups.
That is not some strange ideological invention. It is one of the most obvious features of human social behavior.
So no, most humans throughout history were not freely drifting between unrelated populations the way this post seems to imagine.
Mobility existed, obviously, but usually within kin groups, tribes, neighboring peoples, marriage networks, trade networks, armies, seasonal movements, conquest, or other structured social contexts.
Moving around is not the same thing as being an unattached cosmopolitan nomad.
And historically, people were generally far more tribal, ethnocentric, kin-oriented, and suspicious of outsiders than modern liberal morality likes to pretend.
The reason you do not constantly read about racial conflict in some isolated medieval village is often pretty simple.
They barely encountered distant populations in the first place.
Everything was more local.
When radically different groups did meet, the interaction was very often understood in terms of tribe, clan, ethnicity, religion, ancestry, kingdom, or nation.
Call it racial, tribal, ethnic, national, clan-based, whatever.
The underlying variable is relation, belonging, and perceived common ancestry.
Fyi, I know Reddit cannot handle reality.
Reality is that you are an expression of inherited biological information.
Your genome is a persistent information system that existed before your current life and, if your lineage continues, will persist after it.
Your current life is one temporary instantiation of that inherited information interacting with an environment.
Yes, you only pass roughly half of your autosomal DNA to each child.
But people constantly misunderstand what that means at the population level.
Historically, and still often today, people disproportionately reproduce within their own population, language group, culture, religion, region, or ancestry network.
If generation after generation mates within the same broad population, ancestry does not simply halve toward zero.
You are not repeatedly mixing one population with completely unrelated outsiders every generation.
You are repeatedly recombining genetic material drawn from the same larger ancestry pool.
That is why I think of a natal nation as a reservoir.
And by nation, I do not mean the modern legal fiction where anyone with the correct passport is automatically part of the same historical people.
I mean a natal nation.
A historically continuous population connected by ancestry, kinship, culture, territory, and repeated reproduction through generations.
Such a population functions like a large ancestry reservoir.
An individual contains only one particular recombination of the genetic variation circulating within that larger population.
Obviously the reservoir is not perfectly sealed.
There can be outside admixture, migration, rare variants, and new mutations.
That does not destroy the analogy.
A reservoir can have leaks while remaining the same reservoir, especially if it continues replenishing itself.
What matters is whether the population continues reproducing itself and whether physical, cultural, geographic, religious, linguistic, or social boundaries limit gene flow enough to preserve population continuity.
That is what borders do in the deepest sense.
Not just literal fences.
Cultural borders matter too.
Language matters.
Religion matters.
Marriage norms matter.
Family networks matter.
Geography matters.
Social preference matters.
All of these influence who reproduces with whom.
And that is what prevents endless convergence between every population on earth.
So when people act like ancestry simply gets "diluted" by half every generation until nothing remains, they are misunderstanding the system.
Your DNA from one particular named ancestor can absolutely become a smaller and smaller fraction of your genome.
But if almost everyone in the ancestry tree belongs to the same broad ancestral population, the population ancestry itself remains.
You keep drawing from the same reservoir.
That is the point.
But yeah, I know a lot of Reddit has its own moral framework installed where preserving continuity, kinship, ancestry, or inherited communities is treated as suspicious by default.
A moral framework where the rules are supposedly compassionate even if the long-run demographic consequence is that the people who created those rules eventually stop reproducing themselves as a distinct population.
If life were a chess game, you people would believe giving away your space and pieces somehow equals winning.
Eventually reality removes you from the board anyway.
Your moral preferences do not override the causal consequences of the system you advocate.
And you definitely cannot just base what is "right" on whatever emotional reaction modern culture trained into you.
Feelings are evolved signals.
They can be useful, but they were not designed for every strange condition created by modern civilization.
At some point you actually have to use your brain and ask what a belief system produces across generations.
If an idea predictably causes a lineage or population to stop reproducing itself over time, calling that outcome morally neutral does not make the demographic consequence disappear.
If your idea makes it so your face, the faces of your family, and the faces of the people you care about progressively vanish from the future, I struggle to see how that qualifies as success.
Just remember one very simple thing.
To value anything, you must first exist.
Conscious existence is a prerequisite for valuation.
That is not a moral preference. It is logically prior to morality itself.
And I know nearly everyone reading this instinctively thinks of "life" as their one isolated individual experience.
I am asking you to look one level above that.
Think of your genes as something like a persistent base model.
Your current organism is more like one temporary chat instance produced from that model inside a particular environment.
The instance is not the whole model.
The instance ends.
The underlying inherited information can continue.
And in a metaphorical but biologically meaningful sense, information does persist across lives.
Not autobiographical memories.
But instincts, behavioral predispositions, developmental programs, and inherited responses shaped by selection across enormous stretches of time.
That is the hard memory that survives.
Most of everything else is temporary.
2
u/That_Boysenberry4501 6h ago
AI?
1
u/HeroOfTheProphecy 6h ago
Let's say it is entirely AI.
Does that change the validity of a single argument I made? Nope.
It could be AI. It could be a professor in a suit with ten diplomas behind him. It could be a lunatic scratching the argument into the dirt with a stick.
None of that changes whether the argument itself is true or false.
So why not address what was actually said?
My guess is that when someone's worldview is falling toward the hardwood floor of reality, "AI?" is just the nearest branch to grab on the way down.
1
u/That_Boysenberry4501 4h ago
I mean i liked the point in the first half but then it veered way off into other tangents and that lost me.
1
u/_big_a_ 4h ago
Nomad here. 3.5 years in. I think it’s never been easier to be a nomad, at least in the U.S. There are millions of us.
Things like a rise in remote work, starlink, and BLM land make it pretty accessible. But don’t think that it’s just digital nomads with money. It’s anyone and everyone.
I don’t know if lack of mobility is the single biggest reason for mental health crisis or not. All I know is me and my husband were not interested in the white picket fence life. We prefer adventure. And it absolutely is a life choice that anyone can make. However, taking the leap can be scary, and if for anyone in a mental health crisis, maybe impossible.
6
u/GoatStandardsv2 8h ago
Wouldn’t go as far as saying we need to live like caveman but yeah sitting in an office for 40+ hours a week doesn’t do anybody any good for their mental health