Lots more community. Relationships and physical play (e.g. sports, theater, art, ritual, dance etc.) were the primary form of entertainment. Brains were capable of enduring in silence for 10 minutes without exploding in anxiety. Plant medicines were socially acceptable including "drugs".

Yeah there were diseases, famines, wars, etc. But these weren't constant threats, often regional until empire developed with (inter)continental trade.

People had joy and fulfillment, a bit of boredom, and many lacked effective contraceptives, so kids happened.

when the world starts to really collapse in a few years we wont have to wonder

people will be rationally offing themselves left and right

governments response will be to make suicide extra illegal lol

Rust Cohle explains why pretty well I think. Instinct, it's burned into enough of us that the few who come to that conclusion don't have any effect. And I agree with his solution

Correct, but maladaptive and evolutionarily unfit...

If you want to be entertained, you can watch True Detective Season 1. Someone brought up Rust, already.

If you want to ruin your life in ten pages, the source is The Last Messiah by Zapffe.

An acorn can only become an oak tree but a person is not born with their future path preordained

modern people love thinking this but most people never move even 50 miles from where they were born and the single largest indictor of ‘success’ in life is your parents income

for example being born in gaza or ukraine right now is pretty damn bleak

if it were my choice to be born there or not, i’d pass

Yes, read Simone Beauvoir along with Sartre. Sartre is kind of a comically privileged white man. As you say people can be free to choose the path of their lives, but some more than others.

Yeah not so much that. It was kind of refreshing to read something where the author gives up on trying to preempt arguments against him early in the process of creating his work (exhausting, boring, and as time goes on inevitably futile).

I meant more that the prose is full of self-certain trueisms and has that superficiality to it. It doesn't discount his points to me either, I'm often a vibes person myself. But it offloads a lot of the cognitive work of basically finishing his philosophy onto you as you're reading it. I think that's probably the deeper cause of most other problems people have with his philosophy, like how bad actors took and used it for nefarious shit. But, he was a lonely guy in a lot of pain who took to writing to manage it so that's par for the course.