That worked fine before agricultural revolution. Since then, if you stick to your bows and arrows, you get sidelined and lose access to benefits of society and civilization.
That worked fine before agricultural revolution. Since then, if you stick to your bows and arrows, you get sidelined and lose access to benefits of society and civilization.
If it forces you to keep running with more and more speed just to stay where you are, I wouldn't call it as "benefits of society and civilization". A lot of what we call as progress is a forced transformation of basic needs for the gains of business and politics not people.
Even the healthcare, which everyone thinks as a "benefit" of the progress, only resulted in having lopsided demographic pyramid with countries full of old people. I can't think of single scientific result benefiting the human race in its evolutionary goals.
Countries aren't full of old people because of healthcare, they're full of old people because birthrates plummeted after one of the largest generations ever was born in the post-war period.
Causality is complicated and probably impossible to untangle, but the vast decreases in both infant/early child and maternal mortality played a huge role here.
If half your children didn't die by age 20 (or 5), it was possible to have much smaller families. Industrialisation and urbanisation made children net liabilities rather than household assets (providing labour even at a very young age). Financialisation of real estate along with the rest of the economy made earning and saving money critical, and made non-cash or low-cash lifestyles highly marginal (self-sufficient existence or providing many goods and services through the home directly). All that in combination with improved adult lifespans meant that the demographic pyramid consolidated at the bottom and expanded at the top. There are still countries where this isn't the case, most notably now in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly where HIV/AIDS remains endemic:
Contrast Tanzania and Italy, for example:
<https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html>
<https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html>
Turned out that if you gave people choice they'd rather not have 7 kids! Surprise surprise.
Interesting to consider this thread with regards to the Amish. They noped off the tech treadmill but it requires a highly cohesive religiously centered society to maintain the necessary critical mass.
It's a lot harder to make an insular society which is self sufficient just to the degree necessary to create an open source smartphone :-p
Technology brings tradeoffs. Conformity in some regards, but it also opens up many new and varied ways of living.