We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

[WillowTree]

75. What a lovely thought!

Tell me, who's going to fix the leaky plumbing while everyone else is off playing a lute and contemplating their navels? Or are we going to go back to the days when we had no pipework and just pooped in a hole in the ground and washed ourselves and our clothes in the river?

Oh, wait a minute.......where would the clothes come from? Who's going to tend the cotton and polyester plants and spin the fibers and weave them into fabric and make them into shirts and shorts?

Whence cometh those musical instruments? Will we just pluck them from the piano and saxophone trees and know instinctively what to do with them?

The games we're all going to be playing hours and hour a week.......I assume those would be Hopscotch and Red Rover, because there certainly won't be any Wiis or PlayStations, or even sports as we know them 'cause who's going to make the balls and bats and basketball hoops? And we won't even talk about tennis racquets and golf clubs 'cause those are the toys of the 1% and, well, ya can't get to be a 1%er if you're just hunting and/or gathering for a few hours a day.

"Hunter-gatherers are affluent not because they have so much, but because they want so little."

Ah, there's the rub! Fact is, some people talk a good game of how little they really need and how great the simpler times were, but most, if faced with this really, really, really "simple" life, would find it intolerably austere and insufferably boring. Americans would be no more willing to give up their creature comforts and technologies than to give up running water and sleeping indoors in January. Witness the recent thread about air conditioning. Bottom line is that those of us who live in twenty-first century "first world" countries would be fortunate to make it for a month living the "simple life" you describe before begging to go back to what we presently know as "normal". And we have to earn to have those things that we want.