By that logic, 200 years ago we didn’t need cars or trains or modern medicine to be a high-functioning, successful adult. 1000 years ago most people didn’t need any formal schooling to be a high-functioning, successful adult. 50,000 years ago we didn’t need buildings or agriculture or anything at all from modern society to be a high-functioning, successful adult. So any costs associated with a post-hunter/gatherer society are a modern tax at any price point.
This isn’t entirely accurate. A hunter-gatherer society is not a civilization, and life-expectancy was low. We can also assume that due to injury, disease, and periodic starvation that the hunter-gatherer society didn’t have a surplus of adults, much less high-functioning ones. This is precisely why, over time, the hunter-gatherers of the Earth voluntarily chose to settle, to farm, and to organize into civilizations. The car or the horse is, generally speaking, not a tax on the individual as these allow higher rates of productivity than an individual would otherwise have. The smart phone, however, does not offer sizable gains in productivity, and conversely actually steals attention from the individual and therefore is a net tax on the individual.
Some indigenous tribes (not necessarily hunter-gatherer, but no civilization either) are among the healthiest populations ever observed, eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsimané
Whereas the ancient Egyptians, a civilization, documented Type 2 Diabetes and coronary disease / heart failure. Settling down and forming civilizations had advantages, but improved health probably wasn’t one.
In hunter-gatherer groups, life was, and is, undeniably hard, but their lifespan was not as short as the numbers press us to think. If you were a hunter-gatherer and you made it to adolescence, there was a strong likelihood that you would live a long and healthy life – not so different from modern humans.
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Modern life does have many benefits, but when it persuades us to use transport, sit in a chair at work, or watch TV for extended periods, we increasingly have to turn to medicine for solutions because these habits are killing hundreds of millions of us each year.
You can check your bank account and credit statements anywhere and any time. Even cashing checks. No more walking (or driving if you could afford it) to the nearest location. That’s value.
You can check the news anywhere. You can make sure your mom hasn’t fallen and hurt herself, that’s stress relief. You can educate yourself (and many people do) in very nuanced topics from the bus stop. You don’t need a second TV/computer for the kids to keep everyone in the home happy. You can quickly find great recipes from your kitchen to cook more healthy. Even just looking up stuff like “calories in salmon” have made me healthier. Yea some of this could have been on my computer, but that would take more time.
