At a very general level once you move past subsistence farming you become reliant on society to provide your needs. And in turn provide some value that can only come from spending your time on things other than farming. And that is I suppose how civilization advances. Its kind of funny to work backwards though, because even subsistence farmers are reliant on society for protection -- they are farmers not soldiers after all. I think about this a lot, how important trust is to going anywhere in modern life. And how little choice there is anyways. I also think about how most people don't think about it at all, or very much, and wonder if knowing how fragile we are makes me happier and more productive, or less so.
There's an interesting misconception that humans developed agricultural societies because they achieved better outcomes as individuals. Research shows that hunter-gatherers were healthy and better nourished than humans in early agricultural settlements.
What's probably closer to truth is that many humans were forced to join farming communities. Stronger individuals or tribes probably enslaved others, and then forced them to build and produce.
The patterns of inequity and the march toward hyper-specialization we still see today make sense in that context.
As a tangent, if anyone is interested in that "cavemanness" deep in our DNA, check out the idea of primitive camping. That was my first experience camping, and I expected an idealized tv-ad experience. The trip was not framed as "primitive camping" to me.
I was dealing with intense burnout, stress, ADHD symptoms, immune problems, trouble sleeping... And I was thrown into the desert in the summer with a tent and some beer. It fucking sucked sooo bad. It fucking sucked sooo bad that I forgot every stupid problem I had, because I spent the entire time in survival mode. Setting up camp. Hauling equipment up and down dunes. Staying hydrated in the 100f+ heat. Making food. Making sure my wife and friends were ok. Strategizing how to defend our camp from bugs and psychos.
I really have not had such an existentially-dense experience as that one. And no, I didn't take any mushrooms, as the rest of the group did. I wanted to be lookout. Maybe I come from a long line of hyperaware sentries.
Forced labor was absolutely the norm for the pre-modern state, and provided the bulk of the workforce [1].
AFAIK humanity is yet to produce a society where the majority of farm laborers are fully free to leave the land they work on (whether via having their papers confiscated, their wages held until the season ends, by having transport provided to a remote farm but the trip back withheld etc). We've seen improvements in the degree of freedom, particularly over the past century and especially the past 50 years, but it's still very low compared to urban dwellers.
