Identifying the root of our discontent

I believe I know the reason we, as humans, tend toward depression, listlessness, boredom, discontentment, and any other label you'd like to assign the various negative states we exist within anywhere tribal-type communities have been abandoned. This isn't some miraculous revelation, nor is it an original idea, and I'm sure many of you have heard it before. We are depressed because we are not following a path natural to us according to our evolutionary heritage. Humans are meant to live in close-knit communities with other humans. This obsession with individuality has left us feeling lonely and unfulfilled. And when we do have close relationships in our current societal structures we end up placing all of our relational needs onto them and we wonder why they fall apart or don't fulfill our needs.

We think there must be something wrong with us and seek a suppression of the symptoms, rather than to fix the root problem. There is nothing wrong with us as a species, just with the way we've ignored where we came from and have tried to carry on with totalitarian agriculture and industrialized society when it obviously isn't working. Where we came from was tribal communities which worked with what they had accessible to them in their area of the world to live, eat, and create.

Working together in a tribal community gives you purpose, fulfills your social, emotional and your basic survival needs. No matter what you chose to do, hunting, small-scale agriculture, herding, gathering native food, there is a support system to back you up, and share the parts of the process that you don't participate in. So, if you have a garden, there are people to garden, people to prepare the food, people to make tools, teach the children their specialty, etc.... You share your work with them, they share theirs with you.

When there are problems between people (as there always will be), everyone is invested in working something out between those with the problem because, well, you all live together and must work together in order to survive. Patterns of behavior are adjusted over time within the community according to what works for them.

The community isn't fighting nature to produce more corn, for example, where corn doesn't grow well just because that is what makes the most money needed to buy the food which is held under lock and key. Instead they might graze goats because goats are native to the area and do well there, and provide them with the fulfillment of many needs.

The strive for bigger and better, the lack of reliable social support, the tie to money, the uncertainty about our jobs, roles within the community, and relationships, the ignorance to our evolutionary heritage, and the fight against the natural world around us leads to our depressed, unfulfilled state.