Not everyone in the village lived on a farm, of course, and they would have less space than us farmers did. Still, everyone had their own house, a garden and especially in the original village section (not the new construction), people tended to know just about anything about each other. For much of my life I grew up not really knowing or caring who of the people in the village were or weren't family members. We'd share everything anyway and be there when anyone needed help.
That all dramatically changed when my parents divorced and I moved together with my mother into a house in the nearby city. That was the beginning of what has now been more than a decade of city life. It has convinced me that there are virtually no redeeming qualities to living in a city.
It's not just me, either. Report after report shows that cities are polluted death traps which shorten lifespans [1][2][3], in addition to causing severe stress- and disrupted sleeping pattern-related health issues. Living in a city, or raising children in a city is pretty much one of the worst things that we humans have inflicted upon ourselves over the past thousand years.
Another massive problem that cities perpetuate is that of poverty [4], with those children being born in poor neighbourhoods generally being out of luck unless they can somehow escape from those environments.
All of this does raise the question of why we hate ourselves and our fellow humans so much. Why do we lie to ourselves about what is obviously a massive health issue? Why do we dream of moving up in society while simultaneously trampling others down as we try to move upwards? Why this rat race?
The general way of thinking is that a single human being simply has to do with less. Nobody needs an apartment that's more than about twenty square meters or so. They'd go by just fine. Just cram lots of sub sixty square meter apartments into a few massively tall blocks and stuff them full with people.
Which is exactly what we have been doing with livestock over the past decades, with battery cages for chickens, cramming pigs into cages just barely enough to hold them, turkeys and other poultry on the floors of massive halls with no room to move.
They figured out at some point that dimming the light to about 10 lux caused chickens in battery cages to not inflict as much physical harm on themselves, as these low light levels would trigger resting behaviour. As pigs that got crammed together in small spaces would start resorting to cannibalism - eating the ears, tails and other parts of their fellow pigs - their tails and ears would be preemptively removed, along with some of their teeth.
To me the way humans and livestock are being treated kind of blurs together. The whole bio-industry with their industrial levels of animal cruelty exists because the old ways of raising livestock was too expensive and inefficient. So they optimised those inefficiencies away without any consideration for animal well-being. But cruelty-free/reduced cruelty meat, poultry and eggs cost more, so it'll likely always remain a thing.
Similarly, one points at how inefficient the average human being is. When not at an office doing useful work, or otherwise participating in the economy, they are just a drain on resources, filling space that could be filled with more humans. There's nothing to be gained by making it affordable for the average person to buy a house with a garden, and allow their children to grow up surrounded by nature instead of inside glass, concrete, stone and asphalt-lined cages. That's just not productive.
On our farm, our cows and sheep would spend time outside as much as possible, to eat the fresh grass and otherwise do their thing. We'd bring the cows in only for milking and during the night. Of course, we were painfully aware of this not being efficient. Other farmers had already begun to stop letting their cattle graze outside as much as we did, instead keeping them in the stables and feeding them either dried grass or cattle feed.
These days there's more of a market for meat, poultry and eggs that comes from animals who actually have seen some daylight during their lives, so it's more realistic to farm that way again. For humans there's no such hope, however. Most farmers have already quit their business and sold their farms to mega farms that are run by large companies.
Unless one is rich, this means that one will have to accept that the future for themselves and those around them means less living space, smaller apartments with more restrictions, more stress and more concrete and only a miserable patch of half-dead and dying plants surrounded by muddy grass (commonly referred to as a 'public park') to serve as a way to 'escape the city'.
Makes one wonder whether dimming the light inside cities to 10 lux might be a solution, along with the removal of any appendages which its inhabitants do not need to carry out their jobs anyway. Could solve all crime and violence issues in one stroke, while increasing productivity many fold
Maybe this is the perfect time to consider a career in being livestock..
Maya
[1] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/health-impacts-of-living-in-a-city/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warning-living-city-seriously-damage-health
[3] https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/cities/health-risks/en/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570570/
