There's a decent argument to be made that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was far better than most of civilized history, and we've only recently really dug ourselves out of that hole.
If you gloss over all the "nasty, brutish and short" bits of that lifestyle, sure.
Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality.
Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size.
Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way.
I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.
It wasn't pretty. But the argument was made that people were happier and healthier then.
Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.
We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality.
We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control.
Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics.
I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.
It's not like the life of a medieval peasant was nice, friendly, and long. I don't doubt that we're better off now, but was the life of the average civilized person prior to a couple hundred years ago better than that of the average hunter-gatherer? It seems like you still have all of the same downsides, plus more like worse diseases and having to work nearly every waking moment.
If it takes thousands of years of worse conditions to get to a better lifestyle, is that progress?
Progress isn't a smooth line, for civilisations, startups or individuals. In Europe, the Roman Empire invented a whole bunch of stuff that we're only reinvented recently (and some things, like concrete, that we still aren't as good at). The Dark Ages were not a progression from that.
There were, however, more people living in medieval Europe than there were when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. So yes, I'd count that as progress. As for lifestyle, it's hard to say... the life of a medieval peasant in Europe wasn't that bad. They had a lot of security, a community around them to support them, rights that were guaranteed by that community. They worked hard, but at work that was meaningful to the community. Things might have been worse in the cities, but the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived in rural farming villages. I wouldn't necessarily say that they had it worse than a hunter-gatherer. Or even than a modern tech worker...
You were just arguing that high rates of infant mortality made it crazy to think things were better. Now you're saying that the life of a medieval peasant, where infant mortality was 30-50%, wasn't any worse than the life of a modern tech worker?!
