My ideal life based on my favourite writers

My choice of favourite authors reflects my interests (duh), mainly science and politics. But they each appeal for different reasons. Some writers I would aspire to write like, and some I just want to steal bits of the fictional worlds they create and live them.

I want to be friends with Howard Roark, rogue architect of Ayn Rand’s creation.

I want to write like George Orwell, with clarity and brevity, and have the courage to defend unfashionable political views (but I don’t want to be a socialist).

I want to think like Asimov and Arthur C Clarke – wild ideas that make you gasp.

I want to write novels like Steven Baxter – wild ideas that make you gasp but with a bit more novelistic oomph than Messrs Asimov and Clarke.

I want to live a life and in a world as described by Kim Stanley Robinson – probably some kind of peripatetic scientist in the mix of great events but still taking time out to appreciate the wild and the rocks and the sky.

Happiness and palaeolithic behaviour

We live in very different circumstances to those in which we evolved and are adapted to, and those circumstances gave rise to certain behaviours. Would recreating some of those behaviours make us happier?

[Frank] had written commentaries for the Journal [of Sociobiology] suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had.  Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat that they ate – just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviours might increase health and well-being.  After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons.  And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be.

Frank clicked to this commentary and its list of all the paleolithic behaviors anthropologists had ever proposed as a stimulant to the great brain expansion.  How many of these behaviors was he performing now?

• Talking (he talked much of the day)
• Walking upright (he hiked a lot in the park)
• Running (he ran with Edgardo’s group and the frisbee guys)
• Dancing (he seldom danced, but he did sometimes skip along the park trails while vocalizing)
• Singing (‘Home-less, home-less, oooooooooop!’)
• Stalking animals (he tracked the ferals in the park for FOG)
• Throwing things at things (he threw his frisbees at the baskets)
• Looking at fire (he looked at the bros’ awful fire)
• Having sex (well, he was trying.  And Caroline had kissed him)
• Dealing with the opposite sex more generally (Caroline, Diane, Marta, Anna, Laveta, etc)
• Cooking and eating the paleolithic diet (research this; hard to cook in his treehouse, but not impossible)
• Gathering plants to eat (he did not do that; must consider)
• Killing animals for food (he did not want to do that, but frisbee golf was the surrogate)
• Experiencing terror (he did not want to do that either).

Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below

Which of those do you do?  Which of those would you not do?