{"id":12736,"date":"2026-04-08T22:04:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T02:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/what-the-san-people-know-about-happiness-that-weve-forgotten\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T22:04:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T02:04:01","slug":"what-the-san-people-know-about-happiness-that-weve-forgotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/what-the-san-people-know-about-happiness-that-weve-forgotten\/","title":{"rendered":"What the San People Know About Happiness That We’ve Forgotten"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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What if the happiest humans who ever lived had no money, no government, and no ambition?<\/p>\n

I know that sounds like a provocation. But stay with me, because over the last two weeks something has been quietly dismantling my understanding of progress \u2014 and I think it might dismantle yours too.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t come from a book. It didn\u2019t come from a billionaire on a stage at Davos. It came from a group of people who have lived on this land for longer than any culture on Earth. People that most of the West has never heard of. And people who have heard of them have called them \u201cprimitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

They are the San people of Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And what I learned from them might be the most important thing I write this year.<\/p>\n

The thought experiment that changes everything<\/h2>\n

Before I get to San, I want you to try something. It\u2019s a thought experiment, and it\u2019s not a light one. It\u2019s the kind of question that, if you sit with it long enough, starts to rewire how you think about civilization itself.<\/p>\n

Here it is.<\/p>\n

If you could go back in time and be born into any culture, in any era of human history \u2014 but you had to come back as a <\/strong>random\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>person<\/strong><\/span>. Not the king. Not the nobleman. Not the person with the right gender or the right skin color. Just a random human being in that society. You could come back as a woman. As a slave. As a member of a persecuted minority. As anyone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which civilization gives you the best odds of actually being happy?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Think about it.<\/p>\n

Ancient Greece during the age of Pericles? Maybe \u2014 if you came back as a wealthy male citizen. But there were tens of thousands of slaves who built the Parthenon, and women had no legal rights. Roll the dice wrong, and your golden age is somebody else\u2019s nightmare.<\/p>\n

America in the 1950s? Sure \u2014 if you happened to be white, male, and straight. Otherwise, you\u2019re drinking from a separate fountain.<\/p>\n

The advanced Muslim Abbasid Empire in 12th-century Spain? A genuine golden age of science, art, and tolerance. But still, constant wars and battles with Christian Spain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I started asking this question to historians, to thinkers, even to multiple AI systems. And the answers were fascinating. Modern Scandinavia kept coming up. The Abbasid Caliphate. Periclean Athens. But then there was one unlikely candidate that surfaced again and again.<\/p>\n

The San people. Anytime before the 21st century. In three different AI models (Claude, OpenAI, Kimi), the San Culture came in the Top Ten.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of all the cultures that have ever existed on this planet \u2014 cultures that built pyramids and parliaments and empires \u2014 the one where you could come back as anyone<\/em> and almost surely live a dignified, equal, and connected life\u2026 was a group of hunter-gatherers roaming the savannahs of southern Africa.<\/p>\n

That stopped me cold.<\/p>\n

Because here\u2019s the fascinating thing. This culture is the longest unbroken culture we have, dating back tens of thousands of years. And mostly unchanged.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Writing this from Namibia & Botswana<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m writing this from a hotel room in Botswana. Over the past two weeks, I\u2019ve been traveling across Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe \u2014 watching wildlife that feels almost mythological, standing in landscapes that look untouched by time, and learning about a continent that many of us in the West have come to severely misunderstand. Or worse \u2014 to underestimate entirely.<\/p>\n

Last week, I wrote to you about what female elephants taught me about leadership. About how the matriarch leads not through force but through memory. About how nature, across species, keeps arriving at the same answer: wisdom over dominance.<\/p>\n

This week goes deeper.<\/p>\n

This week gets uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Because the San don\u2019t just challenge how we lead. They challenge how we live. They challenge what we call progress. And they hold up a mirror to the modern world that, honestly, I wasn\u2019t prepared for.<\/p>\n

The oldest culture you\u2019ve never heard of<\/h2>\n

If you haven\u2019t heard of the San, you might know the term \u201cBushmen.\u201d That\u2019s what the West has called them for centuries. But that word carries the stench of colonialism \u2014 it comes from the Dutch bossiesman<\/em>, meaning \u201cbandit\u201d or \u201coutlaw,\u201d a name given to them by the very people trying to destroy them.<\/p>\n

The San have their own identity. And it goes back further than almost anything.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not talking about a few hundred years. We\u2019re not even talking about a few thousand. Genetic evidence suggests the San lineage diverged from other modern humans somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Their culture has been continuous for at least 20,000 years. Some scholars argue it\u2019s the oldest living culture on Earth.<\/p>\n

Let me put that in perspective. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids about 4,500 years ago. Ancient Greece peaked around 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire rose and fell. The Renaissance came and went. The industrial revolution, the digital revolution \u2014 all of it \u2014 and the San were already ancient when those civilizations were young.<\/p>\n

We built progress. And lost happiness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They never had what we call progress. And may never have lost what we\u2019re desperately trying to find.<\/p>\n

6,000-year-old maps of the mind<\/h2>\n

In Damaraland, Namibia, I stood in front of rock paintings left by San ancestors over 6,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

I expected something crude. Stick figures. Basic hunt scenes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not what I found.<\/p>\n

\"Damaraland