I remember reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael close to 20 years ago. It is a great book and made me understand the origins of the bible and Judeo-Christian religions. The Story of B was an even better book.
In his writings, Daniel Quinn talks of The Great Forgetting. To paraphrase, we humans had a way of living in the world that was sustainably working for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact that way of living and the environment in which we lived is really what shaped us to become humans from our pre-human hominid ancestors. But then we started to do larger scale agriculture and small populations could generate way more food than they needed to sustain just themselves. So that allowed larger groups of humans to survive and thrive. And with a small group of farmers/herders providing the food, the rest of the population could focus on non-food-generating pursuits.
And so we gradually moved further and further away from the old way of living and created a society that was in many ways more comfortable and secure, but insidiously was at odds with nature. And of course we interpret the new society to be an improvement, another step along the evolutionary path whereby the remaining nomadic hunter/gatherer societies were stagnant, less evolved and destined for extinction.
This is all exactly on the mark, but falls short in talking about what I feel is a critically obvious missing piece: the fact that the majority of the people living in this modern, "civilized" society are in a near constant state of discontent. Society has made it even easier to active the base of Maslow's hierarchy without requiring what used to be a critical component of human existence: close social and emotional connections with others. The remaining tribes don't have this. And honestly it is this feeling of discontent that drives society forward as we all try to achieve our way to fulfillment. But of course that is not possible.
Daniel Quinn definitely got it right, but it was just slightly incomplete. The answer isn't necessarily give up modern civilization. But we definitely need to start by prioritizing the things that are encoded deep in our genes about what makes a fulfilling existence: being outside, moving your body, connecting on a deep, meaningful, emotional level with others, eating a healthy diet of whole foods in moderation, and spending less time thinking, and more time just being in the world.