It’s not easy being a homo sapien. We have to go to work every day, sitting in front of a bright, glaring screen for eight hours, or else doing something that’ll make our feet hurt. When we get hungry, we can’t just eat: we have to buy the food from a shop, which costs money that we’ve earned from working. The food is wrapped in plastic and shipped in from miles away. We get two days a week to relax, which is often spent doing admin or washing our clothes. It goes on like this until we die, which also costs money when you factor in funerals and debt.
Not so much for the orangutan, who – according to Netflix’s new David Attenborough-narrated documentary, Secret Lives of Orangutans – is one of our closest living relatives, sharing “nearly 30 physical characteristics with us”. Unlike us though, their days are largely spent snacking and grazing freely (adult male orangutans can eat about 8,000 calories a day, just in fruit and termites), or otherwise swinging from tree to tree. Plenty of orangutans, Attenborough informs us, spend their lives never touching the ground. Theirs is an existence of leaves and boundless leisure, of berries and sheltering from tropical rain.
