Here are some quick examples:
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-suicide-paradox/
Here's a handy transcript of part of the podcast that might interest you:
"
Stephen Dubner (host): "Dan Everett is a college professor. A linguist. Off and on for the past thirty years he's lived with a tribe in the Amazon called the Pirahã."
Dan Everett: "I originally went to the Pirahã as a missionary to translate the Bible into their language. But over the course of many years they wound up converting me and I became a scientist instead, and I studied their culture and its effects on their language."
Host: "The Pirahã live in huts, sleep on the ground, hunt with bows and arrows. But what really caught Everett's attention is that they are relentlessly happy. Really happy."
Dan Everett: "This happiness and this contentment is really what had a lot to do with me abandoning my religious goals and my religion altogether, because they seemed to have it a lot more together than most religious people I knew."
Host: "But this isn't just another story about some faraway tribe that's really happy even though they don't have all the stuff that we have. It's a story about something that happened during Everett's early days with the tribe. He and his wife and his three young kids had just finished dinner. Everett gathered about thirty Pirahã in his hut to preach to them."
Dan Everett: "I was still a very fervent Christian missionary and I wanted to tell them how God had changed my life. So I told them a story about my stepmother and how she had committed suicide because she was so depressed and so lost. For the word 'depressed' I used the word sad, so she was very sad, she was crying, she felt lost and she shot herself in the head and she died. And this had a large spiritual impact on me, and I later became a missionary and came to the Pirahã because of all this experience triggered by her suicide. And I told this story as tenderly as I could and tried to communicate that it had a huge impact on me, and when I was finished, everyone burst out laughing….When I asked them, 'why are you laughing?' they said, 'She killed herself! That's really funny to us! We don't kill ourselves. You mean you people, you white people, shoot yourselves in the head? We shoot animals, we kill animals, we don't kill ourselves.' They just found it absolutely inexplicable and without precedent in their own experience that someone would kill themselves."
Host: "In the thirty years that Everett has been studying the Pirahã, there have been zero suicides. Now, it's not that suicide doesn't happen in the Amazon. For other tribes, it's a problem."
Dan Everett: "And as I've told this story, some people have suggested that well, it's because they don't have the stresses of modern life. But that's just not true. There's almost 100 percent endemic malaria among the people. They're sick a lot. Their children die at probably 75 percent; 75 percent of the children die before they reach the age of five or six. These are astounding pressures."
Host:: "A group of people that laughs at suicide? That doesn't sound much like the U.S. does it?"
"
Here's more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
"Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do.[6] There appears to be no social hierarchy; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system can thus be labeled as primitive communism, in common with many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of agriculture before Western contact (see history of the Amazon)."
Plenty more examples of other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, but that's the most detailed one I can think of at the moment. As you can see from their description, the Piraha social system is hardly unique among hunter-gatherer tribes.
Here's more info from a guy who visited multiple African tribes over seven years:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...frican-tribes-says-lesson-happiness-from.html
Hang on in there to that bit of hope :-)
