Why are clothes considered essential for survival?

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Clothing is considered one of the most essential things we need for basic survival, up there with food, water, housing, and healthcare. Those all make sense. But I’ve been naked for hours on end, many times before, and I’m just fine.

It honestly seems more like a social thing (e.g. public nudity is a social taboo) than anything that is scientifically linked to survival.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Clothes are shelter, just like housing is shelter. The human body developed to survive in a very specific environment, but 99% of people don’t live in that environment today.

Some of the native peoples in the Amazon and the Congo don’t regularly wear much clothes. But they also never get cold weather, and have 24/7 shelter from the sun and rain because they live in dense forests.

Every other society on Earth developed customs of wearing clothes because the sun would burn their skin, the rain would give them hypothermia, and winter would freeze them to death.

You cab survive now without clothes because society has built an environment around you to let you do that. You live in a box that protects you from the weather and sun, and you travel to other boxes that protect you from the weather and sun. In between, you travel in various boxes that protect you from the weather and sun.

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