But - with respect - the most likely reason that it was 'the best week ever' was because deep down you knew you could go back to the other life once you were through with the experience.

Your/our complicated life paid for it and allowed you to eat and survive while you were out there.

It would have been far less enjoyable if you had to live like that with no provisions, no fuel, and no money all of the time, with starvation and death the automatic outcome of failure.

probably, but it does show that one doesn't need computers and gadgets to have a good time, which is what the allusion was

And I know for a fact that it's quite possible to survive without all that.
Of all those gadgets the only thing I had access to until about the age of 15 was a television.
We didn't have computers, computers were big things the size of rooms that a university or large company might be able to afford, certainly not a family (even a family with a quite decent income).
iPods and stuff simply didn't exist (I do say about 15, which is when Sony introduced their first Walkman portable casette player, which I bought when the price came down).

We could have survived like that indefinitely, living on the edge of a forest region near several farming communities where the grocer and butcher got their products fresh from the farm and the baker baked his own bread. The mill used to produce the flour had changed from water power to electric not too long before we moved there.

Of course it's possible to survive without it all But you're talking about necessity versus choice.

The original posts asked if civilisation was worth the complexity that goes with it.

People who have no choice but to survive at the lowest level of complexity have no say in the matter. Ironically, those of us at the other end have the opportunity to help them, but we usually don't.

And life is an ongoing construction, so it doesn't really matter what we didn't have as kids. What matters is what we do have right now - since that's what we'd have to give up.

The thing is: living in the wilderness in 2007 in a western state is not the same as living in the wilderness in an undeveloped country.

Necessity versus choice, again.