(Is "Are big societies optimal for human happiness/quality of life," a fair rephrasing of your question?)

I've been asking myself similar questions lately. As pointed out "made to live" implies things that never happened, in that humans weren't created, nor were the current societies/civilizations ever consciously designed or created. They just sort of happened.

Since both humans and societies got to where they are through mostly unthinking processes, it's easy to see how things didn't end up optimal.

Humans were hunter-gatherers for most of their existence. It's hard to intuitively grasp how long a time that is, but I find this quote helpful (source):

If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture.

Without wanting to get into bad evolutionary sciences, I think it's reasonably fair that even modern humans are mostly adapted for the hunter-gatherer life, with a couple of more modern modules thrown in. It's also reasonably fair that humans were mostly "made" to live in small tribes, hunting and gathering.

Agriculture (and later writing, the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, computers...) gave us reasons to not be hunter-gatherers any more and my naive assessment is that a good number of those reasons are good ones. It's just that our bodies and brains haven't caught up.

So where am I going with this? I'm not sure. What I'm trying to say is that I think it's better to say that (our) big societies weren't made for humans (at least, they're not optimal for humans), rather than saying that humans weren't made for big societies.

Others have pointed out that you're asking an incoherent question. I'd like to state that even if you refine it to something like "can modern humans be very happy in a big society" (or whatever you do actually mean), you still have the problem of "compared to what"?

Even if you conclude "the average and median human was happier 10000 years ago", you'll face the (Mere Addition Paradox/ Repugnant Conclusion)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox]. You'll have to figure out how to compare over 7 billion just-OK lives in big societies against a few tens of million pretty-good lives for hunter-gatherers.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/05/a-cascade-of-dunbar-numbers/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number Those links may interest you

Depends on what you mean by "made to live". We certainly gravitate toward them.

This might be the stupid questions thread but at the same time I don't think it belongs here. "Made to life" implies a designer with a purpose which is not a basic stable of LW.

To be a proper question, define exactly what you want to know instead of appealing to ill-defined concepts to make a point.