[HN Gopher] The past was not that cute
___________________________________________________________________
The past was not that cute
Author : mhb
Score : 385 points
Date : 2025-12-06 21:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (juliawise.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (juliawise.net)
| Swizec wrote:
| Having grown up less-well-to-do _and_ post-communist /socialist,
| my favorite thing to remind people is that _working class women
| always worked_. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never
| happened for a large majority of families.
|
| Sure sure my great grandma was "stay-at-home". That meant feeding
| an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for
| 60+ years. She wasn't stay at home, she ran a cantine. _And_
| worked the farm during peak harvest season.
|
| I'll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I
| think): _"While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting
| is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around
| 100lb pots every day"_
| tolerance wrote:
| > I'll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth
| Goodman I think): _"While victorian science cautioned that
| weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their
| kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day"_
|
| What would the modern day iteration of that quote be like?
|
| A woman on a brisk walk through the park mid-afternoon staying
| on top of the tracked metrics stored on her Apple Watch to
| offset the time spent sitting at her desk job while another
| woman lives relatively stationery sitting in traffic at the
| off-ramp waiting to pull into Erewhon to fulfill the walking
| woman's Instacart order.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that
| weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor
| women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in
| the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be
| bad for their health.
|
| Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made?
| That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for
| granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is
| accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone
| scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into
| this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of
| the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth
| about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually
| thought.
| Swizec wrote:
| Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries
| about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They're
| great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong
| fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how
| exercise became a thing that people do.
|
| However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The
| internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for
| women. Here's a pubmed paper:
|
| > Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise
| and competition could cause women to become masculine,
| threaten their ability to bear children, and create other
| reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for
| women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-
| twentieth century.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Victorians were talking about "ladies", not the washerwomen
| and cooks. Ladies are delicate and slight.
|
| The earthy workers existed to toil, not be beautiful. That
| wasn't their station in life.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past
| with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood
| nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the
| past is they felt more... Honest; for lack of a better term.
| Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of
| hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart
| instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there's something to
| the fact that the past was kind of "cute", just not in all
| storybook way.
|
| Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I've been visiting since
| the 80's, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no
| fences, now they're all mansions, many walled off. Sure the
| houses weren't insulated, and you would be crammed in there
| together, but it felt way more.... Human? Communal?
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the
| present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
| margalabargala wrote:
| It has a lot to do with the way our memories form and what
| memories our brains choose to construct from experiences.
|
| The past was not more "real" than present day reality.
| vacuity wrote:
| At the same time, it's arguable that certain observations
| such as "commercialization and commoditization have become
| stronger" are true. We're certainly living in an era where
| a lot can change in a few decades.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades
|
| So were people in 1910. You could say the printing press
| set up the following industrial revolution and things
| have been accelerating ever since. People talk that in
| the future there will be a technological singularity that
| things will go so fast people won't be able to keep up,
| but really in many ways we've been in it for a while
| already and it's still accelerating.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of
| the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio
| ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer
| polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the
| moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in
| Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world
| fighting against the other half of the world. Personally
| saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then
| watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually
| assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to
| shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with
| a world connected with a global knowledge network to
| every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world.
| He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to
| access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly
| ice cream) he wanted all year long.
|
| Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think
| there will ever be another generation of change like that
| one.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I mean - to one extent, concretely in the aesthetic ways I'm
| talking it was technologically we just had simpler materials.
| Cars had knobs and levers instead of touchscreens.
|
| Like, so much of what I do today happens online instead of
| the real world, so I do think you can describe ways in which
| life or the world really has gotten more "fake".
|
| Though some of this is funny too? I remember things from the
| say 50's to the 80'w as being more "real" and that's also the
| like rise of TV dinners and everything eaten out of a can,
| rather than "real" ingredients.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >50's to the 80'w as being more "real"
|
| Yea, people really are out of touch with what was going on
| around them. Naugahyde, for example was invented in 1914.
| Fake wood on cars started in the 1940s! It is very likely
| people remembering the 'real' stuff were quite often
| talking about objects that were far older.
| card_zero wrote:
| 1861, mauvine: all sorts of women wear a startling shade
| of synthetic purple. 1862, now it's Parkesine: the new
| fad is shiny plastic-coated boots.
| sublinear wrote:
| People focus too much on the new and not enough on the rest.
| Of course what's new is going to seem fake because it is.
| Nobody has figured it out yet. The rest never changed or has
| improved significantly.
|
| Anyone older than about 30 who takes a few minutes to reflect
| on all the little details of daily life could probably come
| up with a surprisingly long list of annoying little
| inconveniences they no longer have to deal with. Beyond that
| we've had decades worth of casually raising the bar for what
| is considered common sense and polite. These are the "real"
| things we take for granted.
| imgabe wrote:
| It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood
| and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered
| stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Hey buddy, I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge for $5 - just
| post a screenshot of you donating $5 to FSFE and I'll PM
| you the title deed.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Modern manufacturing and materials science let us create
| imitation materials at huge quantity and low cost that wasn't
| possible before about the '50s-60s.
|
| So you just used to use real materials out of necessity
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| People forget the ways in which the past was fake. Fake
| butter, for example, was more common than real butter from
| the 1950s up until the early 2000s. But most people don't eat
| margarine anymore and so most people don't remember it.
| ocschwar wrote:
| My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some
| places because chocolate was too expensive.
| bsenftner wrote:
| People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the
| wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I
| mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and
| ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that
| lived through and had the mind to record their lives for
| prosperity.
|
| Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and
| the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake
| medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing
| entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild
| west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because
| everyone was desperate.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Not the history makers
|
| Even the so-called "history makers" are the product of
| imagination, of myth, and of hagiography. If you met these
| people today, you wouldn't recognize them if you went by
| the expectations built up by the images we're fed. The same
| holds of so-called celebrities.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Most cowboys didn't own a gun - a gun was a month's pay,
| and nobody with that sort of money worked as a cowboy.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 20% to 25% of the cowboys were Black, and that aspect of
| history has been erased. Hollywood, propagandists and
| media's efforts to glorify, White wash, and profit off
| the American West Frontier has 100% distorted our
| history. It was much closer to this "the past was not
| cute", and then add in rampant corruption, criminal and
| religious criminal activity and you art starting to get
| there.
|
| We are a propaganda nation, far better at it than any
| other on Earth.
| msla wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress
|
| > Feed sack dresses, flour sack dresses, or feedsack dresses
| were a common article of clothing in rural US and Canadian
| communities from the late 19th century through the mid-20th
| century. They were made at home, usually by women, using the
| cotton sacks in which flour, sugar, animal feed, seeds, and
| other commodities were packaged, shipped, and sold. They
| became an iconic part of rural life from the 1920s through
| the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II
| years.
|
| Good, Honest, Old-Fashioned Clothing was Consumerism, too,
| bucko.
|
| > During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women
| and children in the United States were wearing feed sack
| clothing at any given point in time.[7][14] One participant
| in an oral history project stated that "everything on the
| clothesline was from feed sacks."[2] The US Department of
| Agriculture reported in 1951 that 75% of mothers living in
| urban areas and 97% of those living in rural areas had heard
| of making garments from feed sacks.[15]
|
| Did Granny make clothes from scratch? Did she, Hell! She
| bought cloth from a Large Evil Corporation what with the Dark
| Satanic Mills and Finance Capitalism and she was mainly
| unhappy she couldn't spend more:
|
| > There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed
| in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty,
| so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was
| made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the
| fabric, or adding trim.
|
| Our ancestors would be appalled at people wanting to go back
| to The Good Old Days. They fought and struggled mightily
| against what the Cottagecore Losers on their Laptops and
| iPods want.
| Aloha wrote:
| Your tone is a bit acerbic - but most of your facts are
| correct.
|
| Part of what was driving feedsack dresses was the
| agricultural depression from 1918-1939/40
| bazoom42 wrote:
| As far back as we have written records, we have the notion
| that people in past were better and more honest and the
| present day is corrupted.
|
| Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a
| heroic age in past, while later times considered the
| classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians
| romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the
| victorians.
|
| It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the
| present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products
| and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed
| and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost.
| The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The threat of physical violence was a lot more present and
| real in the past
|
| I think there is a lot of shady and dishonest business that
| happens now that would get you killed in the past
| supportengineer wrote:
| A great place to feel this is the USS Hornet in Alameda. This
| actual ship that you are on, made of steel and loaded with
| analog electronics, sailed to the far side of the Pacific and
| back. So much metal, steel, hydraulics, and electrical systems.
| It made it out and back. Not all the ships did. Mighty ships
| just like this one, with people like you, did not make it back.
| gerdesj wrote:
| You could also try HMS Victory in the UK or the Vasa in
| Sweden (other really old ships are available and some are
| still sailing).
|
| You might also note that the inhabitants of Hawaii had to
| have got there somehow and its 2000 odd miles to what is now
| the US mainland and still quite a long way from anywhere
| else, eg Tahiti.
| brabel wrote:
| Hawaii natives are Polynesians! They came the same way New
| Zealanders did by island hopping in the Pacific. We can
| only imagine but I guess most of those who tried it died in
| the middle of nowhere, only a few must have made it, but
| that's enough.
| andrewvc wrote:
| Maybe, but really consumerism wasn't a thing for most of
| history because almost no one had the money to decorate
| intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to
| varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine
| ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were
| lucky to inherit some furniture.
|
| I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you
| espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a
| consumerist society. For what it's worth it is still possible
| to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower
| cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction
| of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a
| new bed.
|
| In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It
| lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere
| directevolve wrote:
| A good depiction of the gritty realities and the meaning of
| material striving for the very poor in turn of the century
| farm life is the novel Independent People, by Halldor
| Laxness, an Icelandic nobel laureate.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Keep in mind that Halldor's book is depicting a situation
| fairly specific to Iceland: people recently freed from debt
| bondage, in a desperately poor and isolated area caught
| between much larger forces. It's not an attempt to
| accurately depict what it meant to be working poor for
| American laborers, like say grapes of wrath.
| echelon wrote:
| A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and
| blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".
|
| The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few
| countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at
| it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world
| experienced.
|
| There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so
| long.
|
| Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the
| trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that
| our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is
| wild.
| roenxi wrote:
| > The fact that our relatively small population supports
| the GDP it does is wild.
|
| Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and
| the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what
| they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is
| basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people
| better their own lives or not.
|
| The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the
| median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US
| does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the
| mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities
| are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a
| political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to
| do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness
| and ignorance.
|
| [0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-
| regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis
|
| [1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.
| arjie wrote:
| I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress
| has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to
| master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats
| centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but
| _The Fifth Discipline_ distinguishes between 'detail
| complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to
| figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have
| feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might
| simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity
| is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation
| strikes me as something that can be particularly like a
| thing that modifies a dynamic system.
|
| In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might
| be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can
| simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in
| such a way as to bring it about.
|
| Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the
| effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the
| Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat.
| Their success is not the norm so much as it is
| extraordinary.
|
| 0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld
| Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become
| mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the
| spark or joke become common knowledge
| nerdponx wrote:
| > The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that
| the median administrator chooses to make people fail and
| the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.
|
| Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful,
| especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main"
| reason.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks
| seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes
| those long-form articles that go on for days and could
| use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly
| the best the community has come up with because it takes
| a lot of words to tackle economics.
|
| That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's
| blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all
| his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just
| echoing all that, so if you want the details you can
| spend a few hours reading what he wrote.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The article you linked to makes a different claim.
| majormajor wrote:
| > On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically
| just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better
| their own lives or not.
|
| Focusing on GDP handwaves away so much around
| externalities that it's hard to know where to start with
| it.
|
| How much worse off would people be if the US GDP was 20%
| lower but FB/Instagram/Google/everybody-else weren't
| vacuuming up ad dollars by pushing as-addictive-as-
| possible mental-junk-food in people's faces to make them
| feel bad about themselves? How much of that GDP is giving
| anyone optimism for improving their own individual
| condition?
|
| How much of the nostalgia for the olden days is about
| agency and independence and perceived trajectory vs
| purely material wealth (from a material standpoint, many
| people today have _more and better stuff_ than boomers
| did as kids, when a single black and white TV may have
| been shared by a whole family)?
|
| Would regulation preventing the heads of big-tech
| advertising firms from keeping as much of that profit for
| themselves really be a net drain? Some suggestions for
| that regulation, harkening back to US history:
|
| 1) bring back super-high marginal tax rates to re-
| encourage more deductions and spread of salaries vs
| concentration in the top CEOs and execs. worked for the
| booming 50s! preventing the already-powerful, already-
| well-off from having another avenue to purely focus on
| "better their own lives" seemed wise there. seems like
| there were mega-wealthy super-tycoons both before the
| "soak the rich" era in US history and after it, but fewer
| minted during it?
|
| 2) instead of pushing more and more people into overtime
| or second jobs, go the other way and revitalize the
| earlier 20th-century trends towards limited work hours.
| get rid of overtime-exempt classifications while at it.
| Preventing people from working 100 hours a week to
| "better their own lives" and preventing them from sending
| their kids to work as early to "better their own lives"
| seems to have worked out ok.
|
| 3) crack down on pollution, don't let people "better
| their own lives" by forcing others to breathe, eat, and
| walk through their shit
|
| 4) crack down on surveillance, don't let people "better
| their own lives" by monetizing the private lives of
| others; focus on letting others enjoy their own lives in
| peace instead
| boston_clone wrote:
| Probably worthwhile to separate that span into smaller
| chunks.
|
| We blame boomers not for what happened in the 50s or 60s,
| we blame them for voting in and supporting Ronald fckng
| Reagan and all the bullshit his policies have affected
| since his presidency.
|
| See: https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/why-almost-
| everything-is...
| jibal wrote:
| Blaming boomers is stupid ... it conflates many different
| and different kinds of people. I'm a boomer who helped
| develop the ARPANET (so I'm not technically illiterate
| ... that's my _parents '_ generation) and I'm a
| democratic socialist who protested vehemently against
| Nixon and Reagan (who many in my parents' generation
| supported). The people to really blame are _right
| wingers_ and corporations and the uber rich who create
| bogeymen and false targets like "boomers" for gullible
| people to be distracted and deflected by.
| boston_clone wrote:
| Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and
| supported Reagan.
|
| I'm very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and
| his policies.
|
| Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud
| socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the
| technology space (not programming like most folks here, I
| presume), and socialism just might finally be having its
| due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy
| conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.
| Aloha wrote:
| 1850-1950 is much closer to a norm over human history -
|
| 3+ catastrophic major wars
|
| 3+ other minor ones.
|
| 2+ great depressions (each of which was as large as ever
| financial panic 1951-current combined)
|
| 3+ financial panic events
|
| At least one pandemic - plus local epidemics were pretty
| common.
|
| When I tell people "its never been better than it is today"
| they dont believe me, but its the honest to god truth.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few
| countries get to experience.
|
| All countries who had participated in WWII experienced it,
| winners and losers.
|
| What you said is the compete opposite of the truth.
| nosianu wrote:
| Having grown up in East Germany, that is the truth. From
| both my grandparents, born early 20th century, to me
| things continuously got better. Apart from the war of
| course. They started little better than servant class and
| ended up with their own big nice houses, and in comfort.
| That is true even for the GDR. They lived through war and
| famine and at least four different currencies and types
| of government.
|
| They also got more and more educated. From the lowest
| education to ever higher education degrees, one more step
| in each new generation. My grandfather tried many new
| tech hobbies as theY appeared, from (actual, original)
| tape recorders over mechanical calculators to at the time
| modern cameras and color slides, to growing hundreds of
| cactuses in a glasshouse, maybe as a substitute for being
| unable to travel to those places. I still have lots of
| quality 1950s and 60s color slides of people and places
| in East Germany.
|
| Looking around. even the GDR until the end experienced
| significant improvements over what existed before, at
| least for the masses. Except for the environment
| especially near industry.
| integralid wrote:
| >A lot of online culture laments the modern American life
| and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".
|
| >The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few
| countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at
| it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the
| world experienced.
|
| Especially ironic when perpetrated by youth from countries
| outside of America - like mine. I'm not a boomer, but my
| parents generation had it rough and my life was much easier
| in comparison. Importing "boomer" memes is a bit stupid in
| this context. Hell, even the name makes no sense here,
| because our "baby boom" happened later, in 1980-1990s.
| ip26 wrote:
| My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard
| bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood
| furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for
| something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble,
| small tables were a months pay.
|
| I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've
| moved away from tables that can support a car.
| p1necone wrote:
| This is true of basically everything people complain about
| having gotten worse over time.
|
| Whiteware and kitchen appliances are the same - you can
| absolutely buy a fridge, or a stand mixer or whatever that
| will work well and last forever. It's just the value
| proposition compared to cheap crap that will still likely
| last for a few years but at a 1/5th of the price is not
| great unless you're going to use it really heavily.
| gtowey wrote:
| Last time I had to buy a refrigerator it seemed like the
| choice was between one that cost around $1k and one that
| cost $10k. I really couldn't find a mid quality option.
| There wasn't a price point at around 2x the cheap ones
| for better quality. Those price points _exist_ , it's
| just that they're usually the same cheap fridges crammed
| full of pointless features that actually make the whole
| thing _less_ reliable because it 's more stuff to break.
|
| What I wanted was a refrigerator with a reliable
| compressor. That's where it really seemed like the only
| options are cheap and astronomical.
| M95D wrote:
| Compressor is replaceable. Also, how do you judge
| reliability of a compressor before buying it?
|
| Instead, try to find a refrigerator with access to the
| cooling pipes. Last fridge I threw away had a leak that
| couldn't be patched because the pipes were all embedded
| in the plastic walls of the fridge.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >how do you judge reliability of a compressor before
| buying it?
|
| Reviews, specs, teardowns, brand name.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Where do you find reviews you can trust? Honest question
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Yeah I think the caveat is that the compressor and maybe
| seals, lights and few other bits are the ONLY repairable
| parts of most fridges. The whole structure of a modern
| fridge is foam panels and sheet metal folds that aren't
| ever meant to come apart after being assembled.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| That's funny, just about a year ago, I had to replace a
| dead fridge and ended up with a reliable $3000-ish model.
| It's been great. GE PWE23KYNFS
|
| https://www.geappliances.com/appliance/GE-Profile-ENERGY-
| STA...
| gtowey wrote:
| This is actually super helpful! I ended up with a less
| expensive GE model because it seemed like they were the
| only brand with positive reliability reports besides the
| super expensive premium brands.
| permo-w wrote:
| even second hand?
| donkeybeer wrote:
| What's wrong with plywood? Why jump instantly from
| particleboard to hardwood?
| ip26 wrote:
| Not sure there's much market for quality plywood
| furniture. It's neither cheap nor fancy, just functional,
| which as a market segment has vanished. The price of
| today's plywood also seems to have closed a lot of the
| gap with hardwood - it's often actually a superior
| material depending on project.
| scott_w wrote:
| > Maybe, but really consumerism wasn't a thing for most of
| history because almost no one had the money to decorate
| intentionally in the way we do today.
|
| This reminds me of being a kid excitedly repeating the trope
| I'd just learned: "Back in your day it was nice because you
| didn't need to lock your doors!"
|
| To which she responded "Because none of us had anything worth
| stealing."
| throaway123213 wrote:
| Illuminating point but quite a lot of people live in 1st
| world countries where you still dont need to lock your
| door. Even in a major city.
| scott_w wrote:
| It's very time and place dependent. Burglaries are less
| common these days because the valuable stuff is iPhones
| now, rather than televisions.
| watwut wrote:
| > because almost no one had the money to decorate
| intentionally
|
| Poor people always decorated and still do. There is basically
| no larger human culture where decorations dont take a place.
| The only ones I can think of are small religious orders that
| dont decorate to deprieve themselves.
|
| You go to any poor area and see dirt, mess, issues and people
| showing off decorations in their houses or on themselves.
| andrewvc wrote:
| You are misquoting me. I wrote:
|
| > to decorate intentionally in the way we do today
|
| Most people not so long ago did not have the luxury of
| saying "that shirt is so last last year" , or "that living
| room set is a relic of the 90s!".
|
| Of course people always find ways to decorate and show off,
| but that's different than what OP talked about WRT quality
| furniture. In the past that stuff was so expensive you
| bought it and lived with it, possibly across multiple
| generations. If the style changed you probably couldn't
| afford to just swap it out.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of
| my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new
| bed.
|
| It's probably fine if you are going to use it for the rest of
| your life. Or you can pay just for the nails, and do the rest
| yourself.
| arjie wrote:
| A lot of people think this, but if I'm being honest modern
| materials are amazing. They survive pretty rough washes,
| they're incredibly cheap, fire-retardant, and last forever.
| Synthetics are amazing.
|
| Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days ago that I was
| thinking about this[0] when I thought about how the microfibre
| fleece my daughter was lying on was the cheap microfiber fleece
| I'd bought when I encountered my first American winter. A
| student's cheap blanket has lasted me over a decade and still
| keeps me warm and cleans easily.
|
| My wife and I have had Caspers and Tuft & Needles and
| Tempurpedics and we sleep now on an Ikea foam mattress. It's
| fantastic. Modern manufacturing and materials are incredible. I
| feel like I'm living in a golden age.
|
| 0:
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_La...
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| It depends; it feels like in some categories the premium
| between a material that's very suitable, and some ersatz
| lookalike is massive and depressing.
|
| I love a good petrochemical, but sometimes it would be nice
| if the cheap thing store wasn't so callously targeting
| veneers and pleathers that last just long enough to loose the
| receipt.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't think I have ever in my life noticed a difference
| between one matress and another. When I lie down, yes, but
| not when I wake up the next morning.
| jonstewart wrote:
| My great-grandfather was born in a dugout (i.e., sod) house on
| the Kansas prairie in 1880. His father died when he was 9. When
| he went to teacher's college, someone gave him an orange and he
| ate the rind, as he didn't know you were supposed to peel it;
| he still thought it was delicious. He married late at 35, and
| his wife died after a year. He married again and their first
| daughter died as a toddler. He was 49 when the Great Depression
| began. He became a Republican because FDR repealed Prohibition.
|
| I'm not wealthy, not by HN standards, but my kids are healthy
| and lack for nothing. I doordash them takeout sushi when I
| don't feel like cooking them dinner. I've been to several of
| the world's great museums, gone to great plays and concerts,
| and love a round of Epoisses with a plump Meursault.
|
| Things that last have always been expensive, out of reach for
| many. And every time I think nostalgically about life on the
| prairie in a dugout, I think about winter, it being -10 outside
| and windy, and 45 degrees inside and damp and smoky.
| euroderf wrote:
| > Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of
| hardwood and metal.
|
| PlasticWorld is designed to empty your wallet over time. In a
| hundred dollar product, what breaks is the two cent piece of
| plastic that replaced a six-cent piece of metal.
|
| Another part of this process of the enshittification of the
| tangible world of consumer goods is the process of (1)
| acquisition of a quality brand (typically by private capital),
| (2) extraction of the value of the brand (via substitution of
| inferior products & services, and self-serving management
| "bonuses"), and finally, (3) brand liquidation (by bankruptcy
| or absorption).
| spicyusername wrote:
| I mean... yes... I guess in 1700 there were only things made by
| hand, but also those things were so incredibly expensive nobody
| had them. Most people had one "nice" pair of clothes that they
| inherited and expected to pass on, because cloth was so labor
| intensive. Children's toys we're basically non-existent. Books?
| Forget about it. Only for monks in the hills.
|
| Today you have the option, everyone can have the cheap thing,
| and the wealthy can still have the honest thing.
|
| Much better this way, in my opinion.
|
| Every era has warts. Even if we lived in heaven, you'd still
| have substack posts complaining about it. It's just the way
| humans are. Ever restless, always looking beyond.
| you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way
| more.... Human? Communal?
|
| Would you believe plenty of people still live this way...
| mostly against their will. Heck, anyone can do it!
| techblueberry wrote:
| You missed the point. The whole town aesthetic changed. No we
| really can't do it anymore, because the way we design cities
| and towns is changing. Wealthy area used to be more open to
| everyone, now it's all gated communities and walled
| compounds. You can't even drive around the lake and enjoy the
| nature of it because all you see are the walls of McMansions,
| that's what's not "cute"
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think 1700 is not the best year to use, depending on the
| place. Rural people in 1700 England were quite different from
| most peasants who have ever lived - they were in a relatively
| advanced monetary economy, literacy rates were high, secular
| books were affordable (much less so than today of course),
| the price of linen cloth had perhaps halved in the last 200
| years. Feudalism was going away, agricultural productivity
| was rising.
|
| Life of a medieval peasant was quite different. Productivity
| was basically static, literacy was low, the economy would
| have been local and mostly based on barter or paying with
| labour. You would likely be growing your own linen to spin
| and weave and make into clothes for your own family. I think
| there was a little more specialisation and a little less
| subsistence agriculture by 1700.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos
| glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I
| guess this is similar ...
| gyomu wrote:
| I love how people in those videos always have impeccable
| clothing/hair/skin/etc.
|
| When I go back to my rural hometown, the people working the
| earth, growing the food, and managing the livestock don't look
| as... prim.
| landosaari wrote:
| See Bullerby syndrome [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullerby_syndrome
| aspenmayer wrote:
| See also depictions of vaguely European historical trappings
| in anime, especially as in Miyazaki's works, a variety of
| shojo manga and anime since the 70s, and many isekai
| settings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai
|
| "Representations of Europe in Japanese Anime: An Overview of
| Case Studies and Theoretical Frameworks". Mutual Images
| Journal, no. 8, June 2020, pp. 47-84,
| https://doi.org/10.32926/2020.8.ara.europ .
|
| An especially interesting quote from the above:
|
| > According to Frederik Schodt, Jaqueline Berndt, and Deborah
| Shamoon, the European settings, depicted in the 1970s shojo
| series took the role of a remote idealised elsewhere with a
| strong exotic appeal, radically different from Japanese
| society and reality, where the recurrent conventions of the
| shojo narratives were developed. Some of these themes, like
| the deconstruction of the feminine subject and the
| development of transgressive romantic stories (which contain
| incests, infidelities, idyllic and allusive sexual scenes or
| homosexual relationships), were hard to conceive in the
| Japanese society of that moment, which enabled the European
| setting with a range of creative possibilities due to the
| depiction of foreign cultures (Schodt, 2012 [1983]: 88-93;
| Berndt, 1996: 93-4, Shamoon, 2007, 2008). _Such a use and
| depiction of Europe fits with what Pellitteri has coined as
| the "mimecultural" scenario of anime, a mode of
| representation present in those anime series that adopt
| contents, settings, and other visual elements from different
| cultural backgrounds to develop their original narratives and
| plots_ (2010: 396). [italics added for emphasis]
|
| The concept of "mimecultral" aspects of anime and manga is
| not new to me, but that phrasing itself is, and it reminds me
| of Dawkins' conception of memes.
| tinkelenberg wrote:
| A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn't so much
| about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We
| rarely get the real thing nowadays.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
|
| I'd say it a bit different....
|
| We can't afford it, or at least don't want to pay for it. And
| quite often, attempting to give a significant fraction of the 9
| billionish people on earth something authentic of the past
| would be an ecological disaster.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I mean, it's not like everyone having a personal automobile
| and AC set to 68 _isn 't_ an ecological disaster... I don't
| want to return us all to subsistence farming, but unless we
| do something, we won't really get to make that choice
| ourselves anyway.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >isn't an ecological disaster
|
| I don't disagree, but at the same time, building the same
| cars we did in 1960 now would ensure the atmosphere would
| be incandescent in the next few years.
|
| If you look at things like US energy consumption per capita
| it leveled off in the 1970s and has decreased since, so it
| is possible, but we're not getting those thing we had
| during the days of insane energy usage.
| Qwertious wrote:
| AC is fine, with sufficient PV and insulation - most of the
| time, hot days are sunny days and thus easily renewable.
|
| Most people shouldn't own personal automobiles, because
| most people live in cities and cities shouldn't be built
| around the personal automobile in the first place.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they
| would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.
|
| In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is
| that supposedly some black people, while remembering their
| shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of
| white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least
| related to kings.
|
| And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.
|
| It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the
| "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a
| illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!
|
| This is what happens when you use history as a political tool.
| This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from
| peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost
| always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget
| what we are and where we come from so we side with the
| oppressors.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| That's not how population genetics work.
|
| Almost every European-descended person has ancestry from Kings
| and peasants alike. Even the very recent Oliver Cromwell has
| way more than 20k living descendants in the UK. If you have any
| substantial English ancestry, there _is_ a Plantagenet
| somewhere in your family tree to a mathematical certainty.
|
| On the continent, and in other aristocratic societies like
| Dynastic-era China, things are much the same. If Qin Shihuang's
| progeny weren't _all_ put to the sword, just about _every_ Han
| Chinese person is descended from Qin Shihuang.
|
| Read about the "identical ancestors point". Past that point,
| every individual alive is either: (1) ancestor of everyone
| alive today, or (2) ancestor of no one alive today.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| I'm definitely aware of this.
|
| This is a very very far stretch from saying your family was
| royalty. Though i do guess you are technically correct.
| Forgive me, your highness. lol
|
| Let me add that you've delineated a technicality with no real
| consequence to my argument. If anything supporting my
| argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
| antonvs wrote:
| > If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that
| makes anyone proper royalty.
|
| This could potentially be a good argument for more
| democratic systems.
|
| My grandmother was very proud of the fact that we were
| descendants of King James (one of them, I couldn't tell you
| which one, probably the one that abdicated!)
|
| What she didn't understand is that something similar was
| true of almost everyone she knew.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Everyone is the star of their personal movie. They shine it up
| on their own.
|
| A good friend of mine had an awakening when he realized that
| his civil war ancestor suffered and sacrificed so that rich men
| could own other humans, and use those people to suppress his
| wages.
|
| Reality is people are people and those before us had the same
| struggles we have about different things. We're no smarter, but
| have access to the worlds information.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| What?!
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Many people romanticize their past so much that they side
| with historical oppressors. Oppressors who most likely
| subjugated most of their ancestors.
|
| This is not a coincidence, but is the result of consuming
| media from people who engage in this same act of
| romanticizing their history, or this media comes from people
| who were themselves actually related to these oppressors.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| Right.
|
| I'm gonna stick with "What?!"
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Peoples idea of their own history are influenced by the
| media (print, film, tv, etc).
|
| The owners of said media often prefer to fund historical
| content from the perspective of rulers, as this reflects
| their class character and aspirations. Meaning they have
| an infatuation with royalty because they do not think of
| themselves as lowly.
|
| The people then adopt similar mechanisms of reflection to
| how they view their ancestors in the past.
|
| I say this mechanism of reflection is a political tool
| designed to entice average people to think of themselves
| as above average in the past. And thus eliminate any
| consciousness of historical class continuation.
|
| If you say "what?!" again, I'm just gonna have to assume
| you disagree but are too afraid to do so out loud.
| klibertp wrote:
| Isn't it the other way around - people, especially when
| young, like to imagine themselves as someone special, so
| the media give them the perspective of the most special
| individuals they can find? Being a king, on its own, may
| not qualify - but the popular shows are rarely about
| "just" kings, it's mostly about ones who did something
| impressive (if evil; though I agree that last part tends
| to be edited out).
|
| In fantasy literature, a hero is almost certainly either
| a prince or at least of royal blood; in sci-fi, he's at
| least a progeny of a war hero or great inventor. Even in
| romance slice-of-life, you'll get mysterious amnesiacs,
| rich CEOs children, shrewd nerds with underworld
| connections, etc. _much_ more often than statistically
| possible - nobody wants to read about "normal people",
| not really (when we think we do, it's just the author
| writing so well that he convinced us _his_ "normal
| people" are different!)
|
| I can't rule out the possibility that this natural
| tendency is being exploited and manipulated in some
| cases, but the stories have always been about heroes,
| long before anyone thought of erasing anyone else's class
| consciousness.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| I mean, It's the same as consciousness of ourselves in
| the present.
|
| There are pieces of media that present the real struggles
| of the average worker. But not that many. Many films are
| instead invested in the ephemeral (and ever lasting)
| questions of reality, fiction(fantasy/action/drama), or
| inane or politically convenient biopics (if not totally
| altered).
|
| You will occasionally see a nod to "struggling to pay
| bills" or some mundane romanticized struggle, stuff like
| that, but almost never a picture of what its actually
| like.
|
| For the few popular films that do show it, and this is my
| critique of most media, they never compel the viewer to
| ANSWER the question of why this happens. This is because
| to present the real working class life is also to
| critique it and the conditions that create it.
|
| The working class life reveals it's own critique. And
| that critique is not something that media owners like
| because it puts into question the whole status quo. It is
| INHERENTLY politically charged content.
|
| So they avoid painting a real picture of average people.
| This lack of real exposure is a heavy influence on our
| ideas of reality. And essentially the viewers take this
| image and runs with it. The viewers ends up not learning
| HOW the world works, they start to see themselves as
| "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", and end up seeing
| society as a pool of ever-permanent social mobility, its
| just not their turn yet.
|
| This is, essentially, the same thing they do with the
| past.
|
| And I do not have anything against "special people" in
| media. This can be helpful, even, if done appropriately,
| by being sure to present kids with the REAL AND RELEVANT
| paths on how to attain this specialty (if it isn't real
| and relevant its just escapism). What I critique is the
| role that medias self-reflection plays in the world and
| in the past that is problematic.
|
| To come back to the actual post: Who originally started
| to view cottage living or working class farm life as cute
| and WHY? Was it truly our grandmas and grandpas? Or was
| it people compelled and organized to sell historical-
| fantasy books?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > My own version of this mistake was thinking that people's
| personalities were different in the past.
|
| It's slightly surprising to me how many people think this. Like
| they think that boomers are selfish because _that generation_ are
| more selfish people. No, people are inherently selfish.
|
| Or old people think young people are lazier than their
| generation. No, pretty much everyone is and always has been lazy.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I agree; however, I also disagree: the culture and systems in
| which people live do affect their behavior, and the boomers
| moved their youth in a different world than the youth of today
| and that did affect them as a group and how they could express
| their natural pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and
| sloth
| lysace wrote:
| _Problematic_. There 's that code word again.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...
|
| (https://archive.ph/XKBZr)
| mystraline wrote:
| Elaborate what you mean.
|
| What is "problematic" a code word for?
| sertsa wrote:
| Its generally code for: "Thinks different than I do". What
| generally follows is a value judgment that lets someone
| believe they hold a moral high ground that someone else does
| not.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Mm but that's not what _you 're_ doing, no. You're being
| "fair and balanced" and very much neutral and objective.
| api wrote:
| Romanticizing the past is hot again right now, and kind of comes
| in two political flavors: trads and neo-monarchists on the right,
| and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left (whom I consider
| to be left-trads).
|
| It's always important to repeat the PSA that this is always
| survivorship bias and mythologizing. The past was very often much
| harder and worse than the present. When it wasn't worse, it was
| just different. People back then faced existential angst, fear
| about the future, depression, and alienation just like we do.
| There were wars, crazy or idiotic politicians, popular delusions,
| plagues, depressions, atrocities, and all the rest.
|
| That's not to say that all things always get better, or that they
| get better in a straight line or in an orderly fashion. History
| is a mess. I'm talking about _romanticizing_ the past to the
| point of imagining a lost golden age. That is bullshit.
| themafia wrote:
| > Romanticizing the past is hot again right now
|
| It would be better to understand _why_ rather than _who_. Since
| this same sentiment has arrived in previous eras it seems like
| a human phenomenon rather than a political one.
|
| > I'm talking about romanticizing the past to the point of
| imagining a lost golden age.
|
| Or perhaps they're just attempting to avoid thinking about
| their bleak future.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and
| anarcho-primitivists on the left"
|
| Where would I find formal definitions of that scatterfest of
| terminologies?
|
| I'd like to engage but I'm not up to speed on the lingo. I
| think PSA means Public Service Announcement - am I on track
| there at least?
| scott_w wrote:
| Trads: reference to "tradwife." Follow an idealised 1950s
| lifestyle that they saw on Mad Men where the wife submits to
| the man. But they don't want a conservative woman, they want
| to force liberal women into it instead.
|
| Neo-monarchist: wants a dictator to replace democratic rule,
| where that dictator is a tech CEO like Elon Musk or Sam
| Altman (used to be Zuckerberg).
|
| Greens: environmentalists.
|
| Anarcho-primitivist: wants to end all technological advance
| and return to hunter gatherer society while miraculously
| somehow maintaining all the benefits of technology (medicine,
| relatively comfortable lifestyle).
| api wrote:
| Pretty good. Trads also sometimes means people who want to
| go back to feudal or ancient ways, old school Catholics,
| and various other things. It can mean different things
| depending on the context but it generally tends toward
| social conservatism and old school patriarchy.
| scott_w wrote:
| > Trads also sometimes means people who want to go back
| to feudal or ancient ways, old school Catholics, and
| various other things.
|
| This is simply incorrect. Any historian versed in this
| area will point to the fact that the version of "trad-
| lifestyle" being pushed by its supporters simply _did not
| exist_ in feudal Europe. In fact, I don 't think the form
| they push really existed for any length of time in the
| USA, either. Maybe there was a form of it somewhere in
| the world but I strongly doubt the people pushing this
| lifestyle would even know.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The author raises valid points, to which I agree.
|
| Something I would add is that when we look back at how _rich_
| people lived, looking at the lavish parties with fancy clothes,
| we miss the _huge_ amount of labour that was needed to make that
| happen (and thus why only the billionaires of the day could
| afford to ponce about in new clothes and have fine food like ice
| cream on demand in summer.)
|
| However we don't have those constraints of requiring a team of
| 40, plus 90 hectares of land, an ice house and town of artisans
| to hold a house party with a four course meal, chocolate, fresh
| fruit, the best cuts of meat and fresh lettuce in winter.
|
| _we_ can have that luxury, to the point where it is mundane.
|
| look at the kitchens needed to service henry the 8th:
|
| https://www.nakedkitchens.com/blog/henry-viiis-55-room-kitch...
|
| and compare that to the kitchens needed to service something like
| an office block (for example Meta's london office serves 3 meals
| a day for ~2k people, fits in 100m2)
| delichon wrote:
| Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of
| servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple
| chores like folding clothes, driving, programming, washing and
| dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and
| play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook
| their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive
| joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a
| single new car. _They_ wrote checks to the _government_ , rather
| than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.
| johnfn wrote:
| This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can't tell which side
| you're arguing for.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Hacker News really is full of luddites now.
| temp8830 wrote:
| Also, back in 2025 people's mental models were so primitive
| that they could only consider one parameter at a time. And
| the reward function was wired into their survival instincts,
| imagine that! This caused them to see a person whose mental
| model held a different parameter value as a threat to their
| survival. These primitive serial thinkers used something
| called "wars" to update model weights, where they physically
| eliminated compute elements! Truly a barbaric age.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Could be they aren't trying to come down on a nice easy high-
| contrast color and are figuring anywhere society lands will
| still be some shade of gray with a bit of flair here and
| there and a dash of spilled paint in other places.
| card_zero wrote:
| Color here is a metaphor for a point.
| tbossanova wrote:
| A rhetorical point, no less.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own
| children.
|
| Oof, that one hits hard. My dad was an executive, mom was a
| housewife/socialite, we lived in Mexico. Had our own live-in
| maid, gardeners/handymen for outside chores. I saw them more
| than my parents. I can totally see them hiring robots instead
| of humans. Once technology gets cheap enough, the masses adopt
| it (in the 60's TV was an electronic babysitter)
| djtango wrote:
| Why is UBI assumed as part of techtopia? When the government
| has access to unlimited labour and military via robots, why do
| they need citizens anymore? Beyond some antiquated moral
| obligation, why would a government actually do anything for a
| population that is net value extracting?
| defrost wrote:
| You might as well ask why a sea of humanity should tolerate a
| toll gate keeping robotically enhanced micro brotopia that is
| net value extracting.
|
| Traditionally these motte and bailey fiefdoms were laid siege
| to and undermined.
| beeflet wrote:
| What value do technocrats extract? It is a totally one-way
| dependency of the serfs upon the technocrats and not the
| other way around.
| tdeck wrote:
| > why do they need citizens anymore?
|
| People like being served by human beings, rich people
| especially. So that work will still be around and all the
| brightest and most diligent people will compete to be the one
| who brings Jeff Bezos's grandson his dinner.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| >why would a government actually do anything for a population
| that is net value extracting?
|
| Because we outnumber them a million to one, and history is
| littered with examples of what happens to leaders who squeeze
| their population a little too far
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I'm not really convinced it's actually possible to
| overthrow a modern government. The disparity in killing
| power available to the two sides is just too great. Like
| yeah we outnumber the government a million to one
| (figuratively), but that's not going to help much when they
| have tanks, artillery, and planes to defend themselves
| with.
| Aloha wrote:
| The people that run that killing power are also citizens,
| and they either must be bought at an increasing steep
| price, or they will go with the bulk of the nation
| (mostly with their near and distant relatives who _are_
| suffering) - network effects are very real here.
| beeflet wrote:
| What happens when the killing power is a autonomous
| machine? Like now?
| throw310822 wrote:
| It's a very valid concern, but technological advances are
| also available to the people. Asymmetrics war (terrorism,
| depending the side you're on) is always a possibility,
| unless the gap between the possibility of states and
| those of citizens grows too wide.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| If this argument were true, dictatorships couldn't exist.
| However, they do.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You're assuming that citizen are united in what they
| want. That's usually not the case.
| Warwolt wrote:
| > they either must be bought at an increasing steep price
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Right, what I was getting at is -- that isn't a fatal
| problem in practice, the price stays affordable.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Most dictatorships make no less than a half-hearted
| attempt to convince the population to support them.
|
| And then they make a point out of terrorizing the people
| who don't support them. Just so the others have no
| trouble discerning whether believing them is a good idea
| or not.
| beeflet wrote:
| The highly specialized vehicles of war are not that
| threatening in a civil conflict. Think about how much tax
| money it takes to purchase a tank for example. There is
| maybe 1 tank for every 1000 people, let's say. Yet it
| only takes a single rocket launcher to destroy a tank.
|
| Look at what happened to the USA in Afganistan recently.
| What really threatens the chances of popular revolution
| are the systems of surveillance and inter-dependence that
| we are building up, and the existence of killer drones
| that can compete with armed peasants at scale.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Didnt the nation armed with all of this modern tech lose
| to a guerilla force of ricefarmers armed with sharpened
| sticks and AKs? Or do you think the Vietnam war would go
| very different now?
| anon-3988 wrote:
| The US could have easily, easily won the Vietnam war if
| they just dropped 1 or 2 nukes. The modern military is
| going to have drone that swarm the sky 24/7. They can
| develop virus that only they have the cure to. They can
| drop EMPs. They can grow their own food in their own lab
| while we all slowly die and wither outside.
|
| These are powers that are actually, technically,
| plausibly be granted to a single or several individual in
| the future.
|
| The future where human is obsolete is scary. Just reread
| that sentence again. Humans are obsolete.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Since no one has bothered to explain how wrong you are...
| I'll give you the easy version...
|
| Tanks and drones, don't stand on street corners and
| enforce non-assembly and curfews.
|
| The tanks and drones argument and later Biden's "we have
| F15s" claim are wildly devoid of reality. You do not
| understand what a "modern military" is. Each MRAP takes
| multiple people to keep it running, and it's just a
| diesel truck.
|
| You think tanks and drones don't take teams of people to
| keep running?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| No offense, but ask someone in the military how wrong you
| are.
|
| Tanks and drones don't stand on street corners and
| enforce curfews.
|
| Our "modern military" in handicapped in multiple ways,
| primarily that society does not have the stomach to win
| wars anymore. And, beyond that, it takes TEAMS of people
| to keep the simplest vehicle or weapon system running.
| It's all logistics and fuel.
|
| In a civil conflict it was dissolve quickly without a
| unified force and a ton of fuel.
| pcrh wrote:
| That depends on your definition of "overthrow".
|
| Governments are routinely replaced in western
| democracies.
| mrob wrote:
| Historical leaders didn't have fully automated killer drone
| factories. (Just an example; a real AGI will probably come
| up with more effective ideas.)
| myk9001 wrote:
| So, you literally read "unlimited supply of military via
| robots" in the parent comment, and still reply with this?
| Humanity truly doesn't stand a chance...
| beeflet wrote:
| "killbots, mow down these stupid protesters"
| analog8374 wrote:
| So it's a mind control problem. We have a good technology
| for that
| integralid wrote:
| Who is "they"? Isn't government just a group of people
| selected among others? Government whole job is making life
| better for people in the country.
|
| Billionaires, on the other hand, are not elected and have a
| vested interest in maintaining the inequalities. If anything,
| they are UBI enemies.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And here I got the impression, that the government's job
| was to enrich themselves, coasting along on the back of the
| common goods, letting themselves be bought by lobbies and
| lining up for supervisory board positions, looking out
| first and foremost for themselves and their clans.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _When the government has access to unlimited labour and
| military via robots, why do they need citizens anymore?_
|
| Wait a minute, didn't you just assume Western countries are
| _not_ democracies?
|
| I've noticed how fashionable it is in the US in particular,
| to distrust the government -- not just this government, but
| on _principle_. This idea that a government _never_ acts on
| behalf of the people, unless forced to. I wouldn't disagree
| to be honest. But then we need to follow this up to its
| logical conclusion: governance by elected officials is _not_
| democratic.
|
| Then we need to decide if we actually want democracy or not.
| Personally, I'd like this decision to be... err... you know,
| it would be nice if everyone had a say?
| 9rx wrote:
| _> governance by elected officials is not democratic._
|
| Correct. In a (representative) democracy, one does not
| elect officials. They elect representatives. The
| representative is not an authority like an official is.
| They are merely messengers who take the constituent
| direction established at the local level and travel with
| that message to deliver it in a country/state/etc.'s
| central gathering place.
|
| _> Then we need to decide if we actually want democracy or
| not._
|
| We (meaning most people) do not. Democracy is _a lot_ of
| work. An incredible amount of work. It requires active
| participation on a near-daily basis. Most people would
| rather do things like go to their job to put food on the
| table or spend time with their hobbies or other pleasure
| activities. Which is why most people seek -- by your own
| admission -- officials to lord over them instead.
|
| _> Personally, I'd like this decision to be... err... you
| know, it would be nice if everyone had a say?_
|
| It is nice when you are independently wealthy and no longer
| have to worry about things like giving up an enormous
| amount of your day to keep a roof over your head. But most
| people are not so fortunate, so they do not find it fair
| that, for all realistic purposes, only some people get to
| participate in democracy to their own advantage. Hence why
| democracies devolve into a system of officials instead,
| with most people believing it offers a better balance for
| all involved, albeit at the cost of losing say.
| bloppe wrote:
| But in your example, it sounds like representative
| democracy is a choice freely taken. If people actually
| want representatives to worry about the details of policy
| for them, then that is real democracy, because the
| alternative is a form of government that the people don't
| actually want.
| delichon wrote:
| Democracy is a less a form of government than a form of
| containment of government. And it leaks like all of the
| others. The form of government itself is a hungry serpent.
| hephaes7us wrote:
| It's pretty easy to imagine a world in which, for example,
| UBI is available, but it's contingent on sterilization.
|
| Aside from being more compassionate than the Terminator
| movies, it might simply be the cheapest way to handle humans
| in a world where we've become a liability.
| shinycode wrote:
| I'd argue, why would we need a government in this case ?
| refurb wrote:
| Yup, it's funny seeing people say how bad the past was without
| realizing people 100 years from now will say the exact same
| thing about today.
|
| Not to mention the opinions and beliefs that people hold "as
| the right side of history" without realizing these things
| change and no doubt some view they hold will be seen as
| "barbaric" in the future.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Any survivors a hundred years from now will consider this
| Eden. They'll be dealing with climate change on a scale we
| can't imagine.
| baq wrote:
| > without realizing people 100 years from now will say the
| exact same thing about today
|
| Past performance future results yadda yadda. I hope you're
| right, though!
| concinds wrote:
| No, I really don't think so. You used to have to build your
| own house and stable. Dig up your own well and carry water
| from it. Shower maybe twice a week (usually just once).
| Remember, you're doing hard physical labor in the sun all day
| long. Someday you can finally afford a tractor, but develop
| hearing damage thanks to it. No electricity. Wash clothes by
| hand for hours. Cook all the time. Your babies might die,
| your husband or wife might die, and then good luck. This is
| literally within living memory in most _developed_ countries.
| Many here have grandparents who lived like this for a big
| chunk of their lives (not just growing up).
|
| No matter what the future looks like, the present won't look
| like that, relative to it, than the past does to the present.
| The average developed country inhabitant objectively lives in
| decent material conditions.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| "decent" is a subjective judgment, there is no objectivity
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I thought it would be more like cyberpunk movies where people
| might get petty UBI, dirty food/water/room so they don't die.
| tolerance wrote:
| For whatever reason I am reminded of this HN comment after
| reading this blog post:
|
| > Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists
| singing hymns to their oppressors.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274237
|
| Especially towards the end of it.
|
| The past was not "cute" and neither is the present. But in spite
| of its edges the past afforded one a greater sense of whatever
| abstract phenomena is related to the word "cute" that escapes the
| present.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Yes, the past definitely wasn't that cute, but outright denying
| that it was not very different is just as absurd.
|
| The definition of "normal" has drastically changed, even over the
| last few decades. A hundred years ago much of the societal
| structures still revolved around farming (which it had for
| thousands of years before that), something which now only
| involves a small minority of people.
|
| People love to look at the past, not as it existed, but
| superpositioned over reality as it exists now.
| themafia wrote:
| Farming has always been seasonal and before gasoline engines
| drastically changed their efficiency they often involved horses
| and oxen. There was a larger number of people living rurally
| but most of them weren't spending the majority of their year
| actually working on any farm.
|
| The other nitpick of the post is, yes, of course, people in
| work clothes of any generation do not look particularly
| elegant. People didn't wear their work clothes all day and
| would have had nicer sets for special functions like church or
| weddings.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >would have had nicer sets for special functions like church
| or weddings.
|
| It's likely they would have one set of church clothes at
| least, but if you ever look at 'old' houses, closets are tiny
| because even modestly wealthy people didn't have that many
| clothes.
|
| In 1900 you've have spend something like 15% of your yearly
| income on clothes, now it's around 3%.
| themafia wrote:
| Did the clothes in 1900 last longer than they do today? Did
| they even have polyester?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Clothes lasted longer, yes. The fabric was almost always
| thicker and less finely woven due to the limitations of
| historical textile manufacturing. The garments themselves
| were properly stitched instead of overlocked, with
| patterns sensibly designed for the usage and size of the
| garments. People also repaired their clothes and would
| keep them long past the point most modern consumers would
| buy new.
|
| Plus, clothes were a considerable portion of the
| household budget. People couldn't afford them if they
| didn't last.
| bluedino wrote:
| > The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from
| the garden.
|
| Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great
| cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their
| food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...
|
| Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and
| not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, people tend to forget that even in the US we had long
| bread lines during the depression and that during WWII there
| were just a lot of items you couldn't get.
|
| >everything was fresh from the garden
|
| And this just goes to show that the writer doesn't understand
| how gardens work. For the vast majority of the year any
| particular plant in the garden ain't producing a damned thing.
| You can get some things like fresh tomatoes that produce from
| late spring through summer. And some herbs will produce all
| growing season. But fresh peas, well, they all pod out at
| around the same time. You better start canning them, oh and
| trying to freeze any amount of them in the past would cost you
| an absolute fortune in electricity.
|
| Simply put, the amount and quality of vegetables you can get at
| your local store would stun most cooks of the early 1900s. They
| would walk in the store and be unable to move for a moment,
| stunned, at the vast selection of non-rotten, non ate up by
| bugs, large vegetables and ones they'd never seen before.
| verbify wrote:
| > large vegetables
|
| I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables
| taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than
| the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are
| more flavorful than large ones.
| brabel wrote:
| It was shocking to me to see how huge onions are in
| Vancouver, and I guess the same applies to the US... those
| things can't be natural!! In Europe they are half the size.
| bluedino wrote:
| How big are they?
|
| We have very large ones like Vidalias, small ones like
| pearl onions, and then everything in between. Most common
| are probably the size of an apple (how big is an apple,
| you ask?)
| relaxing wrote:
| Because large size was a selected-for trait by breeders, at
| the expense of the good tasting genes.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Anecdotally vegetables I grow are wildly more flavorful than
| ones you can buy. Like think grape tomatoes as sweet as grapes.
| Green beans that a have complex flavor almost like green tea.
| The butternut squash that I accidentally grew this year from
| seeds that survived the winter in my compost tastes like a
| pumpkin pie. Corn that you can eat raw and that putting butter
| on feels like a waste.
|
| That's not to say you cannot get really good food that's not
| "farm fresh" but food right out of the ground absolutely on
| average is better.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| As long as you don't consider the growing season in the
| averages. Yes, garden fresh food is great today because you
| can get vegetables from the store when yours are not in
| season.
| msla wrote:
| > The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from
| the garden.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness
|
| > Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, is a kind of
| poisoning characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe
| intestinal pain that affects individuals who ingest milk, other
| dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white
| snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol. In animals
| it is known as trembles.
|
| > Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of
| lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the
| early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio
| River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was
| prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its
| properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln,
| is said to have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and
| lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated
| with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no
| signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals
| most often poisoned.
|
| Nice, Fresh, Honest Milk.
| happosai wrote:
| Seasonal food also tasted a lot better when you spent half of
| the year waiting for the season, dreaming about fresh food of
| the next season.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| That's still the case today though.
|
| If I get red cherries in winter from Chile, they are not as
| good as the ones from eastern Washington in the summer. Local
| seasonal fruit in WA is amazing (cherries, peaches, apples,
| now is pear season)
| ido wrote:
| Is it because it's picked unripe so it doesn't spoil in
| transit? I'll bet for people who live in Chile the red
| cherries they get locally taste great.
| happosai wrote:
| The difference is today we eat bland cherries around the
| year except for a couple of weeks when you get fresh local
| ones.
|
| You don't spend half of the year remembering the previous
| season's cherries waiting for the next time you can taste
| them.
|
| I mean foodies notice the difference today. But a lot what
| made the various foods great in old times for /everyone/
| was having to wait for it.
|
| Like half of the fun of vacations is waiting for them. If
| you can live at The beach around the year it stops being
| special.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > You don't spend half of the year remembering the
| previous season's cherries waiting for the next time you
| can taste them.
|
| I do that, I miss them
| zdragnar wrote:
| My mom's mother was so afraid of pork and trichinosis that, if
| you dropped a pork chop she had cooked onto the floor, it would
| shatter- that is how overcooked it would get (or so the family
| joke went).
|
| Also, most of the chickens she cooked came from a can- that is,
| whole hen, pressure canned and sold that way. There weren't any
| chicken farmers for miles and that was the safest and most
| convenient way to get chicken to cook with.
|
| Spices, fresh fruit and vegetables were all luxuries for most
| of the year. Most dishes were variations on stew, casserole or
| pot roast since everything was already soft already, and gravy
| was the most accessible seasoning / condiment.
|
| Food was cooked fresh because the refrigerator was tiny and
| restaurants weren't cheap enough for anything other than
| special occasions, but "fresh" is definitely an optimistic
| interpretation of the ingredients.
| bluedino wrote:
| My grandmother stored pork in lard-filled crocks in the
| basement for months.
| nradov wrote:
| And if you were lucky enough to get dessert it was something
| like Jello with a bit of canned fruit inside. Of course that's
| also why obesity was less of a problem.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Jello was a fancy desert and a way to show you had
| wealth/prosperity as it required refrigeration, something the
| poors didn't have.
| Qwertious wrote:
| The poors had refrigeration, in the form of ice boxes. Not
| refridgerators, just basically eskies that the ice man came
| and shoved a big block of ice into once a week. So
| basically you could only make ice cream (etc) on the day
| the ice man came, if you were poor.
|
| ...so people just made their ice cream on that day. It
| required a little planning, is all.
| duped wrote:
| What do you mean, cold smoked fish and pickled cabbage is
| great. And you don't have to worry about heart disease when
| consumption will get ya long before the sodium does.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a
| Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we
| can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and
| services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it
| have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact,
| we _ought_ to have both. It 's not like it's impossible. We just
| have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be
| easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie"
| and "Bladerunner".
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and
| choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.
|
| However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More
| than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers
| who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a
| little bit more.
|
| Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up
| for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six
| live births for the population to replace itself.
|
| And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able
| to, including children as soon as they were able.
|
| More here:
|
| https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
|
| You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br...
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's
| actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was
| a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have
| forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal
| sized.
|
| Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are
| all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.
|
| It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three
| earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and
| frames reflected this.
|
| All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green
| revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > However, in general, most of the past really was terrible.
|
| How are you and everybody else here so sure about that? Maybe
| you are forgetting parts of the population with different
| lifestyles and conditions? And I don't mean only the rich.
|
| When people are though, they don't suffer from a though life
| as much as somebody who is soft. You can notice that with
| yourself if you do uncomfortable things, like going on
| outdoor adventures or staying in a more primitive cottage.
|
| Old people have a tendency to only talk about the hard times,
| and paint themselves as hard working martyrs. And of course
| it is in their interest to convince the younger generations
| that the system the olds are in control of is a vanguard
| against endless suffering, starvation and disease. Hmm, now
| it starts to sound familiar. Don't we need to sacrifice an
| oxen or a virgin to keep away that suffering from the past?
| Don't we need the young generations to obey and pay us juicy,
| juicy monetary tributes so that we keep the blight from the
| past away from them? The horror we have had to tell them
| about, because they weren't alive to verify if it was lies or
| truth.
| skybrian wrote:
| That's not the kind of evidence I'm basing my opinions on.
| I'm reading historians who tell us what it's like because
| _they_ have looked at the evidence. What there is of it.
| For ancient times, this is pretty sparse.
|
| For example, read the series on peasants that I linked to
| an acoup.blog. It's largely a demographic model because
| peasants don't write to us and the elites were not very
| interested in them. But it's based on things like child
| mortality rates and I don't think there is anyone claiming
| that there were any societies with modern child mortality
| rates in ancient times?
|
| Also, exploitation by the elites is part of the model.
| ksoshsb wrote:
| > most of the past really was terrible
|
| I used to think this way, but if you actually start reading
| first hand accounts, stories from long ago, etc you start to
| question this narrative. And then I contrast that with my
| current situation:
|
| I wake up, spend 30 minutes with my child before sending him
| off to daycare so I can work, and then I get about an hour
| with him in the evening before he goes to bed. I'd give up a
| lot if it meant more time with my family. Especially if we
| were working together to provide for our family directly, as
| opposed to making some billionaire richer.
|
| Modern society is deeply inhuman compared to the past, and I
| think the whole "the past is terrible" narrative - that I
| grew up believing - is pushed by the wealthy today to
| continue the absurd wealth inequality. If they can point to
| the past and say "that was awful, you should appreciate what
| you have today" people are much less likely to get angry
| about the wealth gap and general parasitism of elites today.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they
| thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs.
| what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome
| is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men
| who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so
| they could have wives and reproduce
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women
|
| Imagine if the USA's founding legend wasn't the honorable
| Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that
| jazz, but instead how _our ancestors kidnapped and raped the
| women of the neighboring tribe_. The psychology of such a
| people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible
| binary132 wrote:
| what's truly hard for the modern mind to comprehend is that
| our societies are the exception to the rule of history, not
| the norm. as the ancients go, that type of thing (along with
| total scorched-earth genocide of other tribes) was basically
| commonplace.
| I-M-S wrote:
| Would this exceptional modern society of ours you speak of
| just happen to be the one founded on the genocide of Native
| American tribes?
| binary132 wrote:
| that's not who we are any more
|
| 200 years ago might as well be 20,000 to the modern mind
| nradov wrote:
| The funny thing is that the Rape of the Sabines was adapted
| into a popular musical comedy movie "Seven Brides for Seven
| Brothers" in 1954. Audiences loved it at the time but the
| story seems bizarre and offensive today.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047472/
| nradov wrote:
| Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap,
| unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff.
| People have distorted memories of what things used to be like.
| Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff
| is still around while everything else is in a landfill.
| djtango wrote:
| Au contraire, when my mother was growing up most ingredients
| were organic and free range by default and all your meals
| were hand made and free of synthetic additives.
|
| There are charts which show the cratering of nutritional
| content of fresh produce over time so maybe not all goods and
| services of the past were total crap.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| What people mean when they say farming in the past was
| "organic" is that crops would be grown in actual, non-
| metaphorical crap. You would collect a big pile of it, let
| it sit there stinking up the area, and then when it dried
| and decomposed enough you would spread an even layer of
| crap across your fields.
| techblueberry wrote:
| Are you trying to imply this is bad? This is what I
| romanticize modern organic farming to be?
| UltraSane wrote:
| Life for the very richest people hundreds of years ago might
| have been almost as comfortable as the average person today but
| for the vast majority of people it was truly miserable.
| bsder wrote:
| > There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public
| spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual,
| deeper connectedness to each other.
|
| Deeper connectedness? Yeah, conform to the small town or gossip
| ruins your life. "Harper Valley PTA" ain't that long ago.
| Shared public spaces ruled by the biggest jerks--hope you're
| willing to take on a sociopath on the hill. My father had an
| entire garage of junk to repair those "quality goods" (cars, in
| particular were _terrible_ ). The only reason why "services"
| were good is that you could get a bad reputation and then you
| were doomed as nobody would buy from you--of course the flip
| side is that you could be shaken down, too. Ritual? Hey, girl,
| you're 18--why aren't you married and pregnant already like
| your sisters were?
|
| At this point, most of the people on HN have never lived in the
| world where being smart was a _HUGE_ negative stigma ( "Revenge
| of the Nerds" was an exaggeration--but not by as much as you'd
| think). If we wound the clock back to the 1960s or 1970s, 95%
| of the smart people on HN would be _profoundly_ unhappy--just
| like all the rest of the functionally alcoholic men working in
| the mills, mines, or factories.
|
| You chose "Bladerunner" as the maximal negative while my
| grandfathers would have viewed it as a step _up_.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Deeper connectedness = Karenism
|
| They can go right now to Karen societies like the middle east
| and asia but they don't, its clear why.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Whenever possible I'd always prefer a societal construction
| that requires minimal interdependence really, its not even a
| question.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Deeper connectedness is Karenism. There are still countries and
| societies today that are "deeper connected" and you can see the
| cost of it.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > Deeper connectedness is Karenism.
|
| I am utterly confused by this statement. Karen as in... "let
| me speak with your manager" meme Karen? What are you trying
| to say here?
| tsoukase wrote:
| Keeping the good parts of the traditional way of life in modern
| context is very difficult. Living a simple, frugal life without
| sacrificing hygiene and mental integrity, controlling consuming
| needs and enjoying the bare minimum presupposes deep
| philosophical insight, knowledge of self and of basic and
| advanced human needs, a maturity that only a few obtain in
| young age.
|
| It is easier to approach the "mental singularity" of a free
| spirit if you are at the edge of survival that in the
| convenient, warm western style.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Nowadays we (UK) have a notion called "fuel poverty" which is
| formally defined (1) It is similar to the more generic notion of
| energy poverty. Basically, if spending out on fuel for heating
| takes a household below the official poverty line, then that is
| considered fuel poverty.
|
| I'm old enough to remember houses without any form of central
| heating - mostly farms and cottages but even modernish town
| houses of the 70s/80s might be a bit remiss on the modern
| touches. I'm 55 so born 1970. My family lived in at least one
| house with an out-house bog (toilet) - it got a bit nippy (cold)
| in winter. If you had to use it then piss first to break the ice
| and then go in for a dump!
|
| My mum was a Devonshire (Stoke Fleming, nr Dartmouth) farm girl
| and one anecdote she had was visiting another farm that even her
| parents considered a bit old school. The bog in the other farm
| was situated above a shippon - ie where cows are kept. The house
| adjoined the shippon and a fancy modern "indoor" bog had been
| built by bashing a hole through an exterior wall and an extension
| added over the shippon. It even had a sink to wash your hands -
| which was from a rain capture tank ... . The floorboards were a
| bit sketchy and apparently you could end up nearly eye to eye
| with the bull, whilst sat on the throne.
|
| OK, back to fuel poverty and the old days not being cute. My
| mum's anecdote would probably be considered laughable to an
| Elizabethan (not QEII - QEI).
|
| The world spins and we move on. I can remember being seriously
| cold in a house and basically wearing a lot more clothing and
| having a lot of blankets and later a hefty TOG rated duvet on my
| bed.
|
| I think I prefer progress but don't think of the past as somehow
| regressive.
|
| (1) https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fuel-poverty-
| stati...
| nradov wrote:
| It's sad how the UK government has impoverished its people
| through a bizarre and misguided pursuit of "Net Zero".
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Our high energy costs are far more complicated than that.
| Qwertious wrote:
| It's so weird how people in the UK blame their economic woes
| on renewables and not the fact that they sanctioned
| themselves against their main trading partners with Brexit.
|
| Like, what were you expecting? Breaking out of the EU (a
| primarily economic union) results in economic problems.
| Import controls requires stopping incoming trucks (sorry,
| incoming _lorries_ ) and that requires building major truck
| stop to avoid backups, and it increases shipping costs on
| everything. You(r govt) didn't build the truck stops, didn't
| set up any sort of _plan_ until after the import controls
| went into effect, and were somehow surprised that putting up
| a trade barrier resulted in less trade, and a resulting
| economic slowdown.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own
| about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago
| still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it
| was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in
| the current era, same structural problems remain.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban
| Woman
|
| https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Today will be the brutal past in the future.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.
| munchler wrote:
| Yes, or the horrible diseases that were common before we
| understood germs or had safe, effective vaccines. (Sadly, we
| seem to be backsliding on that one.)
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth
| out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful
| or two decades ago.
| Animats wrote:
| This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been
| written. Probably too much.
| inshard wrote:
| Everything is relative. Even the perception of effort, from the
| calories burned at work daily to sustain a livelihood, is
| subjective. What truly matters is the amount of effort required
| by your peers to achieve similar financial stability. We tolerate
| the work as long as everyone else is equally willing to do it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| "Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these."
| -- Ovid
| ascorbic wrote:
| He would've loved Tumblr
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| "A woman's work is never done."
|
| In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time
| said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that
| later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed _all_ waking
| hours until the day she died.
|
| Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives
| doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment.
| (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).
|
| Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had
| to dive in to help out the second they could lift something
| heavier than a couple pounds.
|
| We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species -
| up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm
| and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.
|
| There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and
| dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly
| transformative for our species.
| danny_codes wrote:
| You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history
| before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a
| relatively brief period of our collective history.
| margalabargala wrote:
| People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian
| society because the latter was easier.
| euroderf wrote:
| And also beer became possible.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Initially but the excess food allowed population to
| increase and the only way to feed them was to keep farming.
| So in a way humans trapped themselves.
| LanceH wrote:
| The population increased because half of it wasn't dying
| off immediately. You have to include the half that dies
| off early in the calculations of QoL for
| hunter/gatherers.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| "Trapped" in a life that meant women didn't have to
| regularly murder their children.
|
| Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think
| it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.
| strudey wrote:
| I think there's a version of the Malthusian trap that has
| explanatory merit - the idea that as population
| increased, you got diminishing returns from more people
| farming the same land. Population would therefore
| increase until famine, after which there would be good
| times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by
| the industrial revolution.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls
| into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who
| can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the
| niche until there are no more resources: any successful
| species is trapped against some kind of resource or
| environmental ceiling, unfortunately.
|
| Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era?
| Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that
| question.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > So in a way humans trapped themselves.
|
| It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet,
| potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that
| tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/
| bandrami wrote:
| Not _easier_ , lower-risk. Agriculture produced a standard
| of living with a lower mean but a much thinner left tail.
| tor825gl wrote:
| This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and
| Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When
| hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which
| Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils,
| was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange
| for the food.
|
| The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a
| hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities
| also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve
| ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you
| will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and
| thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the
| plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will
| eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.
|
| Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions
| against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed
| to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding
| groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They
| would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then
| end up hungry and sick.
|
| The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a
| season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for
| another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge
| cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our
| close animal ancestors than tool making, and its
| influence is still with us. Rules around not eating
| animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce
| the herd similarly cast a long shadow.
| truegoric wrote:
| That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing
| some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic
| of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence
| on historical stories and myths?
| andsoitis wrote:
| Some academic sources:
|
| - The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by
| Jacques Cauvin (1994/2000)
|
| - Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and
| the Realm of the Gods by David Lewis-Williams & David
| Pearce (2005)
|
| - Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and
| Myth by Walter Burkert (1972/1983)
|
| - Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion by HC
| Peoples et al. (2016)
|
| - Subsistence: Models and Metaphors for the Transition to
| Agriculture by H. Starr (2005)
|
| --------------------------
|
| Myths didn't juts reflect the shift, they were also one
| of the cultural tools that made the shift psychologically
| possible.
|
| For instance, the H&G worldview is cyclical (time
| repeats) but the agricultural worldview is linear. H&G
| myths emphasize eternal returns, cycles of creation and
| destruction, spirits of rivers, trees, animals.
| Agricultural myths introduce beginning of time, progress,
| destiny, apocalypse.
|
| As animals became domesticated, their spiritual status
| from H&G mythology declines, while the status of plants
| and land rises under agriculture. There's agricultural
| symbolism in Christ's body being bread and his blood
| being wine.
|
| The shift the agriculture produces surplus, property,
| inheritance, kings, priests, and so myth arise to justify
| social structures that don't make sense in nomadic
| foraging bands.
|
| Sacrifice is an agricultural logic. Classic pattern: god
| dies, god's body becomes food, eating is communion. It is
| directly agricultural: plant dies when harvested, seed is
| buried (like a corpse), resurrection in spring. Sacrifice
| becomes cosmic agriculture.
|
| The Garden -> Exile story is a pattern we see in Genesis
| ("By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread") but
| also in Greek mythology; Kronos' Golden Age changes when
| Zeus forces humans to work.
|
| In H&G, the trickster gods (Coyote, Raven, Loki, Anansi)
| are central, but with damaging they become dangerous,
| marginalized, punished because agriculture requires law,
| calendar, taboo, not chaos.
| tor825gl wrote:
| Thanks for this!
|
| Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture
| matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter
| gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process
| of carefully building up and storing for the future.
| Rather than a neutral technological innovation, it
| embodied the psychological shift.
| valesco wrote:
| This make me think of Into the Wild. Its cultural appeal
| may come from its resonance with those ancient cautionary
| tales.
| watwut wrote:
| No, it was easier. Not just lower risk. It gave you
| advantages both in terms of self defence, resources and
| even aggression toward surrounding group if you were
| collectively assholes.
|
| It was easier to make your numbers go up, raise more kids
| which made you stronger.
| margalabargala wrote:
| So, easier to not have huge die-offs where you watch your
| kids die of starvation?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an
| agrarian society because the latter was easier.
|
| Agriculture began from a convergence of climate stability,
| resource abundance, sedentary living, population pressure,
| and co-evolution with useful plants and animals.
|
| Hunting and gathering alone cannot feed everyone. Farming
| is harder, less healthy, more labor-intensive but yields
| more calories per acre.
|
| As a population grows, farming becomes the least bad
| option.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter
| gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving
| kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe,
| for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic
| history.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yes, because it was easier, to not have your kids die
| among other things.
|
| Hunter-gathering doesn't scale. What is fine when it's
| one person, collapses the whole society when it gets too
| large.
| mcmoor wrote:
| But it also contain the most people. Industrial age contains
| even more people but it hasn't defeated agricultural age yet
| because it's still so recent.
| lovich wrote:
| Even in agricultural societies it wasnt a nuclear family as
| implied by "Running a family was a brutal two-person job..."
|
| Most human societies were much more interconnected until
| relatively recently(last 80-100 years)
| nowittyusername wrote:
| When humans domesticated animals and started tending to the
| fields is when IMO it all went down hill. That change brought
| in modern civilization with all its advantages but moreeso its
| disadvantages and maladaptive behaviors of the human mind. We
| shoulda stayed hunter gatherers, I am almost certain we would
| have been happier.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| You first.
|
| And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
| nurettin wrote:
| To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we
| have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on
| rapidly.
| defrost wrote:
| A lack of antibiotics wasn't sufficient reason to stay in
| western society for those members of the Pintupi Nine and
| other hunter gather families that came in, looked about,
| and left again.
|
| Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't
| fathom living with everything else that comes with it.
| Aloha wrote:
| They had a place that was familiar and comforting to go
| return to.
|
| Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is
| waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is
| both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles
| and welcome to go find a place to do just that.
| defrost wrote:
| Alternatively they grew up with a foot in both worlds,
| eg:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
|
| Many people that have lived side by side with indigenous
| people across northern australia, the islands, PNG, et al
| have a clear idea of exactly what living off the land
| entails.
|
| A good many have done exactly that for extended periods,
| dropping in and out from one to the other.
|
| They would have done this sans any condescending
| permission from those wishing them well - such opinions
| count for naught.
| Aloha wrote:
| Agreed.
| tor825gl wrote:
| But you've selected one particular group. The thousands
| of groups and individuals who merged their way of life
| with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern
| human society do not have a name, they are just part of
| the human mainstream.
|
| Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or
| coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to
| participate in technological progress, even at the cost
| of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact
| extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often
| been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.
| defrost wrote:
| > But
|
| But?
|
| > you've selected one particular group.
|
| I used as examples some specific individuals of one named
| group, yes. I also had in mind other specific individuals
| of a few other families - all these groups share the same
| major language group.
|
| There are other similar examples across the globe, of
| course, there's an entire island that famously prefers no
| contact- but I'm making a brief comment not writing a
| book.
|
| > Of course some of these adaptations happened by force
| or coercion. But many didn't.
|
| If I were to pursue this I'd likely argue that a majority
| of adaptions happened with more force, less willingness,
| and at a pace faster than desired by the less
| technologically advanced side.
|
| > So many groups have wanted to participate in
| technological progress,
|
| Indeed. Many are curious about water but didn't expect a
| hose shoved down their throats with a bucket load
| funnelled in endlessly with no off tap.
|
| > that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or
| hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel
| societies uncontacted.
|
| I'm assuming this refers to those groups that want to
| retain autonomy but have difficulty doing so.
|
| In many such cases that I'm aware of the problem stems
| less from former group members wanting to bring the
| outside in, more from outsiders (eg: loggers) wanting to
| clearfell habitat, miners wanting pits, etc.
|
| eg: The entire West of PNG not wanting rule by Indonesia,
| various "Indonesians" not wanting their dense jungle
| homes cleared for palm oil plantations, various groups in
| Brazil, Native American Indians not wanting pipes to
| cross ther lands, giant copper mines on sacred grounds,
| etc.
| tor825gl wrote:
| You are making the same two errors again.
|
| You are focusing on the 0.01% of humanity which isn't
| part of mainstream modernity rather than the 99.99% which
| is. And you're discussing cases of extreme differential
| in technological knowledge and worldview (Amazon jungle,
| Papua New Guinea), rather than the vastly more common
| smaller gaps and asymmetries.
|
| If a majority of adaptations happened with force, how do
| you explain the ones that didn't? Don't they suggest that
| even without any force there would have been convergence,
| just more slowly?
|
| European settlers committed genocide against the native
| peoples of North America. I'm not denying that. But that
| happened in a context of a 400 year process of cultural
| exchanges and mergers in both directions. Arguably North
| Americans could not have ignored the written word or
| manufactured textiles in perpetuity, just as their
| societies adapted and mutated to accept the horse and
| steel tools.
| defrost wrote:
| > You are making the same two errors again.
|
| Are you stating that no hunter gathers ever turned their
| backs on modern society despite antibiotics, dishwashers,
| and iPhones?
|
| The claim I made in my comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46179508 that
| prompted your response was a simple documented fact:
|
| Antibiotics were not a sufficient factor to stop some
| people from rejecting technological society.
|
| I'm not seeing the two errors there you claim.
|
| > European settlers committed genocide against the native
| peoples of North America. I'm not denying that.
|
| Cool. I mean that's not something I said, but hey, if you
| want to chuck that in, sure.
|
| > But that happened in a context of a 400 year process of
| cultural exchanges and mergers in both directions.
|
| I'm not sure 400 years of war, conflict and asymetric
| resource exchange makes up for the genocide part.
|
| The Javanese subjugation of West Papua was a lot faster
| and equally or more brutal, the Europeans were largely
| hands off for that one, although they did quietly nod
| along and ignored the severed tonges and familial
| violence that accompanied the staged plebiscite :
|
| Cute Name though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Free_Choice
|
| Blackwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrciT3lXtwE
| rurp wrote:
| Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all over
| the world, until they were universally slaughtered and
| subjugated. We don't really know if industrial societies
| lead to more fullfilling lives or not, because they clearly
| lead to better and more expansive armies that quickly
| destroy anyone trying to live outside of that.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all
| over the world, until they were universally slaughtered
| and subjugated.
|
| There are still a number of uncontacted peoples and
| international groups that advocate for them:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Maybe it's a herd immunity thing or something and others
| are keeping me safe, but I'm 41 and Ive never taken an
| antibiotic and neither has anyone else in my family to my
| knowledge. I still can't figure out if it's the chicken or
| the egg.. have I never been sick because I don't take part
| in the medical system, or do I not take part because I've
| never been sick.. Then again last time my cuticle got
| infected I sterilized a knife and drained it myself. My
| friend said he had something similar and they gave him an
| antibiotic yet DIDNT drain it until it got worse and then
| they just did what I did. But at least they got to sell
| some antibiotics.
| manmal wrote:
| Antibiotics should IMO be reserved for life threatening
| situations, or likely upcoming life threatening
| situations. In the 80s as a toddler I was given
| antibiotics for measles (they can't possibly work on
| viruses), and had half a year of diarrhea afterwards.
| mcny wrote:
| It is funny you say that. Where do you draw the line?
|
| I had what was most likely poison ivy. Covered both arms.
| And was spreading. What do you propose my nurse
| practitioner to do? Not prescribe any antibiotics? To
| what end? I should continue to suffer because of what
| reason?
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Antibiotics do one thing, and one thing only - kill
| bacteria. They don't do anything for viruses, fungal
| infection, inflammation, chemical irritants or pain
| relief.
|
| In the case of poison ivy, all antibiotics would do is
| lower the already slim odds of a secondary infection.
| They wouldn't prevent the contact dermatitis/inflammation
| from urishiol.
| mcny wrote:
| No. I had broken skin barrier. Pus coming out and
| dripping. The use of antibiotics was definitely
| warranted. Again, who do you want to decide whether the
| use of antibiotics is ok and under what conditions?
|
| Should I be dying before you grant me antibiotics? What
| kind of nonsense is this?
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I personally think you were given antibiotics needlessly
| just for the sake of it..
|
| But yes, I think you should have developed some kind of
| infection, and being showing trouble of fighting it off,
| before you're given antibiotics.
| manmal wrote:
| For topical use, maybe an iodine spray would have been
| better suited. Iodine kills way more pathogens than
| antibiotics, and it's very good at that, and has no
| reported cases of resistance development.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Poison ivy is a plant that causes a topical rash,
| antibiotics can't help in any way with this. Maybe you've
| mistyped something?
| mcny wrote:
| When poison ivy spreads on skin, you have broken skin
| barrier with yellow liquid coming out. Then the places
| this yellow liquid touched also gets itchy and you now
| have multiple broken skin barrier everywhere.
|
| When skin barrier gets broken like this, you are now
| vulnerable to bacterial infection.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I know people that have more skin lost than you'd care to
| look at from semi serious motorcycle crashes, and no they
| don't just take antibiotics for fun.
|
| I can't believe someone gave you anti biotics for poison
| ivy.
|
| At this point I genuinely consider the medical system
| about as bad as the service department at a car
| dealership. They'll sell you anything technically legal
| just to keep their stats high.
| mcny wrote:
| > At this point I genuinely consider the medical system
| about as bad as the service department at a car
| dealership. They'll sell you anything technically legal
| just to keep their stats high.
|
| No, the service department has a bad reputation for a
| reason. They tried to tell me a wiper blade would cost me
| USD 80 with a straight face. Not even the whole set, a
| single wiper blade. It costs under USD 15 anywhere else
| other than the dealership.
|
| My guess is they are counting on people not looking at
| the itemized bill.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I hope this is satire.
| monadgonad wrote:
| Antibiotics don't stop you suffering from poison ivy. At
| all. In other posts you say you had a broken skin barrier
| that's vulnerable to infection, so you presumably know
| that this is not the same as actually having a bacterial
| infection, and that antibiotics are only a prophylactic,
| not a treatment. So stop making out that people are dying
| to deny you treatment.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You have absolutely been sick, but your immune system
| fought it off. You have a permanent low level of
| opportunistic infections because everyone does.
|
| You may not have had _symptoms_ , but that's a very
| different thing.
|
| And I assume you've been vaccinated against all the
| usuals.
| Gud wrote:
| You can't survive as s hunter gatherer in the modern world.
| manmal wrote:
| Hard to catch a disease when it's always the same 15 people
| around you, with no communication to the outside world; and
| no factory farming that incubates most of these diseases.
|
| Regarding your reference to how brutal and never-ending
| work was; As far as we know, many European medieval farmers
| had 1500-1800 working hours per year. It's also a bit
| gloomy to assume the household was run by two parents and
| their kids - often, grandparents were colocated and helped
| until they couldn't. What you've described was certainly
| the case during famines and war, but not a permanent state.
| majormajor wrote:
| insects, predator animals, cuts+bacteria all seem like
| quite hard-to-avoid disease vectors. we can spread
| disease quickly these days, but there are no shortage of
| ancient diseases you could've come across in a small
| hunter-gatherer society
|
| I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health
| problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely
| _physically_ safer and more survivable (and more
| comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed
| world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily,
| given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked
| into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)
| manmal wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree on your second point. Cardiovascular
| disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and others are endemic to
| the developed world. My personal opinion here is that
| constant oversupply with calories is not something humans
| have been able to adapt to, yet.
| WA wrote:
| We just live longer than back then and have way more
| opportunities to see these (mostly) late-life diseases.
| Same with cancer.
|
| Yes, average life span was shorter back then because of
| child mortality. But the vast majority of surviving
| adults never reached age 80. Old age was 60-70 and many
| of these diseases only occur at 70+ in significant
| numbers.
| sarchertech wrote:
| >Hard to catch a disease when it's always the same 15
| people around you, with no communication to the outside
| world.
|
| There's plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt,
| water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in
| the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it's not very
| hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit
| in the wild.
|
| >factory farms
|
| Didn't need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live
| in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you
| read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there
| are many reports of squirrel migrations involving
| hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small
| areas.
| manmal wrote:
| Small pox was way after hunter gatherer times, so I'm not
| sure what point you are making. Huge farms were a thing
| even in medieval times, with hundreds of animals.
| 9rx wrote:
| "Way after" is quite an overstatement. Smallpox is as old
| as agriculture. Most seem to agree that it was the
| transition into agrarian life that provided the necessary
| conditions for it to emerge, but it did so right as that
| transition took place.
| sarchertech wrote:
| My point is that factory farms aren't a requirement for
| zoonotic viruses. Smallpox also predates the medieval
| period by thousands of years.
|
| We also know that there are viral epidemics in animals
| that live in solitary animals and animals that live in
| groups smaller than the size of hunter gatherer tribes.
| palmotea wrote:
| > There's plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt,
| water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in
| the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it's not very
| hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit
| in the wild.
|
| An hunter-gathers were probably a lot more robust to that
| than modern people.
|
| Think about it: if what you say were that big of an
| issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out
| before getting to us.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Hunter-gatherers didn't have birth control; if you have 5
| kids and half of them die, you've still maintained your
| population.
| 9rx wrote:
| But as the parent comment suggests, if the adults were
| getting sick it is unlikely that they would be able to:
|
| * Produce 5 kids in the first place.
|
| * Take care of the kids that they were able to produce,
| making survival of even half them much less likely.
|
| But in actuality, best we are able to determine hunter-
| gathers who made it into adulthood lived longer,
| healthier lives than those in agrarian lifestyles.
| integralid wrote:
| They were getting sick and died more often than us, but
| still enough survived to keep the population alive.
| There's no contradiction.
|
| I admit they probably had a stronger immunologic system
| on average, by virtue of relying on it and "exercising"
| more often. Alternatively, people prone to getting sick
| just died early.
| 9rx wrote:
| > They were getting sick and died more often than us
|
| The comparison was with agrarian societies that were
| found in parallel, not "us", which presumably implies
| something about modern medicine. Have I misinterpreted
| you?
|
| _> There 's no contradiction._
|
| Was there reason to think that there was...? It is not
| clear what you are trying to add here.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The adults getting sick and being undernourished was one
| of the leading causes of infant mortality.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Take care of the kids that they were able to produce,
| making survival of even half them much less likely._
|
| H-G societies tend to be smaller groups where everyone in
| the village helps with childcare, so if a parent was out
| of action for a while the children could still be
| gathered.
|
| This is covered in the book _Hunt, Gather, Parent_ by
| Michaeleen Doucleff, specifically with the Hadzabe people
| (Tanzania).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Humanity almost did die out. All living humans are
| descendants from a relatively small funnel.
| manmal wrote:
| It's likely that was due to catastrophic events, and not
| general resilience. If a big meteor hits earth now, we'll
| likely by at a population of a few k or 10k as well.
| sarchertech wrote:
| There's no reason to assume that. Antibiotics and anti-
| parasitic drugs have only been around for a century or
| so. That's not enough time for our immune systems to have
| lost the ability to fight them.
|
| >Think about it: if what you say were that big of an
| issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out
| before getting to us.
|
| Most wild animals are riddled with parasites and it's
| common for for animals in captivity to have 2x the
| lifespan of their wild counterparts.
|
| You don't need to make it to 70 to raise children. If 50%
| of people make it to 30 and each person has an average of
| 5 kids the math works out fine for population growth.
| Konnstann wrote:
| The immune response to diseases has to be developed over
| time, not to mention the fact that the introduction of
| those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the
| bacteria, viruses, etc. I can't speculate as to the
| health of hunter gatherer civilizations but modern diets
| and until recently the prevalence of antibacterial soaps
| and products in homes have definitely changed immune
| systems. Just look at covid, where in just a period of a
| few years the amount of infections due to other common
| diseases like influenza or strep have shot up due to kids
| not being exposed to germs during the lockdowns.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > The immune response to diseases has to be developed
| over time
|
| The human immune system has both innate and acquired
| components. The innate systems are functionally the same
| between you and I or a hunter gatherer.
|
| A hunter gatherer may have acquired immunity to viruses
| and bacteria that you or I haven't been exposed to, but
| in most cases they would have become sick in the first
| place before they got that immunity. The majority of
| diseases don't produce long lasting immunity. There's a
| reason you get tetanus vaccines every 5-10 years.
|
| We are also exposed to more pathogens than hunter
| gatherers not fewer because of the way we live. Plus we
| have vaccines, so if anything we have a more robust
| acquired immune system.
|
| > introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the
| evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc.
|
| Antibiotics accelerated the evolution of bacteria towards
| antibiotic resistance. Not towards greater virulence.
| Antibiotic resistance generally has a fitness penalty as
| well, so if anything modern bacteria would tend to be
| slightly less dangerous.
|
| >antibacterial soap
|
| Antibacterial soap can result in resistant bacteria and
| it also alters your bodies microbiome. Theres some
| evidence that it can make you more prone to autoimmune
| diseases, but no good evidence of a strong impact on your
| bodies ability to fight off diseases.
|
| Certainly not to a level noticeable by an individual.
|
| >look at Covid
|
| The reason influenza infections went up was because
| people weren't exposed to influenza, not because of lack
| of exposure to generic germs.
|
| There weren't more overall infections, they were just
| concentrated in time. If Covid hadn't happened, those
| extra people who got the flu would have just gotten the
| flu earlier.
| scott_w wrote:
| Parent specifically called out antibiotics, which are for
| bacterial infections, not diseases. Coupled with the
| increased number of things to step on or get cut by means
| you really need them.
| manmal wrote:
| You definitely don't automatically need antibiotics for
| something you step on, or get cut. Any topical antiseptic
| will do, and probably perform better.
| scott_w wrote:
| What you say is only half true. I'm also thinking of
| injuries caused by animals and other people. Antiseptic
| isn't going to fix the nasty kind of infections deep bite
| or knife wounds cause. A hunter gatherer society is
| definitely at greater risk of suffering these kinds of
| injuries than we are.
|
| And also, even antiseptic treatment was in shorter supply
| than it is today, so it's still a moot point.
| manmal wrote:
| There's sufficient evidence that hunter gatherer
| societies have indeed used various plant- and animal
| based antiseptics (honey, oils, tannins, resins,
| fungi,...) to treat wounds.
| scott_w wrote:
| I said shorter supply than today, not totally
| unavailable. Pre-agrarian societies, by definition, were
| not growing and harvesting antiseptics in bulk. They'd
| not do much against an infection from a stab wound (yes,
| non-agrarian societies encountered, fought and killed
| each other).
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Hard to catch a disease when it's always the same 15
| people around you, with no communication to the outside
| world
|
| Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If
| an axe head can cross the continent then so can a
| microscopic disease.
| dboreham wrote:
| Disease can also be zoonotic. E.g. North America
| supposedly saw disease spread by wild pigs through the
| indigenous population _before_ direct contact with
| colonizing Europeans.
| palmotea wrote:
| > You first.
|
| He wasn't talking about going back, he was talking about
| staying.
|
| > And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
|
| I don't recall where I read this, but (probably hundreds of
| years ago) some explorer in Africa was on a boat with some
| hunter-gatherers. A bloated, rotting dead rat floated by,
| they picked it up, said "yum" and dug in. They didn't get
| sick. I've also read some speculation that (initially) fire
| wasn't needed so much for cooking meat, because hunter-
| gatherers can (and did) accomplish the same effect by
| letting meat rot a little. Fire was more useful for
| vegetables.
|
| So actual hunter gatherers probably had less need for
| antibiotics than a modern person thrust into a similar
| situation.
| tumult wrote:
| That's from Arnold Henry Savage Landor and I suspect it
| was fabricated or exaggerated, like many Victorian era
| British tales of savages abroad.
| Aloha wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves
| untold lives.
|
| Before about 1920, the difference between rich and poor and
| the likelihood to recover from disease had more to do with
| ability to rest and diet.
|
| The rich and poor alike died to tuberculosis (which was
| often a death sentence until antibiotics), simple cysts,
| all sorts of very basic bacterial infections killed in
| droves.
|
| At the risk of sidetracking this further - it was only
| after insulin where the idea that healthcare could be
| somewhat that could be a right became somewhat reasonable
| (before the late gilded age, doctors often did as much harm
| as good) - every lifesaving innovation we have made sense,
| were often very modest amounts of money is the difference
| between life and death make that argument stronger.
| robocat wrote:
| > Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves
| untold lives.
|
| Type 1 is about 0.5% prevalence. Type 1 diabetes was a
| rapid death sentence before insulin discovery in the
| 1920s.
|
| Type 2 is more common (maybe 10% but highly dependent on
| country) and it is a relatively modern problem
|
| Infant mortality has dropped to 0.5% from 7% 100 years
| ago - so that's more significant.
| Aloha wrote:
| Better food, living conditions and sanitation has helped
| greatly.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Stone age hunter-gatherers had better lives than stone-age
| farmers, assuming that they had enough land to hunt/gather
| on. Modern farming is usually far easier than modern
| hunting/gathering, although if you go far enough north
| you'll find that hunting is still the only viable option.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Oh, really? Then why did they choose farming? And no, it
| wasn't a trap, they experimented with farming and could
| have gone back to hunting if as you imply it truly was
| better.
| amenhotep wrote:
| Farming supports war better than hunter gathering does.
| troupo wrote:
| Translation: farming supports larger populations and more
| complex lifestyles better than hunter gathering.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Ever since the invention of the rifle, hunting has been
| far easier than farming.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I would argue that with the invention of the rifle, it
| was easier IF you could find game, especially since
| others living in your vicinity were hunting also. Despite
| the risk of weather and insects, farming was much more
| predictable as a food source.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That same logic should be applied to farming. Where would
| you find free farmland that nobody else is claiming?
| Fricken wrote:
| There was a brief period of time in which rifles were
| available and game was easy to find. 20 million bison
| were hunted to the brink of extinction within a couple
| decades.
| imtringued wrote:
| No matter what you think, and even if we build a super AI to
| ask it, about what we should do, the answer stays the same.
| We should build a mass driver on the moon.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| It's kind of an interesting question. What makes us
| inherently unhappy?
|
| I think if the theory goes that from a evolutionary
| standpoint we psychologically are still better equipped to be
| hunter gatherers, we should assume that our feelings towards
| homicide and child mortality are comparable. So how happy can
| a people be, when 40% of their children die and another 20%
| die by homicide?
|
| If we follow that thread I would argue that it's very
| unlikely that people were happier back when or would be
| happier today, unless some other component of being hunter
| gatherers makes us fantastically ecstatic.
| nowittyusername wrote:
| What makes us unhappy are the things that the modern world
| takes away from us. Sense of agency, sense of community,
| belonging, autonomy, recognition, and many other factors.
| The modern day human brain and mind is still lagging far
| behind our current predicament. We evolved to thrive in
| small village cohorts that condition for small social
| interactions that have real impact on our lives. Here's a
| striking example I remember.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOhAd3THW4 There are
| better longer videos of the citation from the mothers side,
| where she talks about how alien and cold modern day society
| is compared to her humble village life. No amount of
| medicine, material possessions or modern day creature
| comforts could keep her in New York. she chose to leave and
| come back home because that's what made her happy.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That is a beautiful anecdote, but I don't see what we
| could reasonably generalize from that. It's fairly well
| established that access to good medical care and a
| certain degree of wealth make us happier.
|
| _Could_ a life radically and willfully different in many
| ways turn out to be better for most of us (which is
| critically what you claimed before)? It 's certainly
| possible, given how few people take this route, but an
| appeal to nature is just not super convincing, unless you
| can back it up with data.
|
| I can't help but notice you did not engage with how 40%
| of kids dieing and another 20% of us getting killed by
| some member of the cherished tribe could possible lead to
| high levels of life satisfaction. As far I can tell, on
| the whole, the good old days were cruel and rosy
| retrospection is just that.
| logicprog wrote:
| "Deprivation of material things, including food, was a
| general recollection [of Zhu adults] and the typical
| emotional tone in relation to it was one of frustration and
| anger.... Data on !Kung fertility in relation to body fat, on
| seasonal weight loss in some bands, and on the slowing of
| infant growth after the first six months of life all
| suggested that the previously described abundance had
| definite limits. Data on morbidity and mortality, though not
| necessarily relevant to abundance, certainly made use of the
| term "affluent" seem inappropriate."
|
| "While the !Kung way of life is far from one of uniform
| drudgery--there is a great deal of leisure in the !Kung camp,
| even in the worst time of the year--it is also true that the
| !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all
| times of the year. It is likely that hunger is a contributing
| cause to many deaths which are immediately caused by
| infectious and parasitic diseases, even though it is rare for
| anyone simply to starve to death."
|
| "The give and take of tangibles and intangibles goes on in
| the midst of a high level of bickering. Until one learns the
| cultural meaning of this continual verbal assault, the
| outsider wonders how the !Kung can stand to live with each
| other .... People continually dun the Europeans and
| especially the European anthropologists since unlike most
| Europeans, the anthropologists speak !Kung. In the early
| months of my own field work I despaired of ever getting away
| from continual harassment. As my knowledge of !Kung
| increased, I learned that the !Kung are equally merciless in
| dunning each other."
|
| "In reciprocal relations, one means that a person uses to
| prevent being exploited in a relationship ... is to prevent
| him or herself from becoming a "have".... As mentioned
| earlier, men who have killed a number of larger animals sit
| back for a pause to enjoy reciprocation. Women gather enough
| for their families for a few days, but rarely more .... And
| so, in deciding whether or not to work on a certain day, a
| !Kung may assess debts and debtors, decide how much wild food
| harvest will go to family, close relatives and others to whom
| he or she really wants to reciprocate, versus how much will
| be claimed by freeloaders."
|
| "The !Kung, we are told, spend a great deal of time talking
| about who has what and who gave what to whom or failed to
| give it to whom (Wiessner 1982:68). A lot of the exchange and
| sharing that goes on seems to be as much motivated by
| jealousy and envy as it is by any value of generosity or a
| "liberal custom of sharing." In his survey of foraging
| societies, Kelly (1995:164-65) notes that "Sharing ...
| strains relations between people. Consequently, many foragers
| try to find ways to avoid its demands ... Students new to
| anthropology ... are often disappointed to learn that these
| acts of sharing come no more naturally to hunter-gatherers
| than to members of industrial societies.""
|
| https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
| ACCount37 wrote:
| No. Nature isn't your friend, and evolution doesn't optimize
| for happiness.
|
| The sliver lining is: you'll suffer in an entirely different
| way!
|
| Buuut you can do that in the modern world too. Just go
| homeless.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Staying hunter gatherer isn't sustainable unless everyone
| does it, because of the larger population size enabled by
| agriculture. Larger groups can generally dominate smaller
| groups absent a technological difference, but here again
| agriculture has an advantage because it at least seems like
| it's easier to develop technology when your stuff isn't
| getting moved around all the time.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand,
| but that's shockingly intensive labor.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| If you can, read Robert Caro's The Path To Power (Caro's The
| Power Broker has been a HN favorite ever since Aaron Swartz
| recommended it). It's the story of the first ~30 years of
| Lyndon B Johnson's life.
|
| I forget which chapter it is, but Caro takes a detour where he
| describes the life of women during Johnson's childhood in the
| dirt-poor valley he was from: no electricity, no waterpower,
| everything in the house was done by women's hands, 24/7.
| There's a passage that stuck to me about how women in their 30s
| in that area looked like other area's women in their 70s, just
| a brutal life.
| dtjohnnyb wrote:
| Exactly what I thought of reading this, that chapter is
| genuinely one of the most affecting things I've ever read.
| The horror of it keeps growing as he continues to describe
| awful manual task after the other.
| leobg wrote:
| Chapter 4 - The Father and Mother
|
| > Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to
| work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted
| out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of
| long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth
| had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-
| boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the
| skin off women's hands; the heavy flatirons had to be
| continually carried back and forth to the stove for
| reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new
| supplies of wood--decades later, even strong, sturdy farm
| wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| And what he left out of this book (and included in the
| memoir or in some interview) was that there was a
| scientific study of women in the area at the time which
| discovered that a very high percentage of women had
| birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization
| that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores
| next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.
| tmoravec wrote:
| Exactly. You might also enjoy Bret Devereaux' recent series of
| how life was really like for pre-modern peasants. Also includes
| parts focusing on women in particular.
| https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
| glaugh wrote:
| That series of blog posts is incredible, as is all his work.
| One thing that stuck with me is that while our deep
| evolutionary past is very important, the majority of humans
| who have lived have been peasants in an agrarian society
| Balgair wrote:
| That stuck with me too.
|
| The _modal_ human experience was a farmer, far and away.
| Not the mean, not the median, but the mode. We have the
| numbers to easily back it up.
| chrismatic wrote:
| Came here to post the same resource and to point out that
| based on it it rarely was a "two person's job" only.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| The industrial revolution is the most transformative event in
| this history of life since the Cambrian explosion. It's that
| significant.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| It is also on track to be nearly as... _impactful_ as the
| Permian extinction. That stuff cuts both ways unfortunately.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > It is also on track to be nearly as... impactful as the
| Permian extinction.
|
| why do you say that?
| baq wrote:
| It was also an extremely lucky coincidence.
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| The green revolution was vitally dependent on oil-gas based
| fertilizer trade - which means, doing away with manchester-
| style centralized trade empires who used cutting off trade as a
| tool of suffocating opponents. The past never went away, it
| caught up to the present. All poverty is energy poverty - and
| exponential humanity, always fills that "gap" to the ressource
| roof with people.
|
| The old, pre-harber-bosch world was a grim dark all against all
| where empires (themselves devices to keep civilization afloat
| in a few centralized places, while extracing at great missery
| elsewhere) fought wars of fertilizer and used one sided trading
| and food-exports to starve colonies out like vampires.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon
|
| the whole all against all, no free-trade madness culminated in
| the two new comer empires copy-pasting the concept dialed up to
| eleven in their "new colonies".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan
| Etheryte wrote:
| A small nitpick that doesn't take away from the rest of your
| comment: staying alive and fed was not necessarily a laborious
| activity for hunter-gatherers living in good climates [0]. It's
| our expansion into less hospitable environments that made it
| so.
|
| > Woodburn offers this "very rough approximation" of
| subsistence-labor requirements: "Over the year as a whole,
| probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent
| obtaining food."
|
| > Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present
| --specifically on those in marginal environments--suggest a
| mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food
| production.
|
| [0]
| https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...
| rocqua wrote:
| I believe the reasons we "regressed" into agriculture from
| hunting and gathering are much more complicated than "we
| moved into more marginal land".
|
| It does appear that the median hunter gatherer life was
| better than the median farmer life. But I'd wager that to be
| true in most areas.
| logicprog wrote:
| It isn't true.
|
| https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
| acessoproibido wrote:
| So if we go back much further life was super chill and
| romantic? I dont buy it tbh, it feels to me just as
| unrealistic.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Not necessarily back, but to the right environments. As
| quoted above, we see the same today in isolated tribes that
| live off of hunting and foraging. All of this also doesn't
| account for the lack of all other modern convenience such
| as medicine, hygiene, etc. So it isn't about chill and
| romantic, but rather the time commitment specifically.
| watwut wrote:
| Those tribes work a lot if you count food processing,
| cleaning, creating and maintaining tools, shelters,
| childcare and so on and so forth.
|
| It looks like they work only a little if you count only
| pure hunting attempts, the most food rich seasons and
| ignore the rest.
| logicprog wrote:
| Yup.
|
| https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
|
| Also they're almost universally malnourished and their
| access to the food they are able to get is inconsistent
| at best.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| The Bush People previously called The Pygmies are modern
| humans who eat the diet of the previous homonids and get
| stunted by the caloric deficits. The only thing they
| plant is hemp, which doesnt scale to actual agriculture.
| al_borland wrote:
| Without modern entertainment devices, or even books, what
| else are they going to do? Some "work" could have a lot
| of crossover into hobby. Some people enjoy cooking,
| making tools, spending time with kids, etc. They need to
| do something to pass the time. The stuff is also for a
| clear purpose. Making a tool to solve a problem right in
| front of you feels different than performing a seemingly
| arbitrary task everyday because a boss says so.
| logicprog wrote:
| The "original affluent society" theory is based on several
| false premises and is fundamentally outdated, but people keep
| it alive because it fits certain Rousseauean assumptions we
| have. I recommend reading this:
|
| https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
|
| There are so many things wrong with those time estimates.
| analog8374 wrote:
| Well don't just accuse, insinuate and link. Lay out a few
| actual assertions.
| logicprog wrote:
| It's a detailed, complicated anthropological argument
| made by an expert -- and he also does it in a very well-
| written way. I could attempt to lay out the argument
| myself, but ultimately everyone would be better served by
| just... _reading the primary source_ , because I doubt I
| could do it sufficient justice. I recommend you actually
| just do the reading. But a general TLDR of the points
| made are:
|
| - the estimates of how much time hunter-gatherers spent
| "working" were based on studies that either (a) watched
| hunter-gatherers in extremely atypical situations (no
| children, tiny band, few weeks during the most plentiful
| time of the year, and they were cajoled into traditional
| living from their usual mission-based lifestyle) or (b)
| didn't count all the work processing the food so it could
| even be cooked as time spent providing for subsistence,
| and when those hours are included, it's 35-60 hours a
| week of work _even including times of enforced idleness
| pulling down the average_
|
| - the time estimates also counted enforced idleness from
| heat making it dangerous to work, or from lack of
| availability of food, or from diminishing returns, or
| from various "egalitarian" cultural cul de sacs, as
| "leisure" but at the same time...
|
| - ... even the hunter gatherers themselves considered
| their diet insufficiently nutritious and often complained
| of being underfed, _let alone_ the objective metrics
| showing that the were
| BDPW wrote:
| I just read the 'original affluent society' and (most of)
| your linked essay, I kind of agree with you. That said, the
| conclusions of Kaplan lead to estimates or 35-60 hours a
| week (excluding some depending on the group) and that
| surprised me a lot. That's very different from the image I
| got from some other comments in this thread talking about
| extremely long days with constant back-breaking work. Would
| you agree?
| logicprog wrote:
| Constant, backbreaking work was not a feature of hunter-
| gatherer societies in the way it was of early
| agricultural societies, yes; at the same time, they still
| worked equal to or longer hours than we did, at things we
| would likely consider quite grueling and boring (mostly
| food processing), and what they got out of it was a level
| of nutrition even _they_ regularly considered inadequate;
| moreover, a lot of the reason the average per day work
| estimate is so low, as the paper covers briefly, is that
| there were very often times, especially during the
| winter, where food simply wasn 't accessible, or during
| the summer, where it was so hot it was dangerous to work,
| so there was enforced idleness, but that's not the same
| thing as leisure.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The anthropological research that came up with 2-3 hours of
| work per day only looked at time spent away from camp
| gathering, hunting, and fishing. When you account for food
| processing, cooking, water collection, firewood gathering,
| tool making, shelter maintenance, and textile production the
| numbers go way up.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Yes, pretty much this. If they worked in the fields 12 hour
| per day as in a Victorian industrial setting, they would
| have perished from exposure, not having time to attend
| obligatory work around the house and to process the food
| and materials used to make food. Basically peasants worked
| all the time to maintain a level of "comfort" like in the
| article's picture: https://i0.wp.com/juliawise.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/12/S...
|
| Also idealization of rural life and past rural life tends
| to come almost exclusively from city dwellers, basically
| people who never set foot in a rural area let alone grow or
| live there.
|
| I grew up in rural Romania and even though the conditions
| were (and are) exponentially better than what the non-
| industrial non-mechanized non-chemical (herbicides,
| pesticides and fertilizers) past offered, all I thought
| growing up was get the funk out of there. Agriculture (and
| it's relatives, animal husbandry) sucks and I hate it! :)
|
| And without mechanization it's incredibly labor intensive
| to tend to a farm. Just to keep the animals alive over
| winter you have to dry and deposit a lot of hay, but before
| that you gotta scythe it. Scything is no walk in the park
| and basically you gotta do a lot of that every day to cover
| enough area to keep the cattle fed. Then plowing without a
| tractor and using animals: not just dangerous but
| backbreaking work. Then hoeing the weeds, funking need to
| do it all the time because without herbicides, the weeds
| grow everywhere and by the time you "finished" going once
| over all crops, they've grown back where you first started.
| At some point my father had this fantasy of what is now
| called "organic" crops, in fact cheapskating at paying the
| price for herbicides, so I did so much hoeing that it got
| out of my nose. I don't recall me saying it but my mother
| told me that at some point in a middle of a potatoes hoeing
| session I said that I'd rather solve 1000 math problems
| than do even just another row of potatoes. Definitive
| moment in my career choice, which is a lot closer to
| solving math problems now than hoeing organic potatoes :)
| lukan wrote:
| "and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could
| lift something heavier than a couple pounds"
|
| Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is something
| very small hands can do.
|
| "We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species
| - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat
| warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom
| and dad."
|
| But no. You are talking about a primitive (poor) agrarian
| society. That only started a couple of thousands years ago,
| while our species used fire since over a million years in a
| semi nomadic live style. And those tribes in good territory,
| they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land
| animals were around. (Also, hearding cattle was for the most
| part a very chilled job as well, but that also started rather
| recent)
| Aunche wrote:
| > And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so
| much back braking work, as long as big land animals were
| around
|
| The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere
| close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many
| died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures
| independently decided to not only spend several hours a day
| picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to
| cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would
| still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody
| would choose this life unless if they had to.
| etothepii wrote:
| Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus
| that is much harder to achieve with hunting.
|
| This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell
| you what the sky father wants you to do.
|
| They may have had to but it need not be because it led to
| more calories for them.
| watwut wrote:
| Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
| defrost wrote:
| Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time
| priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got
| the stories and pass down the classics as food for
| thought and discussion.
|
| On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a
| photo finish between them and a Bishop.
|
| https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed,
| much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG "sky
| father" [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral
| lifestyle.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
| lukan wrote:
| "Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to."
|
| You mean nobody would choose the half nomadic hunters life?
|
| Hm, some indigenous cultures I spoke to disagree, but the
| choice is not there anymore, as the bison herds they
| sustained on got slaughtered. The conflict of the nomads vs
| sedentary is an old one and the establishment of the
| latter, made the old ways of life simply impossible.
| Aunche wrote:
| You're completely missing my point. Without any external
| pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and
| eating grass was preferable to being nomads. Yes, this
| includes the ancestors of the bison hunting plains
| tribes. It was only with the population collapse due to
| smallpox and introduction of horses where the nomadic way
| of life became dominant again.
|
| Until the invention of firearms, nomads had equal footing
| with settled people, if not an advantage (e.g. Attila the
| Hun, Genghis Khan). The main advantage that agricultural
| civilizations had was population size.
| lukan wrote:
| "The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had
| was population size."
|
| Metallurgy?
|
| Not just firearms.
|
| Stone axe vs bronze sword?
|
| Bronze sword vs iron sword?
|
| Iron sword vs steel?
|
| Nomadic people got their advanced weapons usually through
| trade from settled ones. The nomadic horse archers
| dominance was rather an exception, also their kingdom
| included cities where the weapons they used were made.
|
| "Without any external pressure, multiple peoples
| concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable
| to being nomads"
|
| And there always was external pressure. Also .. our
| knowledge of that time is just fragmentary. We don't even
| know the real names of those cultures.
|
| So yes, clearly there were benefits to settling and
| planting corn, otherwise humans would not have done it.
| But to my knowledge, it is not correct to call it a
| voluntarily process in general. Once there are fences,
| the nomadic lifestyle does not work anymore. Adopt or die
| out was (and is) the choice.
| estearum wrote:
| All technological advancement is downstream of population
| size and in particular _density_.
|
| You can't divide work if you aren't near enough other
| people.
| whymememe wrote:
| "Without any external pressure, multiple peoples
| concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable
| to being nomads."
|
| Portraying it as an individual choice is inaccurate. The
| process of populations becoming sedentary(and agrarian)
| spans over multiple generations and wasn't really
| reversible. The early settlements likely only worked
| because they had some method to force people from leaving
| and the later settlements had to be sedentary because
| their neighbours were sedentary, it had a cascade effect.
| Oversimplified but that's the gist.
| lukan wrote:
| "The early settlements likely only worked because they
| had some method to force people from leaving"
|
| That mechanism might have simply been, offering a warm
| and dry place and stored food, while it was freezing
| outside.
|
| As of my knowledge, the transition process in general is
| pretty much a open research question.
| taneq wrote:
| Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being
| "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order
| to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded)
| which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a
| life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping
| anyone from walking off into the forest and living off
| berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the
| required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're
| not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable
| existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold
| running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door,
| electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's
| forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are
| nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Living in the forest is illegal.
| derektank wrote:
| You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as
| you're willing to move your camp site every two weeks
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to
| be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
| marssaxman wrote:
| You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that
| way, though. It's not the same.
| derektank wrote:
| A state small game hunting license is very cheap
| marssaxman wrote:
| And very limited.
| WalterBright wrote:
| TV tells me that hunting wabbits is not very productive.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Not in the US. There is a lot of BLM land if you want to
| live a nomadic lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.
| lukan wrote:
| For hunting in a way you want? Not having to pay taxes?
| Raise your children in the nomadic hunter livestyle? I
| think schooling (and lots of other things) is mandatory
| in the US as well. And child protection service etc.
| exist. So it might be easier in the US to cosplay as a
| forest nomad for some time (and I know some people did it
| as eremits for a bit longer) but a real nomadic livestyle
| means living with other people together in a tribe. That
| does not work (just the rule to move camp after 2 weeks
| prevents that).
| bombcar wrote:
| Read into it; it happens, and CPS isn't usually involved
| until it's well into horror-show territory.
|
| It's usually around a cult or similar; we don't have much
| in the way of hereditary nomadic but even those do exist.
| lukan wrote:
| I think I did read about it and met folks who are into
| that. I have never been in the US, though, but the main
| complaint I got is pretty much, state laws make it
| impossible. But I am open for reading suggestions.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's what is explicitly legal, there is what you can
| get away with, and there is moving between jurisdictions
| before they even know you're there.
|
| The US is large and if you keep your head down and
| homeschool to some level of competence I bet you could go
| many generations- especially if you were willing to blend
| in as necessary.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It isn't common but it definitely happens in some parts
| of the US.
|
| There are no taxes to pay if you aren't earning anything.
| It is legal, if inadvisable, to raise children this way
| in much of the US. There is a "live and let live" ethos
| around it, especially in the western US. The true nomads
| are probably most common in the mountain West of the US
| in my experience. While the rule is two weeks in one
| location, in many remote areas there is no enforcement
| and no one really cares. They sometimes have mutually
| beneficial arrangements with ranchers in the area. These
| groups tend to be relatively small.
|
| Alaska is famously popular for groups of families
| disappearing into the remote wilderness to create
| villages far from modern civilization. It is broadly
| tolerated there. Often many years will pass between
| sightings of people that disappeared into the wilderness.
|
| I always wondered what a high-resolution satellite survey
| of the Inside Passage of Alaska and the north coast of
| British Columbia would find in that vast and impenetrable
| wilderness. Anecdotally there should be dozens of
| villages hidden in there that have been operating for
| decades.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > Literally nothing is stopping anyone
|
| Nothing but the power of the state, which has claimed
| sovereignty over all the land, regulates what you can and
| cannot do with it, and will use deadly force against you
| if you fail to comply.
|
| I once added up the total calorie content of all the
| yearly hunting it is legal to do where I live, if a
| hunter were maximally successful, and it would get one
| person through May.
|
| All the land one could reasonably sustain a living on has
| long since been claimed, those claims being backed up by
| (you guessed it) the power of the state. The only land
| left that one can just walk off into is the land nobody
| wanted during the settlement period, because they could
| not find any way to live on it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The first labor-saving invention was theft.
| badpun wrote:
| The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and
| store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After
| that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no
| so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations
| is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer
| lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly
| limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of
| people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just
| doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources
| in your region faster than nature could replenish them.
|
| So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer
| population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say
| anything at all about their standards of life, which by
| most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1]
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited
| in population viability" and "never going to see a
| massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High
| mortality, intense resource competition and survival of
| the fittest. Not what we normally associate with
| "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the
| standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more
| demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and
| then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble
| savage into quite a vicious competitor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over
| time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the
| predators, and the predator population soars. Then they
| overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator
| population crashes.
|
| It's not stable.
| taneq wrote:
| We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of
| relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of
| backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense
| to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a
| nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established
| village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days
| were inevitable, and far more terrifying.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd sure hate to be a nomad in winter.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, that is why most modern nomads I know go to the
| south in winter.
|
| (but sure, native tribes also did this a bit, but were
| much more limited in range. So winter time in general did
| meant being cold and hungry often and the weak ones died.
| Might be the reason, why humanity started in africa and
| not scandinavia)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled
| job as well
|
| I'm sorry but this strikes me as incredibly wrong and
| misleading. Herding cattle is anything but "a very chilled
| job" unless your frame of reference is "hunting Mammoths" and
| "facing Sable-tooth tigers". Sure, at moments it can be
| pretty straightforward, but as most jobs, the hassle comes
| from the situations that aren't straightforward, and they can
| get back-braking, hairy, dirty and outright taxing on you.
| lukan wrote:
| Yes, frame of reference. But I actually meant dangerous at
| times, yes, but also chilled in comparison to the modern
| stressful average job, where you constantly have to do
| things. So when herding there were times of danger and
| stress (young bulls, wolves, other tribes coming to steal
| the animals), but most of the time it was sitting and
| watching.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful
| average job, where you constantly have to do things
|
| I don't know if you mean "office work" as "modern
| stressful average job" or "food delivery as a freelancer
| and barely getting paid", but almost any physical job
| would be more taxing both mentally and physically than
| sitting in an office all day. Maybe my experience of only
| becoming a office worker after ~50% of my working life
| and before that doing other things, but I think most
| people (especially here on HN) don't realize how taxing
| physical labor is, even for the brain and the head.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I worked all kinds of things, but office jobs I
| actually found more stressful than physical labour to be
| honest. What I meant is the expectation, that in modern
| jobs you have to be activly doing things all the time.
| (Or pretending to). While hearding your main activity was
| watching (and be ready for the need of action).
| WalterBright wrote:
| As a teen, I had a physical job. It was very motivating
| for me to get an education so I could do a desk job.
| lenkite wrote:
| I have herded cattle - cows and goats when I was a child on
| my grandfather's farm. It was indeed a "chill job". But I
| had my grandfather's dog to accompany me and he did most of
| the work. I just lazed around.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I would have thought herding or keeping large animals was
| quite dangerous, especially without modern technology. One of
| my wife's not-so-distant relatives was killed by a domestic
| pig.
| lukan wrote:
| Dangerous at times yes(like most of premodern life was) And
| cows, or rather bulls are for sure more dangerous than
| herding sheep. But most of the times it just meant sitting
| and watching.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Pigs are extremely dangerous for kids, but herding cows and
| goats is 100% something kids did. Source: I did it.
|
| The village kids would get up, take the cows out to the
| road where the other cows also came, then together, a big
| group of kids and cows would head to a pasture and spend
| most of their day watching cows, playing games and messing
| about.
|
| It was great.
|
| Realistically the cows and goats took more care of the kids
| than the other way around.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| A quick Google shows that ~20 people per year are killed
| by cows per year in the US. So not very dangerous, but
| not super safe either (cows kill more people than sharks
| - although that mostly shows how few people sharks kill).
| dweez wrote:
| The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a
| disaster for the human race.
| nshm wrote:
| > Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids
| had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something
| heavier than a couple pounds.
|
| Orphanes did struggle but most families were not just two
| person, families were big and supported by community.
| tim333 wrote:
| From travelling to different places I'm not sure about the
| women's work was brutal bit. The ones not in paid work tend to
| spend their time looking after the kids and cooking and
| cleaning and stuff regardless of the style of living. The main
| thing that's hard seems to be the kids going "mum! I
| want..."/"don't want to..." at all hours but that's human
| nature which doesn't change much.
| motoboi wrote:
| Life in the field, from the land, in the past, meant death from
| starvation.
|
| Some unsung heroes: - the person that discovered how to fix
| nitrogen in the soil saved more lives than every other people
| in history, combined. - Norman Borlaug, father of the green
| revolution, saved more than 1 billion people from starvation.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Borlaug was a very important figure in global food security
| but he was a plant breeder, not the guy(s) who figured out
| how to fix nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. Nitrogen
| people were Haber and Bosch.
|
| Millions of probably do owe their very existence to these men
| though, agree with that.
|
| However part of me (maybe a slightly misanthropic part?)
| wonders if it might be a bit like feeding stray cats, and now
| we have a huge herd of cats that are rapidly outstripping the
| ultimate carrying capacity of their environment and it
| doesn't end well. But since I'm one of the cats, I say we
| just go with it and see what happens.
| motoboi wrote:
| Im sorry. That was supposed to be a list but the formatter
| ate the lines.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I see makes sense. Sorry for being "the well actually"
| guy.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| Not 100 hours a week. More like 50. Taxes to the local baron,
| lord, monastery, or whoever took the other 50.
| marzell wrote:
| There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities
| actually had generally better health and far more free time
| than farmers and agrarian society.
|
| Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that
| hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but
| required basically working all day to make it work and survive
| less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often
| had significant more free time.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I have read that hunter-gatherers generally had an easier life
| than peasants in agricultural societies. But the hunter
| gatherer lifestyle can only support small groups with a low
| overall population density. So the hunter-gatherers always lost
| out to agricultural societies, when they came into
| contact/conflict. Not sure how prevalent this view is amongst
| professional anthropologists.
| al_borland wrote:
| I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown
| larger if they put in the same level of work as the
| agricultural societies?
|
| One could debate what leads to a better quality of life. Is
| it more downtime and community, like we see with hunter
| gatherers. Is it the modern conveniences we end up with
| through larger societies and more work effort?
|
| I watched a video of a polyglot who learned the language of a
| hunter gatherer tribe to spend some time with them. It was
| amazing to see how well adapted they were to the environment,
| both in terms of their bodies and skills. The outsider was
| getting eaten up by bugs and cut by every little branch or
| thorn, while the locals had thicker skin and seemed
| completely unaffected by all of this. They were running
| through the forest at night and it seemed effortless. While
| hunting they needed a bag at one point, so someone grabbed
| some stuff off a tree and quickly wove one together like it
| was nothing. What ends up being a survival realty show for us
| ends up looking quite convenient for them. If I need a bag I
| need to work to earn money, then depend on a whole supply
| chain to grow/manufacture the raw materials, weave the
| fabric, cut and assemble the fabric into a bag, and a
| retailer to sell it to me, as well as all of the shipping on
| trucks, boats, and planes along the way. It's actually pretty
| crazy how much work goes into everything we buy.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown
| larger if they put in the same level of work as the
| agricultural societies?
|
| I think it is about organization and population density. A
| hunter gatherer society is not going to be able to field an
| army of tens of thousands of people, as an agricultural
| society can. Hunter gatherers are also limited in their
| technology by their continual movement.
|
| The Mongols were a nomadic society and very successful
| militarily (for a while). But they kept large numbers of
| animals and weren't hunter gatherers.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is a concise description of the current understanding
|
| Marshall Salhins Stone Age Economics is the most popular work
| that is academically serious on this topic
| codq wrote:
| This is actually one of the key points Yuval Noah Harari made
| in his landmark book 'Sapiens' (a must-read, probably the
| book I've recommended more than any other)
| eutropia wrote:
| A book for which literally zero professional archaeologists
| or anthropologists were consulted and which promulgated
| more noble savage bullshit as a result. That "life of
| leisure" picture was based off of the work of one guy who
| wrote the hours literally spent hunting and gathering and
| none of the time spent processing food or maintaining tools
| and clothes, nor the hours per day spent collecting fresh
| water.
|
| If agricultural life and cities were such a raw deal: why
| would people all over the world adopt it against their own
| self interest when humans were basically as intelligent (if
| not at all educated) as we are today?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >why would people all over the world adopt it against
| their own self interest
|
| There was no easy going back. Once agricultural societies
| had settled there would be little if any free land to
| hunt/gather on. Also, much of the traditional knowledge
| would be lost in a few generations. Plus, peasants were
| often kept on their land by force.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Everything has tradeoffs and unforeseen effects and
| social structure is a slow moving ship. Food security is
| pretty obviously compelling, and creates a stability that
| allows a society to scale and grow more wealthy and
| powerful. The loss in autonomy and flexibility is part of
| the cost. Individuals see things different ways, but the
| only vote they get is within a social context that has
| its own momentum. What wins is not necessarily the
| society that the individual feels happiest in, but the
| one that is most evolutionarily fit over many generations
| and conflicts.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I've read it. There is some pretty dubious stuff in it. I
| think he is more interested in telling a good sounding
| story than looking at the research.
|
| See also the 'If books could kill' podcast's take:
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/1IeSWFtBEaYEIblkXTcuu2
| cardamomo wrote:
| I suggest reading The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber
| and David Wengrow. They argue that there's not a true
| dichotomy between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies.
| In fact, many societies practice(d) both.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| This repeats several myths that Graeber and Wengrow have made
| compelling arguments against
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids
| had to dive in to help
|
| In many societies before (say) the 18th/19th Century, extended
| families would have been the norm, e.g. with elderly relatives
| living in the same household, helping with food preparation and
| clothes making. Harvests may have been community-wide affairs.
| Children would have had to dive in, as you say, but they
| wouldn't have had school to go to, and there would have been a
| wide age spread. Maternal mortality (death due to childbirth)
| was high, and many widowed fathers would have remarried,
| extending the family further (incidentally this is partly why
| there are so many step-sisters and step-mothers in folk
| stories).
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Agreed, but I don't think you need to go as far back as the
| 19th century, even early 20th century it was the same in some
| places in eastern Europe. Out of 7 siblings in my Dad's
| family only one went to college. The spread between oldest
| and youngest was about 12 years. All went to school which was
| dismissed much earlier, after which children were expected to
| help in the fields with animals, house work, etc. before
| doing homework. The one pause, and really only time they wore
| nicer clothes, was on Sundays for church. The person who went
| to college would be back each summer to help with the grain
| and potato harvests. My life by comparison is a life of
| luxury.
| gessha wrote:
| I recognize a Hegel vs. Schopenhauer comment chain.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Yep, for most of human history taking care of children has
| been way more communal than in modern era.
| 9rx wrote:
| It used to be way more informal and less institutional, but
| I'm skeptical that it was more communal. We're still
| heavily dependent on community to raise our children (e.g.
| school, spots, etc). Sometimes to the point of absurdity.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The kids went to school in the winter, where there wasn't so
| much to do on the farm. That's why we still have summer
| "vacation", a holdover from needing the kids to work on the
| farm in the summer.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| As kids in a rural area in Eastern Europe, summer
| "vacation" was sure to be filled with "fun" farm work. I
| recall being amused at hearing one of my friends towards
| the end of the summer say: "man, I can't wait for school to
| begin, so I can get some rest".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the
| time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And
| that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all
| waking hours until the day she died.
|
| This was not true in the society my grandparents grew up in
| between 1900 and 1970. Both of my grandmothers and great
| grandmothers helped out tremendously on the farms, and my
| grandmother and mother were part of the new businesses when
| they immigrated to the US.
|
| Based on all the women I have personally seen working in farms,
| and in videos, and in written accounts, I suspect your quote is
| only true for a very small slice of the world in a very small
| slice of time that was developed enough to have large farms
| with large machinery and scale such that the farm was earning
| enough profit to use automation to not need the women and allow
| them to only focus on the home, or hire poorer women so the
| farm owner could solely focus on the home.
|
| Hell, I bet even today, even in the US, a good portion of farms
| need the labor of both spouses.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Theres a nice and comprehnsive treatment of this topic in
| https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...
|
| > [A] series ... looking at the structures of life for pre-
| modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can
| help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much
| evidence of their day-to-day personal lives.
| nikanj wrote:
| But by feodal times, you also had to also work a number of
| hours for your liege. Which modern idiots have perverted with
| the whole "a peasant had more free time than you"-meme, where
| they only count the hours of mandatory service and ignore the
| hundred-hours-a-week part of keeping your own home running
| coldtea wrote:
| > _In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the
| time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And
| that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all
| waking hours until the day she died._
|
| On the plus side, they also didn't have to do the hard
| dangerous jobs like mining coal, building houses, and the like,
| nor did they have to go to the army, fight to defend their
| country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things.
|
| Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume
| "all waking hours until the day she died".
| catlover76 wrote:
| The fuck? Who do you think built the houses?
|
| > army, fight to defend their country (at least not as
| soldiers), and many other things.
|
| In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted
| into war frequently?
|
| > Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it
| consume "all waking hours until the day she died".
|
| Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Who do you think built the houses?_
|
| The men. Again, I'm writing there about what women didn't
| have to do.
|
| > _In most places and times, didn 't all men just get
| conscripted into war frequently?_
|
| Yes, and thus what I wrote is that women didn't have to do
| it.
|
| (My point was: "yes, women did the house tasks, but on the
| plus side, they didn't have to do those other far more
| dangerous and hard things").
|
| > _Why do you think it didn 't consume all waking hours?_
|
| I don't think it didn't, I know it didn't. For starters it
| was shared among larger family units (including several
| kids). And even when it wasn't, like some people living on
| their own, it hardly took a few hours each day, and that's
| including maintaining a fire, cooking, some cleaning,
| feeding some nearby hens, bringing water, and things like
| that. Modern people over-dependent on modern conveniences
| overestimate how hard all those things were, as if it was
| some horror survival movie.
|
| In these here parts, people in the country did all the same
| things people did in the 19th century or the 15th century
| well into the 20th century (with cars and electricity not
| reaching many places until the late 1950s), all with plenty
| of time to spare and socialize.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd sure hate to build a house without power tools. Just
| doing the sawing would break me.
| politelemon wrote:
| This is a fairly common misconception, based on the incorrect
| notion that housework back then looks like it does today.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah, that it was "brutal" is a common misconception.
|
| Beside the fact that duties were shared among extended
| family members, it was really not that brutal, and that's
| including "heavier" chores like bringing water from the
| well and firewood.
|
| Another common misconception is that what they did "back
| then" is something ancient or medieval. People in the
| country did pretty much all the same chores with the same
| tools well into the 20th century. x
| timeon wrote:
| > There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and
| dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly
| transformative for our species.
|
| And left-wing movements that followed industrial revolution.
| barfoure wrote:
| Who is this author and what is effective altruism and why do I
| feel like I'm being given a backhanded lesson in morality by
| someone who is insufferable? I hope I'm wrong.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| The past is not perfect and there are some things that are
| improved in some ways these days (and in future), but other
| things are being worse these days (and in future) than they were.
| It is not so simple.
|
| I also think that you should not rely on (or overuse) modern
| technology too much, even though it can sometimes be beneficial
| (so it is not the reason to avoid it unconditionally, nor
| necessarily to avoid it generally).
|
| Many things now are excessively artificially, including (but not
| limited to): light, music, communication, food, transportation,
| and now even also creativity. (Some of these (such as food and
| music) are mentioned in that article but some are they do not
| seem to mention it) This is not the only problem (there are many
| other problems too), but it is one aspect of it.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| This hits on a pet peeve of mine: representing the past as dull
| and colorless, because we mostly have access to b&w or sepia
| photos from the time.
|
| I'm not saying that the overall point isn't true, just that
| juxtaposing photos propagates an already deeply-embedded and
| mistaken intuition that the past was somehow less colorful, less
| vibrant than the present.
|
| To try to combat this, I had ChatGPT colorize the "actual farmer"
| photo: https://ibb.co/1tkcLKmY
| pezezin wrote:
| This is something that I have been noticing for years. Whenever
| I try to imagine "the past" (any time period before I was
| born), I tend to imagine it with fuzzy colors and film grain,
| like and old movie. It takes me some conscious effort to
| remember that the past looked the same as the present!
| techblueberry wrote:
| Yeah, I actually love the "cottagecore" photos I think she's
| trying to use as evidence that the past wasn't cute? But the
| stone farmhouse with straw roof is exactly the image I have in
| mind when I romanticize "cottagecore of the past. (While
| understanding it was a bit drafty, but "cute" is about
| aesthetic and I totally dig the aesthetic)
|
| But actually I do admit this is the best part of living today,
| if you want it, you can have some level of that aesthetic and
| lifestyle with some of the efficiencies of modern technology
| (not having to worry about dying of starvation if a harvest
| doesn't work out)
| sssilver wrote:
| I do wish I were born early enough to have been a software
| engineer in eighties and early nineties.
| pezezin wrote:
| I was born in 1985 and sometimes I wish I was born 10 years
| earlier to get to experience the heydays of the 8 and 16-bit
| home computers.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm convinced that the fatal flaw of humanity: forgetting the
| lessons of the past, is a function of our lifespan. You don't
| have to be empathic or educated or wise if you still have a
| grandparent at the dinner table who will straighten you out on
| how bad Polio or the Great Depression or Nazis, etc. really were.
|
| Our social herd immunity weakens as we lose a critical mass of
| people who were there and experienced the horror.
| integralid wrote:
| >I'm convinced that the fatal flaw of humanity: forgetting the
| lessons of the past, is a function of our lifespan
|
| Counterpoint: some lessons deserve to be forgotten. Like there
| are many old people in my country that hate Germany and Germans
| for the things that happened in 2nd world war. Yes, nazis were
| bad and Holocaust was a nightmare. But modern day Germany moved
| past it. In fact, in Europe almost every country both did and
| was a victim on many atrocities. Dwelling on that forever would
| make peace or things like EU impossible. We would still be
| angry at things that happened 500 years ago.
|
| Unfortunately we forget more than we should, but maybe it's the
| price we have to pay to evolve as a society.
| gostsamo wrote:
| I'm blind and even 50 years ago my life would be 10x more limited
| than now. 100 - years, outright miserable. 1000 years - beggar or
| a fake oracle. There is a marked difference between living with
| someone's help and on their mercy. Living with no modern
| facilities and technologies is pretty easy only when you don't
| encounter the reasons they are created for.
| dogemaster2028 wrote:
| Something I haven't seen discussed here is the role of capitalism
| as the biggest lift to the quality of humans lives (in addition
| to things like vaccines and health departments or generally
| science).
|
| The notion of Incentives in human nature to drive innovation,
| with efficient allocation via prices and value, plus competition,
| all leading to capital accumulation that just then be efficiently
| allocated to generate further value was amazing.
|
| If you think about the current situation in Venezuela, China or
| Russia on useless missions that led to famine or to killing of
| millions of people, we cannot argue that capitalism wasn't a huge
| influence in the impact in humans lives
|
| I was looking at AOC's comments about capitalism somewhere and
| could not believe my ears. Then Thomas Sowell gave a masterclass
| rebuttal to each of AOC's ignorant points.
|
| Everyone should listen to it:
| https://x.com/cubaortografia/status/1997272611269525985
| Aloha wrote:
| This is a bit meta, but looking at the comments on this thread -
| Nostalgia is a hell of a powerful drug, probably the most
| powerful one our brains can self generate (because of the
| complexity of feelings generated).
|
| While I like some bits, some tech, some ascetics from yesteryear
| - I know one thing for certain - the world today is better for
| basically everyone than it has every been, by virtually every
| measurable standard, even the poorest of the poor are better off
| in 2025 than they ever have been at any point in history.
|
| So while I might want to go visit the past if I had a time
| machine, I know I would never want to live there.
| zkmon wrote:
| >> I want you to have a life I didn't have.
|
| But they said it imagining some contemporary lifestyle that was
| not "servitude". That's not what your current life is. If they
| had a chance to look at your life now and compare it with their
| servitude life, they would probably not say that.
|
| The reason is, modern life has lost core abilities of innate
| resilience and community. The comforts such as the oven-baking
| came at the cost of losing some other things, which you ignore.
| So it all depends on what you value.
| vintermann wrote:
| "We can buy a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too
| dear", sang the Beatles, and that was a thing retirees did when
| they sang it. Those retirees would have been born in 1890-1910,
| and be perfectly aware of what life was like without running
| water and electricity (or the old age pension which made buying a
| cottage in the Isle of Wight an option!), yet they still
| obviously saw something in the "cottagecore" life.
|
| I'm thinking also of one set of great-great grandparents. He was
| from a very poor farming family, who had decided to look for work
| in the city instead of emigrating to the US. She was from a
| considerably wealthier farming family (which owned their own
| farm, his didn't), and also had decided to move to the city,
| probably more out of a desire to see the world (and the wonders
| of fin de siecle city life) than necessity. They did well for
| themselves in the city, but in their old age they moved to a
| rural cottage near the farm she grew up on. (I think actually she
| inherited the land, and considerably more, but that they sold off
| the rest).
|
| I think that _with money_ , cottage core can be a desirable life.
| A big part of the reason life was hard for life-on-the-prairie
| people was that they had debts, and need for a good deal of
| things they couldn't grow themselves. With a little money, like
| both my great-great grandparents and the stereotypical Beatles
| retirees had, cottage life can be fine.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Well, yes if you're a retiree then thing are always a bit
| different, but the cottagecore lifestyle is about raising a
| family, not retiring. Ironically, the Isle of Wight is still a
| great example. It's a lovely place for a holiday, and a great
| place to retire. I spent a weekend there a few weeks ago and
| had a great time. Lovely landscape, beaches with dinosaur
| footprints and loads of fossils, great pubs. I recommend it!
| But it's really not a good place for a working age family. I'd
| never choose to live there.
|
| There's a reason it's among the most deprived areas in England.
| It's badly isolated, with a crazily-expensive ferry the only
| connection to the mainland. The jobs are working in tourism,
| agriculture, or at the prison. Housing is totally unaffordable,
| because of all the second-homeowners, holiday cottages and -
| yes - retirees. The story is the same in many tourism areas.
| brabel wrote:
| Don't they buy cottages anymore? In Sweden that is still
| extremely popular. Almost everyone who can afford one owns one,
| to my foreign eyes amusement as to me that's just finding
| something to work on every summer. There's a satirical
| reference to this in the series "Welcome to Sweden", which
| makes fun of lots of stereotypical Swedish behavior.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Same here in Finland, and it just makes no sense to me at
| all. So often I will talk with someone who lives in a city
| here, and hear them complain about how brutally expensive it
| is, how nobody makes enough money to save anything, and a few
| sentences later they're telling me about how annoyed they are
| that they have to drive 6 hours every weekend to their
| $30,000 hut in the middle of nowhere to patch up the leaking
| roof or stuff more dried moss between the logs, and that they
| should have sprung for the $50,000 one that's only 90 minutes
| away. By car. In a country where gas is regularly over $10 a
| gallon. When they could get to work just fine on the bus.
|
| We'll stick with our quiet little apartment and our free time
| and our growing savings accounts, thank you very much.
| vintermann wrote:
| Same in Norway. These days it's often second homes in the
| mountain, better equipped than many poor people's homes, and
| in a "cottage suburb" where you can even pay people to do the
| maintenance - but that does get some derision from the old-
| style cottage fans. Old-style cottages with limited amenities
| are still popular, though in these days of solar panels even
| mountain cottages typically have at least electricity, and a
| vacuum toilet rather than an outhouse.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| I'm 30 and I remember when this was still a thing in Russia.
| As soon as Communism crumbled and the new economy could
| provide enough food, literally everyone abandoned the dacha
| and the potatoes.
| tor825gl wrote:
| I don't think the Beatles song really tells us much about
| 'cottagecore' or rural life in the 1800s.
|
| Retirees in the 1960s were not aspiring to a rural way of life,
| or giving up plumbing or electricity. They were just buying a
| small house suitable for two older people to live in together.
|
| This was a middle class goal with very little overlap to
| today's 'cottagecore' other than the word 'cottage'.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Cottage core is an aspirational Marie Antoinette-ism. Devotees
| get to pretend they're living the authentic peasant life while
| checking their stock portfolios.
| Simplita wrote:
| Funny how nostalgia smooths out the parts that were actually
| painful. The post is a good reminder that every era only looks
| simple in hindsight.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| I think it's really revealing to see so many folks defending
| views like "hunter gathering was better" and "the past wasn't
| dickensian."
|
| I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a
| person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I
| nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was
| a better life for humans.
|
| It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress,
| because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution
| climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful
| capitalists that rule the world.
|
| But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear
| conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they
| are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very
| very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an
| innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what
| already is. We're pretty good at anticipating and appreciating
| the new, but if it's already there then, like a spoilt child
| living in a luxury home, we take it for granted.
|
| I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many
| comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in
| winter don't use your heating or hot water. For me, it was
| travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm
| water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful
| (at least for a while).
| senfiaj wrote:
| We are definitely better at survival and safety. In modern
| societies we are less likely to starve, die in infancy /
| childhood, have longer life expectancy, etc.
|
| But when we compare by other metrics, such as mental and
| physical health, it becomes more complicated. The problem is
| that out brains and bodies aren't well adapted to the modern
| world. In the past there were stresses (predators, hunger,
| conflict), but they were more acute, big spike of stress, but
| you usually had a lot of time to recover. For example, predator
| appears, huge spike in stress, run/fight, either you die or
| it's over. But afterwards (if you survived) you usually had a
| lot of rest. Also you more or less directly saw the results of
| your actions. For example, you hunt means you eat, you build
| shelter means stay dry, etc.
|
| Meanwhile, modern people tend to have chronic low-level stress
| caused by the complicated and fast paced society: money
| worries, grind, bureaucracy, deadlines, school / college /
| university, burnout, job insecurity, notifications, news
| doomscrolling. Our stress systems are constantly activated
| which is devastating for long-term mental health. It's no
| wonder that we have higher rates of depression, anxiety and
| suicidality. Today's stress is more akin to death by thousands
| of small cuts. The same is for our physical health.
|
| I'm not claiming hunter gatherers' lives were not challenging.
| There were a lot risks, physical hardship, famines, etc. But
| evolutionary speaking, our bodies / minds were more equipped to
| deal with those types stresses. Here is a good video that talks
| about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo
| another_twist wrote:
| > My mother pointed out that a lot of the songs along the lines
| of "my own true love proved false to me" were about unplanned
| pregnancies.
|
| I was this years old when I realized it.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| It's ironic how HN spends a whole thread gushing about how easy
| and nice the life of paleolithic hunter gatherers was as reaction
| to a article that talks about how we romanticize the past...
| systemtest wrote:
| The Coca Cola poster on the impoverished wall is eerie. Reminds
| me of developing countries where to this day I see the same, run
| down shanty towns with Coca Cola signs all over.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| When I was a child, my Father's Father was considered a black
| sheep of the family, thus most extended family held my Father at
| arms length. The exception was his first cousin, Imogene and her
| husband. They farmed land in northern Louisiana, and we visited
| them at least once a year while I was growing up. I loved going
| there and enjoyed their large family, which had two boys my age
| who taught me how to hunt, fish and ride horses.
|
| I remember the early years when they didn't have running water or
| indoor plumbing, which my Mother hated, but I thought was fun. As
| the years went by and the price of the main crops that were grown
| increased, the "shack" was updated more to Mother's liking.
|
| When I reached my tween years, I was asked if I wanted to earn a
| little money by working in the fields, I was thrilled. My first
| assignment was to work hoeing cotton, a semi-brutal job performed
| on endless rows in scorching heat. I was working with a black
| family who, I was told, worked on that particular piece of land
| for generations. They took care of me and, after a few days, I
| began to understand their accented speech. As a kid from a
| middle-class white family who lived in a city hundreds of miles
| away, it was my first time to experience a culture shock. It was
| a lot to process being so young, but I do have fond memories,
| especially of the Mother of the family. I didn't have any contact
| with the family except in the fields, so I can't pretend to know
| how they felt about their lives, I do know they worked very hard
| in the summer and found whatever work they could in the winter.
| This all took place in the seventies.
| dash2 wrote:
| This is true and fair, yet there is another mistake which I see a
| lot of: thinking that because people didn't live lives as
| comfortable as we do, their lot was unremitting misery. Kind of
| the _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ view of pre-industrial
| life.
|
| It's important to have some nuance. Different places had
| different living standards. The French village life depicted in
| Peasants into Frenchmen sounds grim; English village life around
| 1900 was nice enough to generate nostalgic books like _Lark Rise
| to Candleford_ after the rise of the motor car. The peasants in
| Brueghel paintings are having a lot of rough, unsophisticated
| fun.
|
| That doesn't mean we should not be grateful for (say) modern
| dentistry! Of course we should. But if you paint an entirely
| black picture of premodern life, you may subtly dehumanize the
| people who lived it.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| I think I don't understand the point of this site anymore when
| this is what makes it to the front page.
| anonyfox wrote:
| guess people upvote what they're right now interested in. still
| a lot better than the next AI slop trying to hype
| class3shock wrote:
| I think the interest in cottagecore and similar things is less
| about people finding them cute and more about people looking for
| meaning, something we've always struggled with as technology
| advanced. Look at the Arts & Crafts movement in the US and Art
| Nouveau in Europe in the early 1900s, both were a response to the
| industrialization and dehumanization of work and art. Read Player
| Piano by Kurt Vonnegut from the 1950s which imagined a future
| where basically all work was automated and the terribleness of
| that path. History might only rhyme but this is one that has
| happened a number of times.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Look at this astonishing graph:
|
| https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph
|
| For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die
| before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is
| 4.3%. It's 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Yeah, I thought of this first as well. There is nothing that
| hammers home the point that the past was a horrible place
| better than childhood mortality statistics. I'm surprised the
| author of the article didn't mention it, given all her focus on
| families - I mean, good for her for realizing she didn't
| understand what life in the past was really like, but she still
| seems a little focused on "it wasn't _cute_ " rather than the
| really big differences.
|
| Related recent HN thread on the Bills of Mortality from early
| modern London: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46045061
|
| The tldr of my post there is that life before the mass
| availability of antibiotics after WWII was pretty terrifying.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| People sometimes say that people in the past would have been
| familiar with the idea that mortality is high and therefore
| fine when half their children died. While there would have
| been cultural rituals in these cases, it seems like there is
| reasonable evidence (epitaphs, cultural practices eaves-drip
| burials or stillborn baptisms, etc) that the loss was still
| very dearly felt and so people's lives were just much worse.
| kakacik wrote:
| If that would not be enough, any lack of medical care could
| be another. 10% chance of dying for every birth for the
| mother. Flu, any tooth ache, appendix inflammation or any
| more severe cut would be easily deadly for young and old.
|
| Everybody had tons of parasites and smelled horribly
| including royalty, think working out hard daily and wearing
| the same cloth, bathing once a year (maybe). Freedom we
| consider a basic human right was basically unheard of,
| everybody was a prisoner of some form of somebody else.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I agree on all counts except for irregular bathing among
| elites, which was more varied with cultures in the past:
| largely true in early modern Europe, but the upper classes
| in Imperial Rome bathed pretty much daily and probably
| didn't smell too bad.
|
| To the list I would add: a group of horrible diseases
| (smallpox above all, which killed about a billion people
| throughout history) that vaccines largely pushed to the
| margins, at least until recently.
| dmix wrote:
| I learned this recently. I got into waxed canvas/cotton jackets
| for outdoors stuff, where people would oil it for waterproofing
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton
|
| The jackets look nice but they are heavy, don't breath well, and
| are usually expensive for quality, and they are more water
| resistant than waterproof.
|
| Compared to modern ultra-light synthetic jackets (down etc) that
| are legitimately water/windpoof which feels much nicer and warmed
| doing high activity stuff in poor weather. The only downside is
| they aren't as rugged, like getting a scratch walking through a
| bush or cuts from tools/dogs.
|
| Old stuff always lasts longer but the IRL experience doesn't
| always outweigh the cons.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The present isn't all that cute either. But if from the view of
| 100 years in the future, all you saw was the idealized lives of
| everyone as posted on social media, you'd think it was a lost,
| happy time too. That's how nostalgia works. You preserve the good
| stuff, you let the boring and crappy stuff be forgotten. At least
| relatively.
| woopwoop wrote:
| If the Canterbury Tales had been actually representative of the
| time in which they were written, it would not have been the
| Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, etc. It
| would have been the Subsistence Farmer's Tale, the Subsistence
| Farmer's Tale, the Subsistence Farmer's Tale, etc.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| The past was so cute, for certain people. A certain landowning
| leisurely class. The whole point of cottage-core is to role-play
| as an English aristocrat visiting their "humble" hunting lodge.
| didibus wrote:
| Also known as "The Golden Age Fallacy". It's a very common one
| nowadays as we've all romanticized the past in media and our
| subconscious.
| pcrh wrote:
| Cottagecore is almost entirely an aesthetic and nostalgic trend.
|
| Such aesthetics have a long history, well illustrated by bucolic
| visions of "simple" peasant life from the classical Greek and
| Roman era , e.g. Theocritus in 300 BC [0], to the 19th century
| paintings by John Constable.
|
| It has little to do with the actual realities of living a rural
| agrarian life. Let alone a pre-industrial one.
|
| So the tone of much of the discussion in this thread (technology
| vs simplicity) a little curious, to say the least.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocritus#Bucolics_and_mimes
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Many here have spent their lives developing skills that produce
| nothing tangible or immediate so "well the past sucked anyway" is
| a pretty attractive narrative if one has incurred that
| opportunity cost. Yes, a world without antibiotics and modern
| commerce sucked, there was hard labor everywhere but on the other
| hand these people didn't need pills to get their asses out of bed
| every morning.
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