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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...

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.

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.

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”

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

We have a saying: "New Mexico is a place where poor people want to live in a modern house with a pitched roof and rich people want to live in mud huts."

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.

I was this years old when I realized it.

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...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...

(https://archive.ph/XKBZr)

Our social herd immunity weakens as we lose a critical mass of people who were there and experienced the horror.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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