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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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)
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.
"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.
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.
"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.
1 v 1, the average nomad could kill the average conscripted peasant who was physically weaker and less experienced. An iron vs a flint spear isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference. Superior numbers for the creation of a professional class of fighters that conquered the weaker nomads, but the steppe nomads remained superior in combat. The Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Muslim empires were only able to keep them at bay by turning them against each other. When they united, they were completely unstoppable.
With the Romans, the situation was the opposite. Their success was mostly based on the idea that conscripted peasants will eventually beat elite warriors. You just had to equip and train the conscripts instead of wasting the resources on the elites.
Because every man was expected to fight, the Romans had an effectively endless supply of experienced and well equipped soldiers. A society depending on a warrior class might win once or twice. But the Romans would still inflict some casualties. They would learn and adapt, and come back with another army next year. Sooner or later, the warrior class would be depleted, and Rome would prevail.
Eventually the Roman Republic grew large enough and successful enough to switch to a professional army. Not because it was better, but because the population was too large. There were not enough enemies to fight to make conscription useful.
Steppe nomads were far from unstoppable. They had occasional success in conquest, but their societies were set up to fail. The legitimacy of their leaders was based on personal relationships between the elites. When the leader of a large empire died, it was always unlikely that all leaders of note would support the successor. Most of the time, the empire would fracture into effectively independent polities. Sometimes there would be a figurehead leader on the top, but he would rarely have any real power over other leaders.
"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.
I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.
Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?
It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.
With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.
In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...
Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.
It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!
For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Cows are very safe for their herders, assuming there are no bulls (and there never are, those require containment). They can get defensive or spooked and then they're very numerous very large animals with hooves and horns, but their herders won't be the target of their aggression even if the herders are very mean. At least not intentionally.
Pigs are extremely dangerous to children in all cases (they will eat body parts with no hesitation and no effort, like carrots).
Goats are incredibly awesome and accept you as part of their pack and defend you from predators. They can also be assholes but playfully. As with cows, female only herds, as males are dangerous.
I've never herded sharks so I'll go with your opinion on those.
it was in the news recently, an Israeli guy was hanging out with dusky sharks, a somewhat common past-time as they've always been considered to be safe for humans, but they ate him and dusky sharks are no longer considered safe.
20 people out of 350MM is pretty damn safe, even factoring for the relatively low numbers of people who actually interact with cattle. We as modern humans no longer have any sense of proportion when it comes to safety.
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.
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.
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)
I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission.
He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back!
So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
His blog posts are very high quality. It seems however that the average reader ignores his prolific disclaimers about how his work doesn't necessarily generalize and attempting to do so is fraught with peril and attempting to do so any later than the early modern period is laughable.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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)
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?
>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.
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.
> [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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- 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)
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet, potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/
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.
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.
>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".
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
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.
You're completely missing the single largest source of domestic work, which was clothing. Spinning thread and weaving by hand are incredibly time consuming and consumed 40% of women's working hours.
Here's an overview by an actual historian, who estimates that women in a medieval peasant household worked 3,760 hours per year, which averages out to 80 hours per week.
After that it gets pretty easy, just time consuming. Keeping an old school saw sharp would be far more challenging.
I grew up in a household without power tools, and helped gut rehab a few friends houses. Certainly not exactly comparable, but you learn pretty quick sawing is at least as much about technique and skill vs brute strength and stamina.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
That's because you haven't done that work and don't value it.
Women in agrarian societies do difficult manual labor like hauling water, milking, preserving food, tending livestock, laundry. Laundry before machines was backbreaking work nobody wanted to do, which is why the poor did it or women took in laundry if they needed money. If you had a hand free, you spun wool.
Also, they did all that while constantly pregnant or nursing, which is really hard on the body. Sure, women didn't have to go to war, but men didn't have to live with the fear that this year's baby might be the one that finally kills them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "miserable" existence ascribed by modern day humans to past human life is colored by their modern day psychological profile. If they were born and raised at that environment their psychological profile would be very different. A modern day human can be easily traumatized by something that past humans would consider trivial. Sure death was more common, possibly even violence, but that would not mean people were less happy. Satisfaction in human psychology has a certain profile, and that profile mainly follows the things i talked about. Close human relationships in small cohort groups, perception of agency, among a few other important factors. things that are missing among many citizens of modern day societies world wide. My point is that on average if you performed a statistical analysis of how happy people were, the claim is that they were happier back then then now.
To me, 100-500x higher death rates are simply not a detail that I can get past. Since we are basically of the same genetic makeup (which is also the cornerstone of you argument) that simply seems incompatible with a better life. It's possible I am lacking vision for how it all gels into the good existence you think it does.
What I think makes this idea interesting: We are not as fantastically happy today as we should be, if progress on the tangibles translated into happiness. So there's definitely something that is off and I can totally see what you are describing being part of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the "old" days, unused land was there to be had, but, depending on where you were, it was heavily treed or rock infested. There may have been hostel natives or bandits, making isolation potentially dangerous. Cattle ranchers, who would claim umpteenth thousands of acres were particularly testy. In the mid parts of the nineteenth century, "good" free land was hard to find for farming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
You definitely don't automatically need antibiotics for something you step on, or get cut. Any topical antiseptic will do, and probably perform better.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, yes, I've had colds and a cough or two for sure. I don't think I've thrown up in 35 years though since I was a child.
When I meant sick, I meant like a longer sustained thing that needs treatment of some kind. I didn't mean I never stayed in bed watching the price is right for two days.
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.
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.
"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.”"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Maybe something like a publicly traded company, Citizens can vote directly on individual bills, or choose a proxy to vote on their behalf (and change that choice at any point that desire).
It wouldn't actually change anything, because your single direct vote wouldn't have any outcome at all. It would by negligible compared to all the votes from the proxies, because they represent millions and you just one. It would result in the same outcome, talking to the proxy gets your point better across than voting yourself.
> 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.
No. That is exclusively an USA thing. I live in a representative democracy and I vote for the parliamentarian. Representative vs. direct democracy is about whether the people vote on laws directly or not.
> We (meaning most people) do not.
Most people don't want to write the laws, yes. They still want to have a say about the content. Most house owners also don't want to build the house. They still want to have a say what the construction company does.
> Which is why most people seek — by your own admission — officials to lord over them instead.
I don’t recall saying that. On the contrary, I believe people are forced to let officials rule over them, in part by lack of time and other resources, but also in a big part because they believe their government is democratic, even when it is increasingly not.
To give a couple examples in France: in 2005 about 60% of French people voted against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, despite predictions to the contrary by mass media, and overwhelming representative support. It wasn’t just defiance, there were quite a few objections to the text itself. Then a relatively short while later, a functionally identical text was voted by the parliament. That was the first time I realised my country was no longer, if ever, a democracy. Then over time we had unpopular reforms over unpopular reforms, culminating retirement reform, which all indicators show like about 70% of the population was against. All passed. Not long before that there was a popular demand for citizen initiated binding referendums. Ignored.
The people there did more than discuss in their private homes and answered surveys. We voted. We protested, down in the streets. The state answered with increasing violence. Documented repression tactics, turning a blind eye to police misconduct… A real shame in what was supposed to be the country of Human Rights — that too, we are no longer.
So yeah, politics takes time and effort. But it goes beyond that: work is inequitably spread, split between working overtime for relatively little benefit, and utter unemployment. (The split isn’t all that clear cut, I myself work 4 days a week, because I can afford the pay cut.) And on top of that, peaceful protests now put us in increasing physical danger. People lose their hands, their eyes, and in some (thankfully still rare) cases their lives.
No wonder so many people chose to just disengage at this point.
> 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.
I believe this is false, as a matter of historical fact. At least in France. When we had our Bourgeois Revolution (sure the people were starved and all, but it was coopted quite quickly), there were discussions about whether we should have democracy, or a representative government. Note the wording: "representative democracy" would have been a ridiculous oxymoron at the time. Anyway, democracy was shut down, in big part because the bourgeois discussing this decided that the people couldn’t steer themselves. Nevermind the Paris Commune, who did steer themselves for a very short while, but never got the chance to prove itself — the army disbanded them with bullets, over 10,000 killed.
Another example are randomly sampled assemblies. Constituent assemblies, or assemblies with a specific purpose. When analysed after the fact we generally find that their decisions are pretty well reasoned, well grounded, well documented, and (shocker), serve the actual interests of the people — of course they would be, since the members would then go on being subject to their own decisions.
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.
> governance by elected officials is not democratic.
I'd agree that this is the case.
When billionaires, or the ruling class, own the media, and when you have media and capital lobbying influencing everything in government, who is actually in control of people being elected?
A great example is what happened when Jeremy Corbyn (socialist) did well in the UK elections. The media absolutely crucified him and made sure he didn't become the next PM. That's not a democracy.
It's a real hell of a mess we're in and I'm not sure how we go about changing it.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Thinking that people won't fall in line is blind idealism. Autonomous weapons of war are already here as it is - formidable individually, worse than a WMD at scale. Day by day, we're getting closer to a militaristic reality where a commanding officer doesn't need a subordinate's turnkey or permission to enact scaled conflict.
Open a browser tab or start a conversation at a bar today, millions of people are in uproar because elected representatives and military officers issued a video that was JUST A REMINDER that military members have a moral and legal duty to reject manifestly illegal orders. Nevermind how they'll inevitably act when the chips are down, and it's now actually time to reject an order from the commander in chief - or someone that answers to him.
This place fetishizes CGP Grey more than anything - watch his dictatorship video about only needing to hold a few "key" (figuratively and literally) officials in place to get your bidding done most efficiently.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Composites are older than you think: putting thin layers of high quality wood over a lower quality wooden backing goes back at least to the Egyptians and Romans:
Pliny, Book 16: The principal woods for cutting into layers for using as a veneer to cover other kinds of wood are citrus, turpentine-tree, varieties of maple, box, palm, holly, holm-oak, the root of the elder, and poplar. Also the alder, as has been stated, supplies a tubcrosity that can be cut into layers, as do the citrus and the maple ; no other trees have tuberosities so much valued. The middle part of trees is more variegated, and the nearer the root the smaller and the more wavy are the markings. This first originated the luxury use of trees, covering up one with another and making an outside skin for a cheaper wood out of a more expensive one. In order that one tree might be sold several times over, even thin layers of wood have been invented.https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory04plinuoft/page/53...
Composites in that style are also typically very durable, often more than the original material. I think GP was more likely talking about constructions of pressboard and plywood which is (charitably) less durable.
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
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got a nice Samsung fridge for 500€, it is running without issues for 10 years already. There is no sense to buy expensive fridge unless you need a professional one.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.
I do not think that luxury is a good thing. We are able to afford it, by having wage slaves in other parts of the world. Also now these kinds of shirts have become of so low quality that you need to throw them away. It is simply an enormous waste of resources, mostly of human work and lifetime.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
> It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1].
Eeeeeh. Very debatable. One could argue that both extremes of the bi-partisan political spectrum are laser focused on making the individual businessman powerless. They just hide it all behind altruistic rhetoric.
> 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
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
For the price point, IKEA mattresses (both hybrid and foam) are worth it. Same goes for mattresses sold by Costco/Sams Club.
A lot of this enthusiasm about mattresses comes from being young. When your back is still indestructible, nearly any mattress(all kinds of foam, coils, hybrid, innerspring) feels fantastic. 20% of mattresses are returned for comfort reasons; that's how online marketing companies disguised as mattress companies have won over the traditional brick and mortar companies.
Lots of people complain about the invisible sagging after a few years of usage. For warranty purposes, 1.5" visible sagging is needed. Even latex foam sags too, but it sags slower than PU foams. Even Tempurpedic has cheapened their foam, thereby cashing on its brand name.
High density foam lasts longer. However, 99% of mattress makers don't list ILD and densities of their PU and viscoelastic PU foams. That's why the market is flooded with cheap mattresses that have invisible sag after a couple of years.
Same goes with coils: thin wire, reducing the wire in each pocket, stretching the wire, carbon content, how wires are cleaned, etc--all these factors matter.
Yes, there is advancement in the knowledge of materials and foams. However, industry has started cutting corners for a short term profit. If you make a mattress that lasts 10 years at least, who can you sell mattresses to then? That's why cheap low density foams, cheap coils dominate the industry.
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.
> 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).
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!
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Actually the history of real people is my main area of interest :-). I stand by what I said, but I way understand you have to sort of blur your vision and take the bigger 60%, this is not the 99%, also the article was specifically about aesthetics, which is inherently a more rose colored glasses approach. I’m not sure that there’s any era I’d rather live in than today (though this is a nuanced question, since you wouldn’t know better, and I do think we’re in sort of a local minima so for sure I’d rather live in like the early 2000’s and maybe before, probably no earlier than auto-bill pay, digital banking and modern dentistry lol.). But there are many eras I would like to travel to for the aesthetic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am. I think that organic farming is based around the same kind of fake nostalgia discussed upthread, and there's really no coherent reason to avoid chemical fertilizer. Manure contributes nothing better other than a pile of contaminants and pathogens. (I'm more sympathetic to people who want to avoid herbicides, even if the best evidence is that they're safe.)
Even if you like modern organic farming, it's carefully regulated to control the risks and environmental costs of using crap. The US National Organic Program (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/5006.pdf), for example, requires 90-120 days between the application of raw manure and harvest; only properly pasteurized manure can be used in the months before harvest.
So when I was a chemist at university I saw one of those silly chain mail claims that cigarettes have polonium 210 in them. I thought "that's dumb" let me fact check that; it turns out that phosphates enrich the soil with radionuclides and radon in the soil enters plants and decays to Po210.
So actually yes I am generally in favour of archaic methods for making food because our biochemistry and the environment has had a lot longer to find equilibrium with non-synthetic solutions.
That isn't to say that we should throw away science and give up 200 years of progress on hygiene, but I also don't believe that packing chickens into their own feces then pumping them with antibiotics and washing them in chlorine is all that great either.
Maybe this solves for food scarcity and I'm all for that being available to other people but I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium on alternatives methods that eschew the use of synthetic products in my food chain.
Again, I’m sympathetic to some arguments against unnecessary synthetic products in the food chain. I’m just not sure how you get to the intuition that packing chickens into feces is bad but packing plants into feces is perfectly OK.
Because they're not equivalent, in one system there are inbuilt mechanisms to recycle and incorporate feces into nutrients. In the other there is no such system and instead the build up of urea(?) gets so severe it ends up burning off the feet of the chickens who have no means of vacating from their filth.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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.
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)
I appreciate how food tastes, and cherries in the winter are expensive and tasteless. Summer cherries are the complete opposite, specially if you live in a state where they produce them locally. In WA they invented their own hybrid cherry, the Rainier, which is also really good but you can only get during a short period of time.
> The difference is today we eat bland cherries around the year except for a couple of weeks when you get fresh local ones.
Speak for yourself. A lot of people don't want to take part in consumerism and only buy (or just not buy) fruits, when it is their time and don't buy stuff from more than 200km away out of principle.
I'm one of those.
But it's not out of principle, it's because they taste much better, I'm currently eating WA pears from costco as it's the season and have been incredibly good and consistent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Chaucer had just had subsistence farmer after subsistence farmer telling their tales it would be very boring. Even in such a society, there were a number of different roles at the bottom of it. Some people were shepherds or drovers rather than just scraping the soil, others were producing cloth and clothing, others were fishermen, others were midwives and so on. All these were useful at the time and used by peasants.
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
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!
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)
"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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cottage core is an aspirational Marie Antoinette-ism. Devotees get to pretend they're living the authentic peasant life while checking their stock portfolios.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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)
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.
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.
>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%.
Try wearing a dress shirt and a suit. It's incredible and I totally see how people used to wear that for work. You can sweat for hours in it, it just doesn't smell. It also (mostly) doesn't become dirty beyond something you can wipe away. It's really comfy and you stand straight. I am kind of sad it is now weird to wear that. But it is cool to have something real comfy to wear for festive days.
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.
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 ...
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.
“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 shōjo 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 shōjo 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Here in New Mexico there's a long tradition of flat-roofed adobe house construction; the materials are abundant and it insulates fairly well (by the standards of the 1700s). But the roofs always leak because snow and rain don't immediately run off. Yet even though we now have modern building materials readily available, a lot of faux adobe still gets built especially in wealthy neighborhoods.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I doubt that you are really a fan of all things EU but I am with you on unity being important and I absolutely agree we fucked up that one. I'm pretty sure we mildly screwed our economy from day one of Brexit - simply by inviting mutual tariffs for a smaller entity and losing the unified border.
However: I'm old enough (55) to remember quite a lot of EU history. Do you recall or have been told about wine lakes and butter and grain mountains?
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.
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.
People arbitrarily point at periods in the past to say they were worse or better. Some people idealize the Middle Ages over Rome. A Ren Faire is a hodgepodge of Medieval/Renaissance larping. But the past as a sum total is usually worse, hence the concept of progress. While the beginning of someone’s life is usually best and the end is worse. Historically speaking it’s complicated.
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.
>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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
"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.
> 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).
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.
Out of 10 siblings in my grandfather's family, only 5 lived.
the eldest, my grandfather, was sent to America on his own at age 14 to work and send money home. college? who's got time to finish high school?
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.
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".
Yep, for most of human history taking care of children has been way more communal than in modern era.
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.
I recognize a Hegel vs. Schopenhauer comment chain.
"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)
> 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.
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
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.
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.
There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
1 v 1, the average nomad could kill the average conscripted peasant who was physically weaker and less experienced. An iron vs a flint spear isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference. Superior numbers for the creation of a professional class of fighters that conquered the weaker nomads, but the steppe nomads remained superior in combat. The Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Muslim empires were only able to keep them at bay by turning them against each other. When they united, they were completely unstoppable.
With the Romans, the situation was the opposite. Their success was mostly based on the idea that conscripted peasants will eventually beat elite warriors. You just had to equip and train the conscripts instead of wasting the resources on the elites.
Because every man was expected to fight, the Romans had an effectively endless supply of experienced and well equipped soldiers. A society depending on a warrior class might win once or twice. But the Romans would still inflict some casualties. They would learn and adapt, and come back with another army next year. Sooner or later, the warrior class would be depleted, and Rome would prevail.
Eventually the Roman Republic grew large enough and successful enough to switch to a professional army. Not because it was better, but because the population was too large. There were not enough enemies to fight to make conscription useful.
Steppe nomads were far from unstoppable. They had occasional success in conquest, but their societies were set up to fail. The legitimacy of their leaders was based on personal relationships between the elites. When the leader of a large empire died, it was always unlikely that all leaders of note would support the successor. Most of the time, the empire would fracture into effectively independent polities. Sometimes there would be a figurehead leader on the top, but he would rarely have any real power over other leaders.
"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.
"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.
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.
I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.
Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?
It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.
With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.
In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...
Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.
It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!
For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!
Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
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
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
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.
> 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.
Living in the forest is illegal.
Not in the US. There is a lot of BLM land if you want to live a nomadic lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks
You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.
A state small game hunting license is very cheap
TV tells me that hunting wabbits is not very productive.
Especially the wascally ones.
And very limited.
Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
The first labor-saving invention was theft.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Cows are very safe for their herders, assuming there are no bulls (and there never are, those require containment). They can get defensive or spooked and then they're very numerous very large animals with hooves and horns, but their herders won't be the target of their aggression even if the herders are very mean. At least not intentionally.
Pigs are extremely dangerous to children in all cases (they will eat body parts with no hesitation and no effort, like carrots).
Goats are incredibly awesome and accept you as part of their pack and defend you from predators. They can also be assholes but playfully. As with cows, female only herds, as males are dangerous.
I've never herded sharks so I'll go with your opinion on those.
I tried to hang out with white tip reef sharks while snorkelling in Fiji at the start of the year. But they aren't very sociable.
I was able to hang out with a group of cuttlefish though. Cuttlefish are weird and cool.
it was in the news recently, an Israeli guy was hanging out with dusky sharks, a somewhat common past-time as they've always been considered to be safe for humans, but they ate him and dusky sharks are no longer considered safe.
20 people out of 350MM is pretty damn safe, even factoring for the relatively low numbers of people who actually interact with cattle. We as modern humans no longer have any sense of proportion when it comes to safety.
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.
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.
I'd sure hate to be a nomad in winter.
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)
I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission. He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back! So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
His blog posts are very high quality. It seems however that the average reader ignores his prolific disclaimers about how his work doesn't necessarily generalize and attempting to do so is fraught with peril and attempting to do so any later than the early modern period is laughable.
Came here to post the same resource and to point out that based on it it rarely was a "two person's job" only.
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-...
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.
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?
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.
Well don't just accuse, insinuate and link. Lay out a few actual assertions.
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It isn't true.
https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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)
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?
>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.
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.
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
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.
I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand, but that's shockingly intensive labor.
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)
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.
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.
People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
Not easier, lower-risk. Agriculture produced a standard of living with a lower mean but a much thinner left tail.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This make me think of Into the Wild. Its cultural appeal may come from its resonance with those ancient cautionary tales.
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So, easier to not have huge die-offs where you watch your kids die of starvation?
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.
> 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.
And also beer became possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/
“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.
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.
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.
Humans should be able to act smarter than bacteria.
>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".
This is a fairly common misconception, based on the incorrect notion that housework back then looks like it does today.
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
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?
>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.
You're completely missing the single largest source of domestic work, which was clothing. Spinning thread and weaving by hand are incredibly time consuming and consumed 40% of women's working hours.
Here's an overview by an actual historian, who estimates that women in a medieval peasant household worked 3,760 hours per year, which averages out to 80 hours per week.
https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...
I'd sure hate to build a house without power tools. Just doing the sawing would break me.
First few dozen cuts would suck.
After that it gets pretty easy, just time consuming. Keeping an old school saw sharp would be far more challenging.
I grew up in a household without power tools, and helped gut rehab a few friends houses. Certainly not exactly comparable, but you learn pretty quick sawing is at least as much about technique and skill vs brute strength and stamina.
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> In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home.
I come from a family of farmers, and I can assure you that the women worked the field too, even one-hundred years ago. And the children ...
The industrial revolution is the most transformative event in this history of life since the Cambrian explosion. It's that significant.
It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction. That stuff cuts both ways unfortunately.
A hell of a lot of stuff survived the permian extinction.
Now I'm not saying it's gonna be fun, but I'd bet a lot of money on humans and the species we find most useful surviving the next/current one.
> It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction.
why do you say that?
It was also an extremely lucky coincidence.
> 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.
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
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
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.
That's because you haven't done that work and don't value it.
Women in agrarian societies do difficult manual labor like hauling water, milking, preserving food, tending livestock, laundry. Laundry before machines was backbreaking work nobody wanted to do, which is why the poor did it or women took in laundry if they needed money. If you had a hand free, you spun wool.
Also, they did all that while constantly pregnant or nursing, which is really hard on the body. Sure, women didn't have to go to war, but men didn't have to live with the fear that this year's baby might be the one that finally kills them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "miserable" existence ascribed by modern day humans to past human life is colored by their modern day psychological profile. If they were born and raised at that environment their psychological profile would be very different. A modern day human can be easily traumatized by something that past humans would consider trivial. Sure death was more common, possibly even violence, but that would not mean people were less happy. Satisfaction in human psychology has a certain profile, and that profile mainly follows the things i talked about. Close human relationships in small cohort groups, perception of agency, among a few other important factors. things that are missing among many citizens of modern day societies world wide. My point is that on average if you performed a statistical analysis of how happy people were, the claim is that they were happier back then then now.
To me, 100-500x higher death rates are simply not a detail that I can get past. Since we are basically of the same genetic makeup (which is also the cornerstone of you argument) that simply seems incompatible with a better life. It's possible I am lacking vision for how it all gels into the good existence you think it does.
What I think makes this idea interesting: We are not as fantastically happy today as we should be, if progress on the tangibles translated into happiness. So there's definitely something that is off and I can totally see what you are describing being part of it.
You first.
And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
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.
> 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
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.
Ever since the invention of the rifle, hunting has been far easier than farming.
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.
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.
Yes, but history tells us that most of that meat was left in the sun to rot.
That same logic should be applied to farming. Where would you find free farmland that nobody else is claiming?
In the "old" days, unused land was there to be had, but, depending on where you were, it was heavily treed or rock infested. There may have been hostel natives or bandits, making isolation potentially dangerous. Cattle ranchers, who would claim umpteenth thousands of acres were particularly testy. In the mid parts of the nineteenth century, "good" free land was hard to find for farming.
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.
Farming supports war better than hunter gathering does.
Translation: farming supports larger populations and more complex lifestyles better than hunter gathering.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
That's from Arnold Henry Savage Landor and I suspect it was fabricated or exaggerated, like many Victorian era British tales of savages abroad.
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.
> 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.
Better food, living conditions and sanitation has helped greatly.
You can’t survive as s hunter gatherer in the modern world.
To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on rapidly.
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Hunter-gatherers didn't have birth control; if you have 5 kids and half of them die, you've still maintained your population.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
The adults getting sick and being undernourished was one of the leading causes of infant mortality.
Humanity almost did die out. All living humans are descendants from a relatively small funnel.
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.
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)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
You definitely don't automatically need antibiotics for something you step on, or get cut. Any topical antiseptic will do, and probably perform better.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Poison ivy is a plant that causes a topical rash, antibiotics can't help in any way with this. Maybe you've mistyped something?
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.
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.
> 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.
I hope this is satire.
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.
Sorry, yes, I've had colds and a cough or two for sure. I don't think I've thrown up in 35 years though since I was a child.
When I meant sick, I meant like a longer sustained thing that needs treatment of some kind. I didn't mean I never stayed in bed watching the price is right for two days.
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.
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.
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.
"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
This repeats several myths that Graeber and Wengrow have made compelling arguments against
> 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.
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.
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.
Im sorry. That was supposed to be a list but the formatter ate the lines.
I see makes sense. Sorry for being "the well actually" guy.
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.
Not 100 hours a week. More like 50. Taxes to the local baron, lord, monastery, or whoever took the other 50.
> 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.
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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.
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?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Maybe something like a publicly traded company, Citizens can vote directly on individual bills, or choose a proxy to vote on their behalf (and change that choice at any point that desire).
It wouldn't actually change anything, because your single direct vote wouldn't have any outcome at all. It would by negligible compared to all the votes from the proxies, because they represent millions and you just one. It would result in the same outcome, talking to the proxy gets your point better across than voting yourself.
> 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.
No. That is exclusively an USA thing. I live in a representative democracy and I vote for the parliamentarian. Representative vs. direct democracy is about whether the people vote on laws directly or not.
> We (meaning most people) do not.
Most people don't want to write the laws, yes. They still want to have a say about the content. Most house owners also don't want to build the house. They still want to have a say what the construction company does.
> Which is why most people seek — by your own admission — officials to lord over them instead.
I don’t recall saying that. On the contrary, I believe people are forced to let officials rule over them, in part by lack of time and other resources, but also in a big part because they believe their government is democratic, even when it is increasingly not.
To give a couple examples in France: in 2005 about 60% of French people voted against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, despite predictions to the contrary by mass media, and overwhelming representative support. It wasn’t just defiance, there were quite a few objections to the text itself. Then a relatively short while later, a functionally identical text was voted by the parliament. That was the first time I realised my country was no longer, if ever, a democracy. Then over time we had unpopular reforms over unpopular reforms, culminating retirement reform, which all indicators show like about 70% of the population was against. All passed. Not long before that there was a popular demand for citizen initiated binding referendums. Ignored.
The people there did more than discuss in their private homes and answered surveys. We voted. We protested, down in the streets. The state answered with increasing violence. Documented repression tactics, turning a blind eye to police misconduct… A real shame in what was supposed to be the country of Human Rights — that too, we are no longer.
So yeah, politics takes time and effort. But it goes beyond that: work is inequitably spread, split between working overtime for relatively little benefit, and utter unemployment. (The split isn’t all that clear cut, I myself work 4 days a week, because I can afford the pay cut.) And on top of that, peaceful protests now put us in increasing physical danger. People lose their hands, their eyes, and in some (thankfully still rare) cases their lives.
No wonder so many people chose to just disengage at this point.
> 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.
I believe this is false, as a matter of historical fact. At least in France. When we had our Bourgeois Revolution (sure the people were starved and all, but it was coopted quite quickly), there were discussions about whether we should have democracy, or a representative government. Note the wording: "representative democracy" would have been a ridiculous oxymoron at the time. Anyway, democracy was shut down, in big part because the bourgeois discussing this decided that the people couldn’t steer themselves. Nevermind the Paris Commune, who did steer themselves for a very short while, but never got the chance to prove itself — the army disbanded them with bullets, over 10,000 killed.
Another example are randomly sampled assemblies. Constituent assemblies, or assemblies with a specific purpose. When analysed after the fact we generally find that their decisions are pretty well reasoned, well grounded, well documented, and (shocker), serve the actual interests of the people — of course they would be, since the members would then go on being subject to their own decisions.
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.
> I’ve noticed how fashionable it is in the US in particular, to distrust the government
No that's actually a sign of a third-world country. It's definitely shifting towards that in the US but is not as bad as Pakistan, for example. Yet.
> governance by elected officials is not democratic.
I'd agree that this is the case.
When billionaires, or the ruling class, own the media, and when you have media and capital lobbying influencing everything in government, who is actually in control of people being elected?
A great example is what happened when Jeremy Corbyn (socialist) did well in the UK elections. The media absolutely crucified him and made sure he didn't become the next PM. That's not a democracy.
It's a real hell of a mess we're in and I'm not sure how we go about changing it.
>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
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.
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.
If this argument were true, dictatorships couldn't exist. However, they do.
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.
Was this supposed to be a counter-argument?
> they either must be bought at an increasing steep price
Right, what I was getting at is -- that isn't a fatal problem in practice, the price stays affordable.
You're assuming that citizen are united in what they want. That's usually not the case.
What happens when the killing power is a autonomous machine? Like now?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Thinking that people won't fall in line is blind idealism. Autonomous weapons of war are already here as it is - formidable individually, worse than a WMD at scale. Day by day, we're getting closer to a militaristic reality where a commanding officer doesn't need a subordinate's turnkey or permission to enact scaled conflict.
Open a browser tab or start a conversation at a bar today, millions of people are in uproar because elected representatives and military officers issued a video that was JUST A REMINDER that military members have a moral and legal duty to reject manifestly illegal orders. Nevermind how they'll inevitably act when the chips are down, and it's now actually time to reject an order from the commander in chief - or someone that answers to him.
This place fetishizes CGP Grey more than anything - watch his dictatorship video about only needing to hold a few "key" (figuratively and literally) officials in place to get your bidding done most efficiently.
I'd say it takes about 1 million people with modern military capability to completely take over the world.
That depends on your definition of "overthrow".
Governments are routinely replaced in western democracies.
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.
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...
Historical leaders didn't have fully automated killer drone factories. (Just an example; a real AGI will probably come up with more effective ideas.)
So it's a mind control problem. We have a good technology for that
"killbots, mow down these stupid protesters"
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.
What value do technocrats extract? It is a totally one-way dependency of the serfs upon the technocrats and not the other way around.
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.
> 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.
I’d argue, why would we need a government in this case ?
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.
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.
> 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)
This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can’t tell which side you’re arguing for.
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.
Color here is a metaphor for a point.
A rhetorical point, no less.
Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks
Hacker News really is full of luddites now.
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.
I thought it would be more like cyberpunk movies where people might get petty UBI, dirty food/water/room so they don’t die.
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.
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.
Climate change is not an existential threat. Even the IPCC doesn't take that position.
> 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!
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.
"decent" is a subjective judgment, there is no objectivity
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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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Composites are older than you think: putting thin layers of high quality wood over a lower quality wooden backing goes back at least to the Egyptians and Romans:
Pliny, Book 16: The principal woods for cutting into layers for using as a veneer to cover other kinds of wood are citrus, turpentine-tree, varieties of maple, box, palm, holly, holm-oak, the root of the elder, and poplar. Also the alder, as has been stated, supplies a tubcrosity that can be cut into layers, as do the citrus and the maple ; no other trees have tuberosities so much valued. The middle part of trees is more variegated, and the nearer the root the smaller and the more wavy are the markings. This first originated the luxury use of trees, covering up one with another and making an outside skin for a cheaper wood out of a more expensive one. In order that one tree might be sold several times over, even thin layers of wood have been invented. https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory04plinuoft/page/53...
Composites in that style are also typically very durable, often more than the original material. I think GP was more likely talking about constructions of pressboard and plywood which is (charitably) less durable.
Plywood can be extremely durable, in many cases more than whole boards.
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
> 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.”
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.
It’s very time and place dependent. Burglaries are less common these days because the valuable stuff is iPhones now, rather than televisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Got a nice Samsung fridge for 500€, it is running without issues for 10 years already. There is no sense to buy expensive fridge unless you need a professional one.
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.
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.
>how do you judge reliability of a compressor before buying it?
Reviews, specs, teardowns, brand name.
Where do you find reviews you can trust? Honest question
What's wrong with plywood? Why jump instantly from particleboard to hardwood?
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.
even second hand?
> 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.
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.
> luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.
I do not think that luxury is a good thing. We are able to afford it, by having wage slaves in other parts of the world. Also now these kinds of shirts have become of so low quality that you need to throw them away. It is simply an enormous waste of resources, mostly of human work and lifetime.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
The article you linked to makes a different claim.
Oh well fair enough. I'm claiming what the article says.
> It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1].
Eeeeeh. Very debatable. One could argue that both extremes of the bi-partisan political spectrum are laser focused on making the individual businessman powerless. They just hide it all behind altruistic rhetoric.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.
Such an intellectually dishonest comment.
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).
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...
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.
For the price point, IKEA mattresses (both hybrid and foam) are worth it. Same goes for mattresses sold by Costco/Sams Club.
A lot of this enthusiasm about mattresses comes from being young. When your back is still indestructible, nearly any mattress(all kinds of foam, coils, hybrid, innerspring) feels fantastic. 20% of mattresses are returned for comfort reasons; that's how online marketing companies disguised as mattress companies have won over the traditional brick and mortar companies.
Lots of people complain about the invisible sagging after a few years of usage. For warranty purposes, 1.5" visible sagging is needed. Even latex foam sags too, but it sags slower than PU foams. Even Tempurpedic has cheapened their foam, thereby cashing on its brand name.
High density foam lasts longer. However, 99% of mattress makers don't list ILD and densities of their PU and viscoelastic PU foams. That's why the market is flooded with cheap mattresses that have invisible sag after a couple of years.
Same goes with coils: thin wire, reducing the wire in each pocket, stretching the wire, carbon content, how wires are cleaned, etc--all these factors matter.
Yes, there is advancement in the knowledge of materials and foams. However, industry has started cutting corners for a short term profit. If you make a mattress that lasts 10 years at least, who can you sell mattresses to then? That's why cheap low density foams, cheap coils dominate the industry.
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.
> 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).
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.
Would you believe plenty of people still live this way... mostly against their will. Heck, anyone can do it!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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
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
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.
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.
My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some places because chocolate was too expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Actually the history of real people is my main area of interest :-). I stand by what I said, but I way understand you have to sort of blur your vision and take the bigger 60%, this is not the 99%, also the article was specifically about aesthetics, which is inherently a more rose colored glasses approach. I’m not sure that there’s any era I’d rather live in than today (though this is a nuanced question, since you wouldn’t know better, and I do think we’re in sort of a local minima so for sure I’d rather live in like the early 2000’s and maybe before, probably no earlier than auto-bill pay, digital banking and modern dentistry lol.). But there are many eras I would like to travel to for the aesthetic.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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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".
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you trying to imply this is bad? This is what I romanticize modern organic farming to be?
I am. I think that organic farming is based around the same kind of fake nostalgia discussed upthread, and there's really no coherent reason to avoid chemical fertilizer. Manure contributes nothing better other than a pile of contaminants and pathogens. (I'm more sympathetic to people who want to avoid herbicides, even if the best evidence is that they're safe.)
Even if you like modern organic farming, it's carefully regulated to control the risks and environmental costs of using crap. The US National Organic Program (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/5006.pdf), for example, requires 90-120 days between the application of raw manure and harvest; only properly pasteurized manure can be used in the months before harvest.
So when I was a chemist at university I saw one of those silly chain mail claims that cigarettes have polonium 210 in them. I thought "that's dumb" let me fact check that; it turns out that phosphates enrich the soil with radionuclides and radon in the soil enters plants and decays to Po210.
So actually yes I am generally in favour of archaic methods for making food because our biochemistry and the environment has had a lot longer to find equilibrium with non-synthetic solutions.
That isn't to say that we should throw away science and give up 200 years of progress on hygiene, but I also don't believe that packing chickens into their own feces then pumping them with antibiotics and washing them in chlorine is all that great either.
Maybe this solves for food scarcity and I'm all for that being available to other people but I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium on alternatives methods that eschew the use of synthetic products in my food chain.
Again, I’m sympathetic to some arguments against unnecessary synthetic products in the food chain. I’m just not sure how you get to the intuition that packing chickens into feces is bad but packing plants into feces is perfectly OK.
Because they're not equivalent, in one system there are inbuilt mechanisms to recycle and incorporate feces into nutrients. In the other there is no such system and instead the build up of urea(?) gets so severe it ends up burning off the feet of the chickens who have no means of vacating from their filth.
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.
Deeper connectedness is Karenism. There are still countries and societies today that are "deeper connected" and you can see the cost of it.
> 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?
Karen as in excessive nosiness and controlling behaviour
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.
> 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.
Whenever possible I'd always prefer a societal construction that requires minimal interdependence really, its not even a question.
Deeper connectedness = Karenism
They can go right now to Karen societies like the middle east and asia but they don't, its clear why.
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
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/
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.
Would this exceptional modern society of ours you speak of just happen to be the one founded on the genocide of Native American tribes?
that’s not who we are any more
200 years ago might as well be 20,000 to the modern mind
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?)
I searched for images on Google, I think this one matches the size of the onions I saw on the supermarkets near British Columbia University: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/uae/giant-red-onion-baby-head-s...
Serioulsy.
But as I searched , apparently they can get much bigger still! Search for "biggest onions" and you'll see.
Because large size was a selected-for trait by breeders, at the expense of the good tasting genes.
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.
My grandmother stored pork in lard-filled crocks in the basement for months.
Properly rendered lard is indeed shelf stable for months, and won't mold or otherwise spoil.
The meat is the concerning bit, and where you're most likely to pick up roundworms like trichinosis and other nasty things.
Heck, I've got a medicinal rub made from bear grease and herbs on my shelf right now that I picked up at a Dakota elder craft fair.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
Most likely?
I appreciate how food tastes, and cherries in the winter are expensive and tasteless. Summer cherries are the complete opposite, specially if you live in a state where they produce them locally. In WA they invented their own hybrid cherry, the Rainier, which is also really good but you can only get during a short period of time.
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.
> The difference is today we eat bland cherries around the year except for a couple of weeks when you get fresh local ones.
Speak for yourself. A lot of people don't want to take part in consumerism and only buy (or just not buy) fruits, when it is their time and don't buy stuff from more than 200km away out of principle.
I'm one of those. But it's not out of principle, it's because they taste much better, I'm currently eating WA pears from costco as it's the season and have been incredibly good and consistent.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jello was a fancy desert and a way to show you had wealth/prosperity as it required refrigeration, something the poors didn't have.
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.
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.
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.
The Canterbury Tales were trying to show the viewpoints of people from a wide variety of social backgrounds.
But in this world the distribution of social backgrounds in the population had very low entropy. Over 90% of people were just working the land.
If Chaucer had just had subsistence farmer after subsistence farmer telling their tales it would be very boring. Even in such a society, there were a number of different roles at the bottom of it. Some people were shepherds or drovers rather than just scraping the soil, others were producing cloth and clothing, others were fishermen, others were midwives and so on. All these were useful at the time and used by peasants.
Yes, Malthusian society was very boring, that's my point.
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
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!
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)
"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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cottage core is an aspirational Marie Antoinette-ism. Devotees get to pretend they're living the authentic peasant life while checking their stock portfolios.
Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman
https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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/
> 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.
[flagged]
This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.
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)
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.
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.
>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%.
Try wearing a dress shirt and a suit. It's incredible and I totally see how people used to wear that for work. You can sweat for hours in it, it just doesn't smell. It also (mostly) doesn't become dirty beyond something you can wipe away. It's really comfy and you stand straight. I am kind of sad it is now weird to wear that. But it is cool to have something real comfy to wear for festive days.
Did the clothes in 1900 last longer than they do today? Did they even have polyester?
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.
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 ...
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.
See Bullerby syndrome [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullerby_syndrome
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 shōjo 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 shōjo 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.
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
My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.
Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful or two decades ago.
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.)
I think I don't understand the point of this site anymore when this is what makes it to the front page.
guess people upvote what they're right now interested in. still a lot better than the next AI slop trying to hype
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." -- Ovid
He would've loved Tumblr
>> 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.
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.
Here in New Mexico there's a long tradition of flat-roofed adobe house construction; the materials are abundant and it insulates fairly well (by the standards of the 1700s). But the roofs always leak because snow and rain don't immediately run off. Yet even though we now have modern building materials readily available, a lot of faux adobe still gets built especially in wealthy neighborhoods.
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 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.
I do wish I were born early enough to have been a software engineer in eighties and early nineties.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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?
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
It's sad how the UK government has impoverished its people through a bizarre and misguided pursuit of "Net Zero".
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.
I'm not a fan of Brexit but it is what it is.
I doubt that you are really a fan of all things EU but I am with you on unity being important and I absolutely agree we fucked up that one. I'm pretty sure we mildly screwed our economy from day one of Brexit - simply by inviting mutual tariffs for a smaller entity and losing the unified border.
However: I'm old enough (55) to remember quite a lot of EU history. Do you recall or have been told about wine lakes and butter and grain mountains?
Our high energy costs are far more complicated than that.
Problematic. There's that code word again.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...
(https://archive.ph/XKBZr)
Elaborate what you mean.
What is "problematic" a code word for?
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.
Mm but that's not what you're doing, no. You're being "fair and balanced" and very much neutral and objective.
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.
Today will be the brutal past in the future.
Not necessarily. They are also times of cultural decline. Late roman live was more comfortable than some time in the middle ages.
People arbitrarily point at periods in the past to say they were worse or better. Some people idealize the Middle Ages over Rome. A Ren Faire is a hodgepodge of Medieval/Renaissance larping. But the past as a sum total is usually worse, hence the concept of progress. While the beginning of someone’s life is usually best and the end is worse. Historically speaking it’s complicated.
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.
>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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What?!
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.
Right.
I'm gonna stick with "What?!"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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).
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
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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