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.
"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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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 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] 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.
>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".
> 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.
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?
>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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
Readit News
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.
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).
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)
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.
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 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.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
> 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-...
https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
There are so many things wrong with those time estimates.
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.
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.
Marshall Salhins Stone Age Economics is the most popular work that is academically serious on this topic
> [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.
Most human societies were much more interconnected until relatively recently(last 80-100 years)
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".
> 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?
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 ...
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.
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/Lebensraumhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan
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.
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.
And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
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.
Deleted Comment
"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
Orphanes did struggle but most families were not just two person, families were big and supported by community.
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.
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.
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.
And left-wing movements that followed industrial revolution.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
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?
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
Traditionally these motte and bailey fiefdoms were laid siege to and undermined.
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.
Billionaires, on the other hand, are not elected and have a vested interest in maintaining the inequalities. If anything, they are UBI enemies.
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)
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.
Past performance future results yadda yadda. I hope you’re right, though!
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.
Dead Comment
I remember the early years when they didn't have running water or indoor plumbing, which my Mother hated, but I thought was fun. As the years went by and the price of the main crops that were grown increased, the "shack" was updated more to Mother's liking.
When I reached my tween years, I was asked if I wanted to earn a little money by working in the fields, I was thrilled. My first assignment was to work hoeing cotton, a semi-brutal job performed on endless rows in scorching heat. I was working with a black family who, I was told, worked on that particular piece of land for generations. They took care of me and, after a few days, I began to understand their accented speech. As a kid from a middle-class white family who lived in a city hundreds of miles away, it was my first time to experience a culture shock. It was a lot to process being so young, but I do have fond memories, especially of the Mother of the family. I didn't have any contact with the family except in the fields, so I can't pretend to know how they felt about their lives, I do know they worked very hard in the summer and found whatever work they could in the winter. This all took place in the seventies.
Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?
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.
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...
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
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.”
I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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!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 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.
So you just used to use real materials out of necessity
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.
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.
> 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.
The past was not more "real" than present day reality.
Deleted Comment
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.
I think there is a lot of shady and dishonest business that happens now that would get you killed in the past
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047472/
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.
They can go right now to Karen societies like the middle east and asia but they don't, its clear why.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Deleted Comment
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
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)