Materially no; socially yes.
Materially, our ancestors would murder to have days off every week and limited work hours in exchange for sufficient food and nutrition, and they did so in constant, careful, worried concert with their entire community. And that has an emotional burden far in excess of what we endure, make no mistake.
Socially, the ascendency of industrialism and labor mobility during the Cold War - in both ideologically capitalist and communist states - has splintered communal ties and atomized families, making many emotional and social endeavors much more taxing than they once were. Combine that with the slow death of ‘third places’ in the post-Cold War era, and you have a recipe for some… arduous emotional ordeals.
Also, please remember that pre-modern societies are often immensely repressive themselves, and that ‘closeness’ is often at the expense of individual expression and self-actualization.
Materially, our ancestors would murder to have days off every week and limited work hours in exchange for sufficient food and nutrition, and they did so in constant, careful, worried concert with their entire community.
It’s not a fair comparison cause you’re not going back far enough. There is not much debate comparing being poor today to being poor during the Middle Ages.
If you compare modern life to pre agricultural times, then it gets tricky, they worked a lot less and weren’t constantly starving. They were athletes by today’s standards, with their own challenges and hardships. Life was harder but it matched the human needs/desires better than modern life. Hopefully we can reach a society that is better than all of history, not just cherry picked bad parts.
To add to your point, in those times nature was seen as equal to humanity and sustainability was therefore paramount. This is very different from our modern worldview of sustainability, which has us currently marching towards our own extinction.
To add to your point, in those times nature was seen as equal to humanity and sustainability was therefore paramount.
You’re kidding, right? Hunter-gatherer societies regularly radically altered the environment and drove native species to extinction through overhunting. This idea of an ideological proto-environmentalist view is largely constructed in response to hunter-gatherers being pushed off of land by more efficiently unsustainable societies; not because hunter-gatherers have an inherent ideological or spiritual disinclination towards altering the environment.
It’s not a fair comparison cause you’re not going back far enough. There is not much debate comparing being poor today to being poor during the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately there are a great many people who will argue just that, including many leftists.
If you compare modern life to pre agricultural times, then it gets tricky, they worked a lot less and weren’t constantly starving. They were athletes by today’s standards, with their own challenges and hardships. Life was harder but it matched the human needs/desires better than modern life. Hopefully we can reach a society that is better than all of history, not just cherry picked bad parts.
The ‘original affluent society’ argument is a relict of the 70s that desperately needs to die.
I’m firmly in the camp that modern Western culture has taken individualism too far and this worldview has seeped into a dominant global worldview of prioritizing self over others.
Its a common trope in individualistic cultures that people living in collective societies lack personal development. But this ignores that much of personal development comes from how we relate to others. Often it is within the collective that we find ourselves and our purpose.
I find present day Western society to also be obsessed with the idea of an individual saviour, whether it’s in the form of a demogogue, a superhero or a religious figure. The creep towards far right authoritarianism throughout the West attests to this. Often the collective power of likeminded and strong willed people is diminished, which in turn suppresses overall social development.
Communities whither as people become more isolated allowing mental health challenges and drug addiction (which is often a response to these challenges) flourish.
I work in a profession that deals with many people. I meet perhaps 15 to 20 new people every week. The overall arc of what I see is a profound loneliness. I don’t see anyone truly actualizating themselves or finding their unique expression in that sea of despair.
I find present day Western society to also be obsessed with the idea of an individual saviour, whether it’s in the form of a demogogue, a superhero or a religious figure. The creep towards far right authoritarianism throughout the West attests to this.
… do you think far-right authoritarianism was weaker in the more collective past?
Communities whither as people become more isolated allowing mental health challenges and drug addiction (which is often a response to these challenges) flourish.
Mental health challenges and drug addiction are extremely widespread before the ‘modern West’, and outside of the West today as well.
I think the Western world, particularly America, has taken Enlightenment values and misused them to justify hyperindividualism. Everyone is their own hero who had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We shouldn’t lift each other up because that will disincentivize them from working for themselves. Its nonsense and it gradually pushes us towards a type of authoritarianism.
I’m not trying to say dynastic or heriditary authoritarianism didn’t exist in the past but its different in my view. The people didn’t have a choice then. Now they’re choosing authoritarianism.
Isolation absolutely increases the incidence of mental health issues and drug addiction, irrespective of region or era. Modern Westerners (especially in the US) are about as isolated as people can be.
As far as I can tell, society consists of 8 billion negligent idiots mostly concerned about avoiding liability, so the only way to get anything done is by yourself, from scratch.
signed, a man who checked his pickup truck into the dealership for a 7:30 AM appointment on Monday, and they still haven’t looked at it by Wednesday.
Independent repair shops FTW
I need a building I can put a vehicle hoist in.
You need a vehicle which can be hoisted by something that fits in your building.
Show me the vehicle that can be hoisted by that lift, that can also carry 200 board feet of lumber 70 miles in less than 2 hours.
board feet
I didn’t know boards had feet, but oh well
A board foot is a unit of volume, equal to 144 cubic inches. A board that is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 1 inch thick is 1 board foot. So is a board that is 6 inches wide, 24 inches long and 1 inch thick, or 6 inches wide, 12 inches long and 2 inches thick.
Pre-milled construction lumber like 2x4s are milled to uniform sizes and sold as a price/each, hardwood lumber for fine woodworking is sold rough sawn by volume.
I’m a woodworker, I haul lumber around, I use a pickup truck to do that. An electric pickup truck that would fit my needs is within the possibilities of engineering but not currently manufactured.
I was just joking, but thanks for the useful info anyway.
electric pickup truck … not currently manufactured
I have a feeling that still wouldn’t fix your problem of being unable to hoist it in your house.
But would it just be better anyway, to have a workshop that can be shared, rather than everyone with a big vehicle having to keep one in their house?My main reason for maintaining my cycle myself is because, all shops I see providing cycle maintenance just don’t meet my quality requirements no matter what they charge. Meaning that, I as an amateur, am able to make the components work better for longer than those claimed professionals.
Is it really that bad in your area for truck servicing?
Are all independent repair shops that bad?
Posted this several times because I think it’s profound and certainly fits here:
“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.
Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?”
Yes, THAT sounds like a fulfilling life!
I am so opposite. Completely alone all day every day forever. And it aches.
Sounds like a nightmare.
Sounds like a nightmare? To be alone all the time? Yes it is. And I look like this (WARNING NSFW)
!deleted nude photo because that’s not appropriate here!<
and why am I alone all the time when I don’t want to be? Everyone ignores me everywhere I go. It must be a personality issue. Or as OP points out, an epidemic societal issue. Or both. 😢
(~And in B4 anyone accuses me of being a s€x w0rker or 0nly f4ns, no, gross. I have a real job.) I’m just really frustrated that I work so hard to be healthy but everyone ignores everybody. Nobody talks to each other anymore.
I ended up surrounded by talkers and it sucks. I’m talking about people who act like they’ll die if they stop talking doesn’t matter about what as long as intelligible sound is coming out of their mouth.
Wait, did you really just post your NSFW image on a non-NSFW Lemmy instance? You are hot af, but chill tf out bro-woman.
Okay at least someone saw it which gave me a sense of non-invisibility. I will delete it now.
Just what would cause you to go to such desperate measures?
No. People for centuries had to fend for themselves. Its why we had the Salvation Army, Red Cross, Churches and other places of worship were so popular. The reason is is so bloody difficult today compared to 20+ years ago is the explosion in wealth for a minority. They’re literally making a killing.
Not just that, though. There’s a broader social issue at play.
In terms of economic wellbeing though, yeah, it’s the increase in wealth disparity that’s fucking us.
Churches were certainly part of the support structure, or the congregations. Neo liberalism has fought to break down the wider support structure for years. The billionaire class is obviously not good, but are you really suggesting that’s a new thing? Kings and nobility have been around for a lot longer than the salvation army.
In medieval times to early 1930’s’s, the same relative distinction and oppression with the power in the hands of local tyrants / landlords / gentry / business owners. In the period from the 1940s to the 2000’s, not very much old school Kingly / Queenlyness. Mid 80’s to early 2000’s there is a narrowing of the wealth gap, on average. Today, its a shitshow of widening gaps for most metrics like wealth, economic mobility, health, educational opportunities, home ownership, etc.
This 1000 times. Not to sound like a tankie but it’s part of the propaganda machine.
Divide, isolate, conquer. Add to that, consume. Boom, perfect profitable complacent public.
If that makes you sound like a tankie then “tankie” has no meaning anymore
Sort of?
it takes a village to raise a child
Now it’s just the parents and maybe a close friend/relative.
People are a lot less close with their neighbours given they can get that companionship online.
If you have a bad harvest (or more modernly lose your job) your neighbours aren’t likely to feed you/keep you in your home.
The saying probably includes stuff like food production and creating and maintaining shelter.
If you were a hunter-gatherer, probably the latter would be good enough, but that’s where originates the difference in future potential.
I’m thinking of dishwashers, clothes washers, automobiles, and grocery stores. I consider those my “support” network since I don’t have to grow my own food, raise horses, or wash everything down by the river. Think you’re tired now? Imagine having to do that.
Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
This has been the root of a few arguments in my house. I support increased efficiency to enable more free time. My wife supports increased efficiency so she can get more done.
I for sure believe we reduced the amount of physical work done by a shitload. Hand washing clothes is a shitload of work and takes ridiculous time
The is true, but to the point of the thread, you’d meet other people down washing their clothes bu the river. It would be a communal activity.
We don’t have communal activity anymore. No reason to interact.
The most community I felt was when I was in poverty, like boarding house poverty, and a storm wiped the power out for ten days. We all came together. It was brilliant.
Once the power went back on, everyone withdrew back to their homes, and resumed isolation.
I agree about washing machines, which is why I emphasized them in my comment, but not necessarily about physical work in general.
To the first world office worker it may seem like modern life is practically incomparable to the life of a subsistence farmer, but consider where that worker’s clothes come from, who grows his coffee, who mines the materials that make his car. A lot of those people live in circumstances that are not unlike laborers in societies of the past. A good amount of them are even slaves.
Thanks to modern technology those workers produce far more per hour than they ever would have in the past, and the beneficiaries of their work enjoy wonders that people in the past could only dream of, but I’m not so sure the bottom classes physically labor much less if at all. It can just seem that way because the population is larger now, the hierarchies of civilization now stretch across the globe rather than just the local area, and the scribe class takes up entire countries.
Maybe the lower classes really are proportionally smaller than they used to be, I don’t have any statistics to that effect in front of me, but it could be the case. After all complex technology requires a lot of intellectual activity to create and maintain. But if that is the case I think there is still something to be said about how increased productivity wasn’t used to make the lives of the laborer class much easier, but instead to grow the size of the scribe class.
I’d say even globally we’re better off when it comes to amount of physical labour since the number of people being able to survive on physical labour of others has ballooned. Most of the world I’d say are service economies, people do office jobs instead of physical labour. Even fields such as construction are to large degree mechanized in many industrialized countries, same for agriculture, many factories have robots doing the actual physical activity and humans are more in supervisory role and so on.
Office work might be stressful and soul crushing, but it’s not quite the same as actual demanding physical labour.
Sure, like I said I just think its notable that we used the increased productivity to proportionally increase the size of the non-laborer population rather than reduce the per-laborer workload.
Like, to use an analogy, you know how in ‘The Jetsons’ George Jetson goes to work every day, pushes a single button, then takes a nap? I know that sketch wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a joke, but think about how its implied that every family has a breadwinner husband like George with a similar job.
I feel as if, if it were like the real world, there would be a single guy frantically pressing buttons for 8 hours a day while about a billion people are supported by his effort. Though, granted, that’s a definite improvement over all of them having to work like that.
I guess in the context of the post it depends on the cards you were dealt in the first place. In a world that’s almost entirely commodified almost every aspect of human/animal labor into something that can be purchased and utilized with either money or personal ownership, the question is at what stage of independence does the tradeoff of our world seem better?
Granted, for people who are privileged enough to grow up in a modern urban environment who are not homeless, most of these are simply quality of life improvements. However, for those who are not privileged enough to have these opportunities (grow up in an area without reliable electricity or food supply, accessing the internet through their phone exclusively, started out their independent lives homeless or indebted, etc…), it can feel like you are having it worse than people in an era where you exchanged your physical labor for the resources and outcomes you desired.
To bring an analogy, a middle class or wealthy person of our modern day would be unlikely to desire to go back to an era of having to live off a natural landscape devoid of much of the technology we enjoy today. They are beneficiaries of our current system, so that makes rational sense. On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
Bruh, I live under the poverty line. Most of the people I grew up with lived under the poverty line. I grew up in one of the poorest regions of America.
There is still no comparison between the living standards of today and those of, say, 200+ years ago.
I come from a family where coming home to see all the lights off because the electricity couldn’t be paid on time was not an abnormal sight, wherein I, the child, had to be shuffled through family members to whomever had their lights on at that particular moment. Where meals had to be skipped 'til payday. Where we lived in crumbling apartment complexes in high-crime areas. Where single-parent families working two jobs was not an abnormal setup. Where my mother lived in constant fear of losing her job due to declining economic conditions in the region.
It still had nothing on the crushing poverty of working-class existence in the past.
“Figure it out”
“Just do it”
“It’s your responsibility”
The mantra of American life. To do anything else is a personal failing.
Entire generations have been gaslit into believing success is still possible for the masses.
Yeah I total can confirm this - source: My exhausted ass
