Agreed. Whilst touring Neuschwanstein Castle and Biltmore Estate, what struck me: for all the luxurious art & fineries & service kings & tycoons enjoyed, what we consider basic necessities were hard to come by, if available at all, for even the super-rich.

Sitting here in my study, I: teleconference with my team continent-wide, practically have more [e-]books than Vanderbilt's 25,000 volume library, enjoy a constant 74°F interior year-round, drink clean running water (so much available I literally irrigate my lawn & flush toilets with it), instant light & power, and can have darn near any product delivered to my door within 2 days flat. I may not have live-in servants but that's more a matter of law than ability (thanks, OSHA & minimum wage). Other luxuries would be nice, but are mostly impractical indulgences. ...and all this is available to practically anyone willing to get up & go to work.

Given all that, a 14th century peasant would consider my life a permanent vacation.

Very true to all of that.

But the live-in servants have been replaced by external servants. People who are expected to be working when at 11pm I decide I want to eat a bite of food, yet are paid below what it takes to raise their own family and are working 2 jobs at once to make ends meet.

The boundary between nobility and servitude is more blurry, and yes there are a lot more ways to rise out of servitude than 7 centuries ago, but I'm reminded that all the niceties I currently enjoy are still coming at a price for those working in the system that supplies them to me.

Having lived in Europe and in the US, I'm aware that there's a tradeoff between having excellent service to the wealthy and decent living conditions to the poor.

Excellent point. We've basically just outsourced the servants. I show up at one of a proliferation of restaurants, and expect cooks & servers at my beck-and-call. I set my thermostat, and expect someone will ensure the temperature remains to my liking with hardly a thought on my part. I open the tap, and clean water is carried thereto. A litany of robots (!) perform assorted household tasks which I minimally contribute to.

The point of this thread: today's "decent living conditions to the poor" are now significantly on par with then-"excellent service to the wealthy". Outright luxuries, scale & elegance which doesn't really contribute to sustenance, remain a defining difference, but are more a matter of "money to burn" than contributing to survival & prosperity.

There have been external servants for as long as we've had nations... that's something you must get over if you're enjoying the spoils of a better off country. There's also a lot more trade going on because of better technology (seafaring, navigation, freight, etc), along with farming which is generally occupied by about 2 or so percent of the US population which was historically much higher.

Let us not forget that your home would be staffed with a small militia of servants if you had to trade back your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, fridge, and vacuum, etc.

But do you have unlimited access to wenches?

Enough so that Playboy went under.

I'd go even further: I would not want to swap positions with anybody who was born even 50 years earlier than me.

I would, FWIW.

Why? No HVAC, electricity, running potable hot water, limited literature, long delivery times.

I don't have HVAC now and nor have I ever felt much need for it; I don't do much online ordering; and I don't spend much time reading other than frivolities online.

On the other hand, power, especially over a large organization, and playing in a much bigger game is very interesting.

You use no heating or cooling? That's unusual. Approximate latitude?

I spent 37 years largely without A/C, northern climate usually being below preferred room temperature. Heating, however, was essential. Moving south, both are surprisingly necessary as the area, while quite temperate on average, has annual temperature swings from about 25°F to 105°F - requiring HVAC.

Unless you're in an unusual situation, like high desert in a remarkably well-insulated home, I suspect HVAC is so prevalent in your life you've completely forgotten it's there out of familiarity. Mad King Ludwig of Neuchwuanstein Castle, however, would find much of the year uncomfortably cold - except that he'd completely forgotten it's there out of familiarity.

A fair amount of the world has no "need" for heating or air conditioning. Mediterranean climates and all of Latin America qualify here, as does much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

In fact, the only place where HVAC would be a "need" would be super cold climates, or super hot climates. Everything else is tolerable, just not comfortable. Plenty of places are hot, but people lived there just fine before we had electricity or any fancy cooling tech.

I grew up in a 200 year old cottage in the Irish countryside, the only heating was a fireplace (one, for the whole cottage). It wasn't a problem at all.

And a monarch would have more options for heating.

Why would the Mad King not have all the fireplaces he could want, considering he was a king?

Traditionally heating was easier to come across than cooling, despite cooling taking less energy to have happen.

Ruling a country and an army could be pretty attractive to some.

Well, the context here is largely about relative vacation time.

Now if you'd rather have a job which was notable in the 14th century, that's a different - and also interesting - discussion.

The message I replied to was talking about a monarch, not a peasant.

To say nothing of the fact that let's see the first time he gets an infection or disease or needs surgery given no vaccinations, antibiotics, or anesthetics.

When was the last time you got an infection or disease that would have struck you down without modern medicine?

I never have. In fact if hospitals didn't exist and I never saw a doctor my entire life, I don't think anything would have changed.

I don't expect to live much longer than 60 as it is. Most 14th century monarchs, in the brief glance I did on Wikipedia before my answer, lived to 55 or 60 or so before they died of natural causes.

I'd be dead four times over (and those are the obvious near-lethal maladies), and I just turned 50.

A small percentage of the population uses the majority of the health-care. You would have died back then, but most of us would have been fine.

From Health A millennium of health improvement (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm) The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.

From this history.stackexchange[1] thread, on user found that the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years in England. In the same thread it seem that it was 48.5 depending on how you made your calculation and 53.4 years if you made it to 20 year old. [1] -https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...

By the time you became a monarch you had usually already survived to adulthood (child kings existed but were the exception). This biases the statistics considerably.

FWIW: I’d have (probably) died from pneumonia at age 5 without modern medicine. In reality it was curable trivially.

You don't get infection or disease because. 1- most of the people (and probably you too) are vaccinated and prevent the spreading of such disease. 2- Most of our current developed world is sanitize compare to back them 3- a cut could be lethal or could meant amputation in the middle age, now you just need to put alchool on it. 4- you might had suffer from malnutrition even has a monarch, lack of vitamin C could lead to scurvy in the winter and lack of iodine in the food might cause Iodine deficiency (wich lead to Goitre or Cretinism) If you your so keen of wanting to live that life style, you can find a sweet amish girl and go live in her community.

I can't help but feel that there is some mild trolling going on this thread :-) If not that, there are at least a couple of people who are seriously optimistic about their personal invulnerability in the absence of modern medicine, healthcare, and public health practices.

I think that things like herd immunity just aren't intuitively understood or respected by the people who think that just because they haven't had a health emergency in the modern world they haven't benefitted from their existence in the modern world.

How could I control the destiny of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in an Amish community?

That's the lifestyle explicitly being referred to when talking about swapping with a monarch.

The age of monarchs has a strong bias toward those who made it to adulthood. A huge percentage of children died historically of diseases that are mostly prevented by vaccinations today.

And since we're talking 14th century, there was also that Black Death thing that killed about half the population of Europe.

Its nice that people like you are willing to make sacrifices; otherwise we'd have no fourteenth-century monarchs!