Re:Coffee Is Hard
by chrisco255 on Friday October 18, 2019 @06:00PM
(#21295403)
The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.
Back then you probably couldn’t afford even a horse, plus if your feet got a little scratch while walking you might have just died of infection a week later. Come on, any claim that antiquity had better living standards is absurd on its face.
Clearly the living standards were better, but I imagine there definitely were less things considered to be chores. Gathering food hardly gets boring if you're hungry.
That said I highly doubt if that's a preferable state of affairs.
Driving to work doesn't fit with the others--it can be replaced with riding the subway to work. The automotive status quo is tragedy and farce.
I find taking the bus to work quite relaxing. I can put on my noise cancelling headphones and rest for the whole trip
If anything, you're underplaying it. Beating a rug takes far longer than vacuuming or sweeping. Before the washing machine, doing the laundry could easily take a whole day (which is why people wore clothes far longer between washes)
Sure, but even before that we didn't have rugs or floors to clean, we just died in damp caves and made stone blades.
Re:Coffee Is Hard
by kiliantics on Friday October 18, 2019 @07:13PM
(#21295800)
Ancient Romans were not hunter-gatherers so you are not making the right comparisons here. In fact, it's estimated that hunter-gatherers only do/did about 15 hours of productive labour a week, so doesn't seem they need our "labour-saving devices" since they already have much more free time than us.
Well, OP was complaining about modernity, so I compared to what came right before modernity. Hunter-gatherers might have actually had it better, under some measures -- but the world can't support that many of them.
To put it another way: we used to required half of all human beings to attend to household tasks. That setup wasn't put into place because of malice, it was there by necessity. Managing a household used to take as much effort and thought as running a small business does today. Modernity has saved us from that.