It's kind of annoying how every time someone discusses aspects of society that may have regressed from the past, somebody chimes in to remind us that technology has advanced so life is better today. Well obviously, what's your point? Nobody's claiming we should get rid of 21st century technology and start living like medieval peasants.
But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago. In practice it was a hard and stressful life both physically and socially.
The summary of the downsides of peasant life was:
> Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this.
This is a dramatic understatement, to say the least.
> in our current society you are just a drone. [...] Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't.
Rural peasants have been treated much more like “just drones” for the past 8 (?) millennia since large-scale civilization built on agriculture than any modern office worker. (Hunter–gatherer societies are different in many ways, though also often precarious.)
Rural peasants do not lack for work anxiety. Or anxiety in their interpersonal relationships. In rural peasant societies many people feel alienated. Domestic abuse is rampant. And so on.
There are many beautiful and nostalgic things about historical rural life. But we shouldn’t get carried away.
No they weren't, like I said in my last comment, they were talking about the negative effects of the modern overcompartmentalization of work. It's not hard to see that there are certain benefits to working for oneself in one's own home vs. being a cog on an assembly line in some factory.
I imagine they were talking about farmers, not peasants. By the way the average medieval peasant had more time off than the average American worker since the work was seasonal. The takeaway there isn't "let's return to medieval technology and start living like medieval peasants again", it's "maybe there's something wrong with our society if despite the enormous technological advances from the past, certain elements of society like autonomy over one's time have regressed, controlling for technology".
Again, the original commenter was not arguing that we should all start living like the Amish. It's a failure of reading comprehension if that's how you interpreted it.
How is this rosy-eyed?
I think many people today use the idea that even though some things are miserable today it ok, because they've been miserable always. It's a sad, self-defeating coping mechanism, a lame justification for how things are.
It's possible for some things to have been better in the past, much like some other things may be better in the present. Progress like regress is unilateral.
are pretty much at the top of “things that really stress us when we don’t have them.
I mean, everything else is icing on the cake. Not too long ago, people didn’t know whether they would starve to death during the next winter, their wife would die from childbirth or some local bogeyman would just burn down your house and enslave your family.
People quickly forget many of the hardships their own great grandparents faced.
Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial amount of time as a child in the 1990s visiting an indigenous peasant village, sleeping in a dirt-floored hut with a hearth fire nearby, with no electricity and water carried on people’s heads from half a mile away, high infant mortality, belief that diseases are caused by witches (vs. germs), etc.
Their illegalization and displacement by supermarkets has been at least partly a deliberate political choice, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable part of modern life.
(Working as a vendor in a market stall is not necessarily a great career though.)
There are farmers market around my area and my impression is that, if anything, people selling there can be more dishonest than the big chain stores - i.e. they will try selling a batch of bad apples, because they're not wealthy and they just need the money. Whereas big chains have quality standards and will just throw away bad food.
I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides.
And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.
The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.
It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.
> The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.
You are cherry-picking examples that are in no way representative of the life of most humans.
Plenty of evidence shows otherwise.
Rural peasants were and are typically a foot shorter than people living in wealthy industrialized countries today (or people in hunter–gatherer tribes for that matter). Almost all of their calories come from staple starches, which they supplement as best they can. Periods of extreme hunger are common enough that most peasants experienced them at least a few times over a lifetime. What kind of good nutrition do you think people have/had?
Life expectancy was under 40 years old. Even life expectancy after age 5 was pretty short.
Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate of maternal death in childbirth (play 5+ rounds of not-quite-russian-roulette and the odds get pretty grim). Starvation and disease were ubiquitous. Many people suffered some now-trivial injury and ended up as lifelong cripples. The work was literally backbreaking and elderly people’s (i.e. >50 years old) bodies were just wrecked after a career of hard manual labor, assuming they lived that long at all. People’s indoor time was spent in small dark rooms with an open hearth worse than the worst second-hand cigarette smoke you can possibly find, and unbelievably uncomfortable beds. In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) and everyone was slightly malnourished, especially in the winter. People generally just shat outside near their houses and hoped the dogs would take care of it. If they wanted water (for drinking, bathing, ...) they’d have to carry it on their heads/backs from the nearest well or stream; water is very heavy.
People had to make literally everything in an extremely labor-intensive way from scratch: clothes, food, housing, furniture, toys, tools, etc. Raising sheep (or finding some other fiber) and then carding the wool, spinning the wool, weaving every piece of fabric on a hand loom, sewing fabric into clothes takes unbelievable amounts of human time. Making a small hut by hand takes weeks if not months of work (and the result is usually drafty, leaky, and not very comfortable). Making bread by hand including growing the grain and grinding it is nearly a full time job for everyone in the society.
If for whatever reason you were different from the expected norms (or just got unlucky and crossed the wrong gossipy neighbor) the rumors about you would mercilessly destroy your social life, and possibly result in exile or death if neighbors decided you were (e.g.) a witch.
The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.
Etc.
There’s a reason that the world has now experienced several centuries of dramatic migration away from rural peasant farming and toward horribly exploitative urban factory labor.