> If the village is small and remote enough that's functionally the same thing

No it isn't. Interacting with with 120-150 neighbors[1] on a daily basis is a richer form of social interaction than is available to most people in the West today. For most of history people lived in groups of up to a few hundred, being isolated wasn't the norm.

[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers...

My grandparents lived on a farm there was nobody around for some distance.

And many 'villages' in Europe were just 2 or 3 households, not really villages.

I think the OP's point is reasonable for context.

My condolences, as it is apparently clinically impossible for them not to have developed severe psychological issues as a result. ;)

The discussion here is clearly about COVID isolation and the wild bullshit claims you’re making about history. Being in a community of even 3 households isn’t remotely similar to a single adult in COVID isolation and that should be obvious.

You’re doing a great job ignoring any criticism of your claims.

Yeah I spent much of my childhood around there it's a different kind of social system but I have not a single worry for them. I think they're more normal and happy than urban types who are a bit untethered, depressed, overly busy, unfulfilled a bit directionless. They have big families and know a lot of people for a long time. Regular people have funerals where 300 people come to the wake. My grandfather had to have three days of open casket there were so many people. He was a man of few words, he just owned a store and so got to know a ton of people.

You’re talking about a completely different time period. This is also historically abnormal. Premodern farmers almost universally lived in villages of 100 or more people. Check out some sources I linked.

Widely dispersed freeholding is super unstable and even more so without modern tools and techniques.

You’re speaking to my point. A household of 4-5 and a typical village have extremely different social dynamics. Similarly the groupings (villages, tribes, etc.) of primal humans were much larger than a household of 4-5.

(Your examples of lighthouses and religious hermits are too rare to be seriously compared to the average person. These extreme examples are probably similar to what I’m talking about, though. We just don’t know as much about them as we do a typical village.)

Pandemic aside, we live in a world where it is much more possible to live in this hyper isolation than ever before.

Well back then all of your friends and relatives were probably living in the same village. Now they might be spread-out over hundreds of kilometers or even much more.

Seems like fundamentally different situations to me.

> If you lived in a viking settlement or out in the wilderness of the Wild West or some secret monastery at the top of a mountain range in Tibet that's pretty damn isolated. Or a lighthouse. Or an island. 'etc.

That was a statistically insignificant proportion of the population even back then (assuming by 'viking settlement' you mean in Greenland or something like that)

What about those of us trapped somewhere with no friends or family in the local area? Serfs had their spouses, children, and parents to socialize with, even when cut off mostly from the rest of society.

Some percentage of us experienced an alone-ness that really has no historical precedent. For some, it persisted many months.

I fall into that percentage. I got stuck in a very severe lockdown whilst traveling. It was unpleasant to say the least.

However we should disentangle the stress of the situation, the uncertainty about the future, the arbitrary restrictions on previously taken for granted personal freedoms and the abrupt change to a lifetime of normalcy from the bummer of being alone.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Some people actually thrived during lockdown. Others choose to isolate with no relation to it. All I am saying is that it is not written in your DNA that your mental health must deteriorate due to lack of socializing.

It is not so much unprecedented as it is unusual and involuntary.

Can you point to any research that supports your extraordinary claim?

It was actually fairly rare for people to spend their entire lives in their villages during the medieval era. People would regularly travel within their region, and it was typical for a person to undertake multiple longer journeys within their lifetime, often to religious sites.