In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.
Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).
Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.
We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.
There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.
You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.
Even in agricultural societies it wasnt a nuclear family as implied by "Running a family was a brutal two-person job..."
Most human societies were much more interconnected until relatively recently(last 80-100 years)
Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple chores like folding clothes, driving, programming, washing and dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a single new car. They wrote checks to the government, rather than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.
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This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can’t tell which side you’re arguing for.
Could be they aren’t trying to come down on a nice easy high-contrast color and are figuring anywhere society lands will still be some shade of gray with a bit of flair here and there and a dash of spilled paint in other places.
Color here is a metaphor for a point.
Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks
Also, back in 2025 people's mental models were so primitive that they could only consider one parameter at a time. And the reward function was wired into their survival instincts, imagine that! This caused them to see a person whose mental model held a different parameter value as a threat to their survival. These primitive serial thinkers used something called "wars" to update model weights, where they physically eliminated compute elements! Truly a barbaric age.
I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way.
Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?
Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were lucky to inherit some furniture.
I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a consumerist society. For what it’s worth it is still possible to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed.
In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere
A good depiction of the gritty realities and the meaning of material striving for the very poor in turn of the century farm life is the novel Independent People, by Halldor Laxness, an Icelandic nobel laureate.
Keep in mind that Halldor's book is depicting a situation fairly specific to Iceland: people recently freed from debt bondage, in a desperately poor and isolated area caught between much larger forces. It's not an attempt to accurately depict what it meant to be working poor for American laborers, like say grapes of wrath.
My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.
I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.
This is true of basically everything people complain about having gotten worse over time.
Whiteware and kitchen appliances are the same - you can absolutely buy a fridge, or a stand mixer or whatever that will work well and last forever. It's just the value proposition compared to cheap crap that will still likely last for a few years but at a 1/5th of the price is not great unless you're going to use it really heavily.
A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".
The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.
There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.
Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.
> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.
Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.
The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance.
I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.
In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.
Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.
0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge
> The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.
Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful, especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main" reason.
Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.
That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.
Probably worthwhile to separate that span into smaller chunks.
We blame boomers not for what happened in the 50s or 60s, we blame them for voting in and supporting Ronald fckng Reagan and all the bullshit his policies have affected since his presidency.
Blaming boomers is stupid ... it conflates many different and different kinds of people. I'm a boomer who helped develop the ARPANET (so I'm not technically illiterate ... that's my parents' generation) and I'm a democratic socialist who protested vehemently against Nixon and Reagan (who many in my parents' generation supported). The people to really blame are right wingers and corporations and the uber rich who create bogeymen and false targets like "boomers" for gullible people to be distracted and deflected by.
Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.
Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan.
I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies.
Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).
A lot of people think this, but if I'm being honest modern materials are amazing. They survive pretty rough washes, they're incredibly cheap, fire-retardant, and last forever. Synthetics are amazing.
Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days ago that I was thinking about this[0] when I thought about how the microfibre fleece my daughter was lying on was the cheap microfiber fleece I'd bought when I encountered my first American winter. A student's cheap blanket has lasted me over a decade and still keeps me warm and cleans easily.
My wife and I have had Caspers and Tuft & Needles and Tempurpedics and we sleep now on an Ikea foam mattress. It's fantastic. Modern manufacturing and materials are incredible. I feel like I'm living in a golden age.
It depends; it feels like in some categories the premium between a material that's very suitable, and some ersatz lookalike is massive and depressing.
I love a good petrochemical, but sometimes it would be nice if the cheap thing store wasn't so callously targeting veneers and pleathers that last just long enough to loose the receipt.
A great place to feel this is the USS Hornet in Alameda. This actual ship that you are on, made of steel and loaded with analog electronics, sailed to the far side of the Pacific and back. So much metal, steel, hydraulics, and electrical systems. It made it out and back. Not all the ships did. Mighty ships just like this one, with people like you, did not make it back.
You could also try HMS Victory in the UK or the Vasa in Sweden (other really old ships are available and some are still sailing).
You might also note that the inhabitants of Hawaii had to have got there somehow and its 2000 odd miles to what is now the US mainland and still quite a long way from anywhere else, eg Tahiti.
My great-grandfather was born in a dugout (i.e., sod) house on the Kansas prairie in 1880. His father died when he was 9. When he went to teacher’s college, someone gave him an orange and he ate the rind, as he didn’t know you were supposed to peel it; he still thought it was delicious. He married late at 35, and his wife died after a year. He married again and their first daughter died as a toddler. He was 49 when the Great Depression began. He became a Republican because FDR repealed Prohibition.
I’m not wealthy, not by HN standards, but my kids are healthy and lack for nothing. I doordash them takeout sushi when I don’t feel like cooking them dinner. I’ve been to several of the world’s great museums, gone to great plays and concerts, and love a round of Epoisses with a plump Meursault.
Things that last have always been expensive, out of reach for many. And every time I think nostalgically about life on the prairie in a dugout, I think about winter, it being -10 outside and windy, and 45 degrees inside and damp and smoky.
I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
Modern manufacturing and materials science let us create imitation materials at huge quantity and low cost that wasn’t possible before about the ‘50s-60s.
So you just used to use real materials out of necessity
It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.
People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.
Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.
> Not the history makers
Even the so-called "history makers" are the product of imagination, of myth, and of hagiography. If you met these people today, you wouldn't recognize them if you went by the expectations built up by the images we're fed. The same holds of so-called celebrities.
It has a lot to do with the way our memories form and what memories our brains choose to construct from experiences.
The past was not more "real" than present day reality.
At the same time, it's arguable that certain observations such as "commercialization and commoditization have become stronger" are true. We're certainly living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades.
>living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades
So were people in 1910. You could say the printing press set up the following industrial revolution and things have been accelerating ever since. People talk that in the future there will be a technological singularity that things will go so fast people won't be able to keep up, but really in many ways we've been in it for a while already and it's still accelerating.
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.
Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.
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People forget the ways in which the past was fake. Fake butter, for example, was more common than real butter from the 1950s up until the early 2000s. But most people don't eat margarine anymore and so most people don't remember it.
I mean - to one extent, concretely in the aesthetic ways I’m talking it was technologically we just had simpler materials. Cars had knobs and levers instead of touchscreens.
Like, so much of what I do today happens online instead of the real world, so I do think you can describe ways in which life or the world really has gotten more “fake”.
Though some of this is funny too? I remember things from the say 50’s to the 80’w as being more “real” and that’s also the like rise of TV dinners and everything eaten out of a can, rather than “real” ingredients.
>50’s to the 80’w as being more “real”
Yea, people really are out of touch with what was going on around them. Naugahyde, for example was invented in 1914. Fake wood on cars started in the 1940s! It is very likely people remembering the 'real' stuff were quite often talking about objects that were far older.
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People focus too much on the new and not enough on the rest. Of course what's new is going to seem fake because it is. Nobody has figured it out yet. The rest never changed or has improved significantly.
Anyone older than about 30 who takes a few minutes to reflect on all the little details of daily life could probably come up with a surprisingly long list of annoying little inconveniences they no longer have to deal with. Beyond that we've had decades worth of casually raising the bar for what is considered common sense and polite. These are the "real" things we take for granted.
> Feed sack dresses, flour sack dresses, or feedsack dresses were a common article of clothing in rural US and Canadian communities from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. They were made at home, usually by women, using the cotton sacks in which flour, sugar, animal feed, seeds, and other commodities were packaged, shipped, and sold. They became an iconic part of rural life from the 1920s through the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II years.
Good, Honest, Old-Fashioned Clothing was Consumerism, too, bucko.
> During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women and children in the United States were wearing feed sack clothing at any given point in time.[7][14] One participant in an oral history project stated that "everything on the clothesline was from feed sacks."[2] The US Department of Agriculture reported in 1951 that 75% of mothers living in urban areas and 97% of those living in rural areas had heard of making garments from feed sacks.[15]
Did Granny make clothes from scratch? Did she, Hell! She bought cloth from a Large Evil Corporation what with the Dark Satanic Mills and Finance Capitalism and she was mainly unhappy she couldn't spend more:
> There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty, so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the fabric, or adding trim.
Our ancestors would be appalled at people wanting to go back to The Good Old Days. They fought and struggled mightily against what the Cottagecore Losers on their Laptops and iPods want.
Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman
No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact, we ought to have both. It's not like it's impossible. We just have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bladerunner".
Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap, unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff. People have distorted memories of what things used to be like. Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff is still around while everything else is in a landfill.
Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.
However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more.
Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself.
And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able.
An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal sized.
Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.
It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and frames reflected this.
All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.
It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women
Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe. The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible
The funny thing is that the Rape of the Sabines was adapted into a popular musical comedy movie "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" in 1954. Audiences loved it at the time but the story seems bizarre and offensive today.
what’s truly hard for the modern mind to comprehend is that our societies are the exception to the rule of history, not the norm. as the ancients go, that type of thing (along with total scorched-earth genocide of other tribes) was basically commonplace.
> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.
Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...
Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.
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Yea, people tend to forget that even in the US we had long bread lines during the depression and that during WWII there were just a lot of items you couldn't get.
>everything was fresh from the garden
And this just goes to show that the writer doesn't understand how gardens work. For the vast majority of the year any particular plant in the garden ain't producing a damned thing. You can get some things like fresh tomatoes that produce from late spring through summer. And some herbs will produce all growing season. But fresh peas, well, they all pod out at around the same time. You better start canning them, oh and trying to freeze any amount of them in the past would cost you an absolute fortune in electricity.
Simply put, the amount and quality of vegetables you can get at your local store would stun most cooks of the early 1900s. They would walk in the store and be unable to move for a moment, stunned, at the vast selection of non-rotten, non ate up by bugs, large vegetables and ones they'd never seen before.
> large vegetables
I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are more flavorful than large ones.
My mom's mother was so afraid of pork and trichinosis that, if you dropped a pork chop she had cooked onto the floor, it would shatter- that is how overcooked it would get (or so the family joke went).
Also, most of the chickens she cooked came from a can- that is, whole hen, pressure canned and sold that way. There weren't any chicken farmers for miles and that was the safest and most convenient way to get chicken to cook with.
Spices, fresh fruit and vegetables were all luxuries for most of the year. Most dishes were variations on stew, casserole or pot roast since everything was already soft already, and gravy was the most accessible seasoning / condiment.
Food was cooked fresh because the refrigerator was tiny and restaurants weren't cheap enough for anything other than special occasions, but "fresh" is definitely an optimistic interpretation of the ingredients.
And if you were lucky enough to get dessert it was something like Jello with a bit of canned fruit inside. Of course that's also why obesity was less of a problem.
Jello was a fancy desert and a way to show you had wealth/prosperity as it required refrigeration, something the poors didn't have.
Seasonal food also tasted a lot better when you spent half of the year waiting for the season, dreaming about fresh food of the next season.
That’s still the case today though.
If I get red cherries in winter from Chile, they are not as good as the ones from eastern Washington in the summer.
Local seasonal fruit in WA is amazing (cherries, peaches, apples, now is pear season)
Anecdotally vegetables I grow are wildly more flavorful than ones you can buy. Like think grape tomatoes as sweet as grapes. Green beans that a have complex flavor almost like green tea. The butternut squash that I accidentally grew this year from seeds that survived the winter in my compost tastes like a pumpkin pie. Corn that you can eat raw and that putting butter on feels like a waste.
That’s not to say you cannot get really good food that’s not “farm fresh” but food right out of the ground absolutely on average is better.
As long as you don't consider the growing season in the averages. Yes, garden fresh food is great today because you can get vegetables from the store when yours are not in season.
> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.
> Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, is a kind of poisoning characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain that affects individuals who ingest milk, other dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol. In animals it is known as trembles.
> Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, is said to have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.
Nice, Fresh, Honest Milk.
This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.
A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
>We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
I'd say it a bit different....
We can't afford it, or at least don't want to pay for it. And quite often, attempting to give a significant fraction of the 9 billionish people on earth something authentic of the past would be an ecological disaster.
I mean, it's not like everyone having a personal automobile and AC set to 68 isn't an ecological disaster... I don't want to return us all to subsistence farming, but unless we do something, we won't really get to make that choice ourselves anyway.
>isn't an ecological disaster
I don't disagree, but at the same time, building the same cars we did in 1960 now would ensure the atmosphere would be incandescent in the next few years.
If you look at things like US energy consumption per capita it leveled off in the 1970s and has decreased since, so it is possible, but we're not getting those thing we had during the days of insane energy usage.
My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.
Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful or two decades ago.
Yes, or the horrible diseases that were common before we understood germs or had safe, effective vaccines. (Sadly, we seem to be backsliding on that one.)
Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.
Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.
I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”
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The Victorians were talking about “ladies”, not the washerwomen and cooks. Ladies are delicate and slight.
The earthy workers existed to toil, not be beautiful. That wasn’t their station in life.
Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be bad for their health.
Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made? That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually thought.
Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do.
However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper:
> Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century.
> I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”
What would the modern day iteration of that quote be like?
A woman on a brisk walk through the park mid-afternoon staying on top of the tracked metrics stored on her Apple Watch to offset the time spent sitting at her desk job while another woman lives relatively stationery sitting in traffic at the off-ramp waiting to pull into Erewhon to fulfill the walking woman’s Instacart order.
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"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." -- Ovid
The author raises valid points, to which I agree.
Something I would add is that when we look back at how _rich_ people lived, looking at the lavish parties with fancy clothes, we miss the huge amount of labour that was needed to make that happen (and thus why only the billionaires of the day could afford to ponce about in new clothes and have fine food like ice cream on demand in summer.)
However we don't have those constraints of requiring a team of 40, plus 90 hectares of land, an ice house and town of artisans to hold a house party with a four course meal, chocolate, fresh fruit, the best cuts of meat and fresh lettuce in winter.
_we_ can have that luxury, to the point where it is mundane.
look at the kitchens needed to service henry the 8th:
and compare that to the kitchens needed to service something like an office block (for example Meta's london office serves 3 meals a day for ~2k people, fits in 100m2)
My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...
I love how people in those videos always have impeccable clothing/hair/skin/etc.
When I go back to my rural hometown, the people working the earth, growing the food, and managing the livestock don’t look as… prim.
See also depictions of vaguely European historical trappings in anime, especially as in Miyazaki’s works, a variety of shojo manga and anime since the 70s, and many isekai settings.
“Representations of Europe in Japanese Anime: An Overview of Case Studies and Theoretical Frameworks”. Mutual Images Journal, no. 8, June 2020, pp. 47-84, https://doi.org/10.32926/2020.8.ara.europ .
An especially interesting quote from the above:
> According to Frederik Schodt, Jaqueline Berndt, and Deborah Shamoon, the European settings, depicted in the 1970s shōjo series took the role of a remote idealised elsewhere with a strong exotic appeal, radically different from Japanese society and reality, where the recurrent conventions of the shōjo narratives were developed. Some of these themes, like the deconstruction of the feminine subject and the development of transgressive romantic stories (which contain incests, infidelities, idyllic and allusive sexual scenes or homosexual relationships), were hard to conceive in the Japanese society of that moment, which enabled the European setting with a range of creative possibilities due to the depiction of foreign cultures (Schodt, 2012 [1983]: 88-93; Berndt, 1996: 93-4, Shamoon, 2007, 2008). Such a use and depiction of Europe fits with what Pellitteri has coined as the “mimecultural” scenario of anime, a mode of representation present in those anime series that adopt contents, settings, and other visual elements from different cultural backgrounds to develop their original narratives and plots (2010: 396). [italics added for emphasis]
The concept of “mimecultral” aspects of anime and manga is not new to me, but that phrasing itself is, and it reminds me of Dawkins’ conception of memes.
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It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in the current era, same structural problems remain.
Everything is relative. Even the perception of effort, from the calories burned at work daily to sustain a livelihood, is subjective. What truly matters is the amount of effort required by your peers to achieve similar financial stability. We tolerate the work as long as everyone else is equally willing to do it.
Yes, the past definitely wasn't that cute, but outright denying that it was not very different is just as absurd.
The definition of "normal" has drastically changed, even over the last few decades. A hundred years ago much of the societal structures still revolved around farming (which it had for thousands of years before that), something which now only involves a small minority of people.
People love to look at the past, not as it existed, but superpositioned over reality as it exists now.
Farming has always been seasonal and before gasoline engines drastically changed their efficiency they often involved horses and oxen. There was a larger number of people living rurally but most of them weren't spending the majority of their year actually working on any farm.
The other nitpick of the post is, yes, of course, people in work clothes of any generation do not look particularly elegant. People didn't wear their work clothes all day and would have had nicer sets for special functions like church or weddings.
>would have had nicer sets for special functions like church or weddings.
It's likely they would have one set of church clothes at least, but if you ever look at 'old' houses, closets are tiny because even modestly wealthy people didn't have that many clothes.
In 1900 you've have spend something like 15% of your yearly income on clothes, now it's around 3%.
Did the clothes in 1900 last longer than they do today? Did they even have polyester?
Clothes lasted longer, yes. The fabric was almost always thicker and less finely woven due to the limitations of historical textile manufacturing. The garments themselves were properly stitched instead of overlocked, with patterns sensibly designed for the usage and size of the garments. People also repaired their clothes and would keep them long past the point most modern consumers would buy new.
Plus, clothes were a considerable portion of the household budget. People couldn't afford them if they didn't last.
Nowadays we (UK) have a notion called "fuel poverty" which is formally defined (1) It is similar to the more generic notion of energy poverty. Basically, if spending out on fuel for heating takes a household below the official poverty line, then that is considered fuel poverty.
I'm old enough to remember houses without any form of central heating - mostly farms and cottages but even modernish town houses of the 70s/80s might be a bit remiss on the modern touches. I'm 55 so born 1970. My family lived in at least one house with an out-house bog (toilet) - it got a bit nippy (cold) in winter. If you had to use it then piss first to break the ice and then go in for a dump!
My mum was a Devonshire (Stoke Fleming, nr Dartmouth) farm girl and one anecdote she had was visiting another farm that even her parents considered a bit old school. The bog in the other farm was situated above a shippon - ie where cows are kept. The house adjoined the shippon and a fancy modern "indoor" bog had been built by bashing a hole through an exterior wall and an extension added over the shippon. It even had a sink to wash your hands - which was from a rain capture tank ... . The floorboards were a bit sketchy and apparently you could end up nearly eye to eye with the bull, whilst sat on the throne.
OK, back to fuel poverty and the old days not being cute. My mum's anecdote would probably be considered laughable to an Elizabethan (not QEII - QEI).
The world spins and we move on. I can remember being seriously cold in a house and basically wearing a lot more clothing and having a lot of blankets and later a hefty TOG rated duvet on my bed.
I think I prefer progress but don't think of the past as somehow regressive.
It's sad how the UK government has impoverished its people through a bizarre and misguided pursuit of "Net Zero".
Who is this author and what is effective altruism and why do I feel like I’m being given a backhanded lesson in morality by someone who is insufferable? I hope I’m wrong.
Its generally code for: "Thinks different than I do". What generally follows is a value judgment that lets someone believe they hold a moral high ground that someone else does not.
Mm but that's not what you're doing, no. You're being "fair and balanced" and very much neutral and objective.
For whatever reason I am reminded of this HN comment after reading this blog post:
> Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.
The past was not “cute” and neither is the present. But in spite of its edges the past afforded one a greater sense of whatever abstract phenomena is related to the word “cute” that escapes the present.
> My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past.
It's slightly surprising to me how many people think this. Like they think that boomers are selfish because that generation are more selfish people. No, people are inherently selfish.
Or old people think young people are lazier than their generation. No, pretty much everyone is and always has been lazy.
I agree; however, I also disagree: the culture and systems in which people live do affect their behavior, and the boomers moved their youth in a different world than the youth of today and that did affect them as a group and how they could express their natural pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth
Romanticizing the past is hot again right now, and kind of comes in two political flavors: trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left (whom I consider to be left-trads).
It’s always important to repeat the PSA that this is always survivorship bias and mythologizing. The past was very often much harder and worse than the present. When it wasn’t worse, it was just different. People back then faced existential angst, fear about the future, depression, and alienation just like we do. There were wars, crazy or idiotic politicians, popular delusions, plagues, depressions, atrocities, and all the rest.
That’s not to say that all things always get better, or that they get better in a straight line or in an orderly fashion. History is a mess. I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age. That is bullshit.
> Romanticizing the past is hot again right now
It would be better to understand _why_ rather than _who_. Since this same sentiment has arrived in previous eras it seems like a human phenomenon rather than a political one.
> I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age.
Or perhaps they're just attempting to avoid thinking about their bleak future.
"trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left"
Where would I find formal definitions of that scatterfest of terminologies?
I'd like to engage but I'm not up to speed on the lingo. I think PSA means Public Service Announcement - am I on track there at least?
We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.
In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is that supposedly some black people, while remembering their shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least related to kings.
And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.
It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!
This is what happens when you use history as a political tool. This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget what we are and where we come from so we side with the oppressors.
Everyone is the star of their personal movie. They shine it up on their own.
A good friend of mine had an awakening when he realized that his civil war ancestor suffered and sacrificed so that rich men could own other humans, and use those people to suppress his wages.
Reality is people are people and those before us had the same struggles we have about different things. We’re no smarter, but have access to the worlds information.
That's not how population genetics work.
Almost every European-descended person has ancestry from Kings and peasants alike. Even the very recent Oliver Cromwell has way more than 20k living descendants in the UK. If you have any substantial English ancestry, there is a Plantagenet somewhere in your family tree to a mathematical certainty.
On the continent, and in other aristocratic societies like Dynastic-era China, things are much the same. If Qin Shihuang's progeny weren't all put to the sword, just about every Han Chinese person is descended from Qin Shihuang.
Read about the "identical ancestors point". Past that point, every individual alive is either: (1) ancestor of everyone alive today, or (2) ancestor of no one alive today.
I'm definitely aware of this.
This is a very very far stretch from saying your family was royalty. Though i do guess you are technically correct. Forgive me, your highness. lol
Let me add that you've delineated a technicality with no real consequence to my argument. If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
> If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
This could potentially be a good argument for more democratic systems.
My grandmother was very proud of the fact that we were descendants of King James (one of them, I couldn't tell you which one, probably the one that abdicated!)
What she didn't understand is that something similar was true of almost everyone she knew.
What?!
Many people romanticize their past so much that they side with historical oppressors. Oppressors who most likely subjugated most of their ancestors.
This is not a coincidence, but is the result of consuming media from people who engage in this same act of romanticizing their history, or this media comes from people who were themselves actually related to these oppressors.
"A woman's work is never done."
In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.
Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).
Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.
We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.
There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.
You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.
Even in agricultural societies it wasnt a nuclear family as implied by "Running a family was a brutal two-person job..."
Most human societies were much more interconnected until relatively recently(last 80-100 years)
Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple chores like folding clothes, driving, programming, washing and dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a single new car. They wrote checks to the government, rather than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.
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This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can’t tell which side you’re arguing for.
Could be they aren’t trying to come down on a nice easy high-contrast color and are figuring anywhere society lands will still be some shade of gray with a bit of flair here and there and a dash of spilled paint in other places.
Color here is a metaphor for a point.
Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks
Also, back in 2025 people's mental models were so primitive that they could only consider one parameter at a time. And the reward function was wired into their survival instincts, imagine that! This caused them to see a person whose mental model held a different parameter value as a threat to their survival. These primitive serial thinkers used something called "wars" to update model weights, where they physically eliminated compute elements! Truly a barbaric age.
I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way.
Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?
Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were lucky to inherit some furniture.
I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a consumerist society. For what it’s worth it is still possible to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed.
In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere
A good depiction of the gritty realities and the meaning of material striving for the very poor in turn of the century farm life is the novel Independent People, by Halldor Laxness, an Icelandic nobel laureate.
Keep in mind that Halldor's book is depicting a situation fairly specific to Iceland: people recently freed from debt bondage, in a desperately poor and isolated area caught between much larger forces. It's not an attempt to accurately depict what it meant to be working poor for American laborers, like say grapes of wrath.
My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.
I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.
This is true of basically everything people complain about having gotten worse over time.
Whiteware and kitchen appliances are the same - you can absolutely buy a fridge, or a stand mixer or whatever that will work well and last forever. It's just the value proposition compared to cheap crap that will still likely last for a few years but at a 1/5th of the price is not great unless you're going to use it really heavily.
A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".
The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.
There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.
Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.
> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.
Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.
The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis
[1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.
I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.
In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.
Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.
0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge
> The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.
Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful, especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main" reason.
Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.
That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.
Probably worthwhile to separate that span into smaller chunks.
We blame boomers not for what happened in the 50s or 60s, we blame them for voting in and supporting Ronald fckng Reagan and all the bullshit his policies have affected since his presidency.
See: https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/why-almost-everything-is...
Blaming boomers is stupid ... it conflates many different and different kinds of people. I'm a boomer who helped develop the ARPANET (so I'm not technically illiterate ... that's my parents' generation) and I'm a democratic socialist who protested vehemently against Nixon and Reagan (who many in my parents' generation supported). The people to really blame are right wingers and corporations and the uber rich who create bogeymen and false targets like "boomers" for gullible people to be distracted and deflected by.
Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.
Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan.
I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies.
Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).
A lot of people think this, but if I'm being honest modern materials are amazing. They survive pretty rough washes, they're incredibly cheap, fire-retardant, and last forever. Synthetics are amazing.
Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days ago that I was thinking about this[0] when I thought about how the microfibre fleece my daughter was lying on was the cheap microfiber fleece I'd bought when I encountered my first American winter. A student's cheap blanket has lasted me over a decade and still keeps me warm and cleans easily.
My wife and I have had Caspers and Tuft & Needles and Tempurpedics and we sleep now on an Ikea foam mattress. It's fantastic. Modern manufacturing and materials are incredible. I feel like I'm living in a golden age.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_La...
It depends; it feels like in some categories the premium between a material that's very suitable, and some ersatz lookalike is massive and depressing.
I love a good petrochemical, but sometimes it would be nice if the cheap thing store wasn't so callously targeting veneers and pleathers that last just long enough to loose the receipt.
A great place to feel this is the USS Hornet in Alameda. This actual ship that you are on, made of steel and loaded with analog electronics, sailed to the far side of the Pacific and back. So much metal, steel, hydraulics, and electrical systems. It made it out and back. Not all the ships did. Mighty ships just like this one, with people like you, did not make it back.
You could also try HMS Victory in the UK or the Vasa in Sweden (other really old ships are available and some are still sailing).
You might also note that the inhabitants of Hawaii had to have got there somehow and its 2000 odd miles to what is now the US mainland and still quite a long way from anywhere else, eg Tahiti.
My great-grandfather was born in a dugout (i.e., sod) house on the Kansas prairie in 1880. His father died when he was 9. When he went to teacher’s college, someone gave him an orange and he ate the rind, as he didn’t know you were supposed to peel it; he still thought it was delicious. He married late at 35, and his wife died after a year. He married again and their first daughter died as a toddler. He was 49 when the Great Depression began. He became a Republican because FDR repealed Prohibition.
I’m not wealthy, not by HN standards, but my kids are healthy and lack for nothing. I doordash them takeout sushi when I don’t feel like cooking them dinner. I’ve been to several of the world’s great museums, gone to great plays and concerts, and love a round of Epoisses with a plump Meursault.
Things that last have always been expensive, out of reach for many. And every time I think nostalgically about life on the prairie in a dugout, I think about winter, it being -10 outside and windy, and 45 degrees inside and damp and smoky.
I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
Modern manufacturing and materials science let us create imitation materials at huge quantity and low cost that wasn’t possible before about the ‘50s-60s.
So you just used to use real materials out of necessity
It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.
People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.
Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.
> Not the history makers
Even the so-called "history makers" are the product of imagination, of myth, and of hagiography. If you met these people today, you wouldn't recognize them if you went by the expectations built up by the images we're fed. The same holds of so-called celebrities.
It has a lot to do with the way our memories form and what memories our brains choose to construct from experiences.
The past was not more "real" than present day reality.
At the same time, it's arguable that certain observations such as "commercialization and commoditization have become stronger" are true. We're certainly living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades.
>living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades
So were people in 1910. You could say the printing press set up the following industrial revolution and things have been accelerating ever since. People talk that in the future there will be a technological singularity that things will go so fast people won't be able to keep up, but really in many ways we've been in it for a while already and it's still accelerating.
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.
Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.
People forget the ways in which the past was fake. Fake butter, for example, was more common than real butter from the 1950s up until the early 2000s. But most people don't eat margarine anymore and so most people don't remember it.
I mean - to one extent, concretely in the aesthetic ways I’m talking it was technologically we just had simpler materials. Cars had knobs and levers instead of touchscreens.
Like, so much of what I do today happens online instead of the real world, so I do think you can describe ways in which life or the world really has gotten more “fake”.
Though some of this is funny too? I remember things from the say 50’s to the 80’w as being more “real” and that’s also the like rise of TV dinners and everything eaten out of a can, rather than “real” ingredients.
>50’s to the 80’w as being more “real”
Yea, people really are out of touch with what was going on around them. Naugahyde, for example was invented in 1914. Fake wood on cars started in the 1940s! It is very likely people remembering the 'real' stuff were quite often talking about objects that were far older.
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People focus too much on the new and not enough on the rest. Of course what's new is going to seem fake because it is. Nobody has figured it out yet. The rest never changed or has improved significantly.
Anyone older than about 30 who takes a few minutes to reflect on all the little details of daily life could probably come up with a surprisingly long list of annoying little inconveniences they no longer have to deal with. Beyond that we've had decades worth of casually raising the bar for what is considered common sense and polite. These are the "real" things we take for granted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress
> Feed sack dresses, flour sack dresses, or feedsack dresses were a common article of clothing in rural US and Canadian communities from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. They were made at home, usually by women, using the cotton sacks in which flour, sugar, animal feed, seeds, and other commodities were packaged, shipped, and sold. They became an iconic part of rural life from the 1920s through the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II years.
Good, Honest, Old-Fashioned Clothing was Consumerism, too, bucko.
> During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women and children in the United States were wearing feed sack clothing at any given point in time.[7][14] One participant in an oral history project stated that "everything on the clothesline was from feed sacks."[2] The US Department of Agriculture reported in 1951 that 75% of mothers living in urban areas and 97% of those living in rural areas had heard of making garments from feed sacks.[15]
Did Granny make clothes from scratch? Did she, Hell! She bought cloth from a Large Evil Corporation what with the Dark Satanic Mills and Finance Capitalism and she was mainly unhappy she couldn't spend more:
> There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty, so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the fabric, or adding trim.
Our ancestors would be appalled at people wanting to go back to The Good Old Days. They fought and struggled mightily against what the Cottagecore Losers on their Laptops and iPods want.
Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman
https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...
No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact, we ought to have both. It's not like it's impossible. We just have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bladerunner".
Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap, unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff. People have distorted memories of what things used to be like. Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff is still around while everything else is in a landfill.
Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.
However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more.
Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself.
And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able.
More here:
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here:
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br...
An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal sized.
Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.
It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and frames reflected this.
All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.
It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women
Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe. The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible
The funny thing is that the Rape of the Sabines was adapted into a popular musical comedy movie "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" in 1954. Audiences loved it at the time but the story seems bizarre and offensive today.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047472/
what’s truly hard for the modern mind to comprehend is that our societies are the exception to the rule of history, not the norm. as the ancients go, that type of thing (along with total scorched-earth genocide of other tribes) was basically commonplace.
> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.
Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...
Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.
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Yea, people tend to forget that even in the US we had long bread lines during the depression and that during WWII there were just a lot of items you couldn't get.
>everything was fresh from the garden
And this just goes to show that the writer doesn't understand how gardens work. For the vast majority of the year any particular plant in the garden ain't producing a damned thing. You can get some things like fresh tomatoes that produce from late spring through summer. And some herbs will produce all growing season. But fresh peas, well, they all pod out at around the same time. You better start canning them, oh and trying to freeze any amount of them in the past would cost you an absolute fortune in electricity.
Simply put, the amount and quality of vegetables you can get at your local store would stun most cooks of the early 1900s. They would walk in the store and be unable to move for a moment, stunned, at the vast selection of non-rotten, non ate up by bugs, large vegetables and ones they'd never seen before.
> large vegetables
I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are more flavorful than large ones.
My mom's mother was so afraid of pork and trichinosis that, if you dropped a pork chop she had cooked onto the floor, it would shatter- that is how overcooked it would get (or so the family joke went).
Also, most of the chickens she cooked came from a can- that is, whole hen, pressure canned and sold that way. There weren't any chicken farmers for miles and that was the safest and most convenient way to get chicken to cook with.
Spices, fresh fruit and vegetables were all luxuries for most of the year. Most dishes were variations on stew, casserole or pot roast since everything was already soft already, and gravy was the most accessible seasoning / condiment.
Food was cooked fresh because the refrigerator was tiny and restaurants weren't cheap enough for anything other than special occasions, but "fresh" is definitely an optimistic interpretation of the ingredients.
And if you were lucky enough to get dessert it was something like Jello with a bit of canned fruit inside. Of course that's also why obesity was less of a problem.
Jello was a fancy desert and a way to show you had wealth/prosperity as it required refrigeration, something the poors didn't have.
Seasonal food also tasted a lot better when you spent half of the year waiting for the season, dreaming about fresh food of the next season.
That’s still the case today though.
If I get red cherries in winter from Chile, they are not as good as the ones from eastern Washington in the summer. Local seasonal fruit in WA is amazing (cherries, peaches, apples, now is pear season)
Anecdotally vegetables I grow are wildly more flavorful than ones you can buy. Like think grape tomatoes as sweet as grapes. Green beans that a have complex flavor almost like green tea. The butternut squash that I accidentally grew this year from seeds that survived the winter in my compost tastes like a pumpkin pie. Corn that you can eat raw and that putting butter on feels like a waste.
That’s not to say you cannot get really good food that’s not “farm fresh” but food right out of the ground absolutely on average is better.
As long as you don't consider the growing season in the averages. Yes, garden fresh food is great today because you can get vegetables from the store when yours are not in season.
> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness
> Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, is a kind of poisoning characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain that affects individuals who ingest milk, other dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol. In animals it is known as trembles.
> Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, is said to have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.
Nice, Fresh, Honest Milk.
This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.
A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
>We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
I'd say it a bit different....
We can't afford it, or at least don't want to pay for it. And quite often, attempting to give a significant fraction of the 9 billionish people on earth something authentic of the past would be an ecological disaster.
I mean, it's not like everyone having a personal automobile and AC set to 68 isn't an ecological disaster... I don't want to return us all to subsistence farming, but unless we do something, we won't really get to make that choice ourselves anyway.
>isn't an ecological disaster
I don't disagree, but at the same time, building the same cars we did in 1960 now would ensure the atmosphere would be incandescent in the next few years.
If you look at things like US energy consumption per capita it leveled off in the 1970s and has decreased since, so it is possible, but we're not getting those thing we had during the days of insane energy usage.
My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.
Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful or two decades ago.
Yes, or the horrible diseases that were common before we understood germs or had safe, effective vaccines. (Sadly, we seem to be backsliding on that one.)
Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.
Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.
I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”
The Victorians were talking about “ladies”, not the washerwomen and cooks. Ladies are delicate and slight.
The earthy workers existed to toil, not be beautiful. That wasn’t their station in life.
Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be bad for their health.
Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made? That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually thought.
Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do.
However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper:
> Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/
> I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”
What would the modern day iteration of that quote be like?
A woman on a brisk walk through the park mid-afternoon staying on top of the tracked metrics stored on her Apple Watch to offset the time spent sitting at her desk job while another woman lives relatively stationery sitting in traffic at the off-ramp waiting to pull into Erewhon to fulfill the walking woman’s Instacart order.
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"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." -- Ovid
The author raises valid points, to which I agree.
Something I would add is that when we look back at how _rich_ people lived, looking at the lavish parties with fancy clothes, we miss the huge amount of labour that was needed to make that happen (and thus why only the billionaires of the day could afford to ponce about in new clothes and have fine food like ice cream on demand in summer.)
However we don't have those constraints of requiring a team of 40, plus 90 hectares of land, an ice house and town of artisans to hold a house party with a four course meal, chocolate, fresh fruit, the best cuts of meat and fresh lettuce in winter.
_we_ can have that luxury, to the point where it is mundane.
look at the kitchens needed to service henry the 8th:
https://www.nakedkitchens.com/blog/henry-viiis-55-room-kitch...
and compare that to the kitchens needed to service something like an office block (for example Meta's london office serves 3 meals a day for ~2k people, fits in 100m2)
My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...
I love how people in those videos always have impeccable clothing/hair/skin/etc.
When I go back to my rural hometown, the people working the earth, growing the food, and managing the livestock don’t look as… prim.
See Bullerby syndrome [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullerby_syndrome
See also depictions of vaguely European historical trappings in anime, especially as in Miyazaki’s works, a variety of shojo manga and anime since the 70s, and many isekai settings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai
“Representations of Europe in Japanese Anime: An Overview of Case Studies and Theoretical Frameworks”. Mutual Images Journal, no. 8, June 2020, pp. 47-84, https://doi.org/10.32926/2020.8.ara.europ .
An especially interesting quote from the above:
> According to Frederik Schodt, Jaqueline Berndt, and Deborah Shamoon, the European settings, depicted in the 1970s shōjo series took the role of a remote idealised elsewhere with a strong exotic appeal, radically different from Japanese society and reality, where the recurrent conventions of the shōjo narratives were developed. Some of these themes, like the deconstruction of the feminine subject and the development of transgressive romantic stories (which contain incests, infidelities, idyllic and allusive sexual scenes or homosexual relationships), were hard to conceive in the Japanese society of that moment, which enabled the European setting with a range of creative possibilities due to the depiction of foreign cultures (Schodt, 2012 [1983]: 88-93; Berndt, 1996: 93-4, Shamoon, 2007, 2008). Such a use and depiction of Europe fits with what Pellitteri has coined as the “mimecultural” scenario of anime, a mode of representation present in those anime series that adopt contents, settings, and other visual elements from different cultural backgrounds to develop their original narratives and plots (2010: 396). [italics added for emphasis]
The concept of “mimecultral” aspects of anime and manga is not new to me, but that phrasing itself is, and it reminds me of Dawkins’ conception of memes.
It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in the current era, same structural problems remain.
Everything is relative. Even the perception of effort, from the calories burned at work daily to sustain a livelihood, is subjective. What truly matters is the amount of effort required by your peers to achieve similar financial stability. We tolerate the work as long as everyone else is equally willing to do it.
Yes, the past definitely wasn't that cute, but outright denying that it was not very different is just as absurd.
The definition of "normal" has drastically changed, even over the last few decades. A hundred years ago much of the societal structures still revolved around farming (which it had for thousands of years before that), something which now only involves a small minority of people.
People love to look at the past, not as it existed, but superpositioned over reality as it exists now.
Farming has always been seasonal and before gasoline engines drastically changed their efficiency they often involved horses and oxen. There was a larger number of people living rurally but most of them weren't spending the majority of their year actually working on any farm.
The other nitpick of the post is, yes, of course, people in work clothes of any generation do not look particularly elegant. People didn't wear their work clothes all day and would have had nicer sets for special functions like church or weddings.
>would have had nicer sets for special functions like church or weddings.
It's likely they would have one set of church clothes at least, but if you ever look at 'old' houses, closets are tiny because even modestly wealthy people didn't have that many clothes.
In 1900 you've have spend something like 15% of your yearly income on clothes, now it's around 3%.
Did the clothes in 1900 last longer than they do today? Did they even have polyester?
Clothes lasted longer, yes. The fabric was almost always thicker and less finely woven due to the limitations of historical textile manufacturing. The garments themselves were properly stitched instead of overlocked, with patterns sensibly designed for the usage and size of the garments. People also repaired their clothes and would keep them long past the point most modern consumers would buy new.
Plus, clothes were a considerable portion of the household budget. People couldn't afford them if they didn't last.
Nowadays we (UK) have a notion called "fuel poverty" which is formally defined (1) It is similar to the more generic notion of energy poverty. Basically, if spending out on fuel for heating takes a household below the official poverty line, then that is considered fuel poverty.
I'm old enough to remember houses without any form of central heating - mostly farms and cottages but even modernish town houses of the 70s/80s might be a bit remiss on the modern touches. I'm 55 so born 1970. My family lived in at least one house with an out-house bog (toilet) - it got a bit nippy (cold) in winter. If you had to use it then piss first to break the ice and then go in for a dump!
My mum was a Devonshire (Stoke Fleming, nr Dartmouth) farm girl and one anecdote she had was visiting another farm that even her parents considered a bit old school. The bog in the other farm was situated above a shippon - ie where cows are kept. The house adjoined the shippon and a fancy modern "indoor" bog had been built by bashing a hole through an exterior wall and an extension added over the shippon. It even had a sink to wash your hands - which was from a rain capture tank ... . The floorboards were a bit sketchy and apparently you could end up nearly eye to eye with the bull, whilst sat on the throne.
OK, back to fuel poverty and the old days not being cute. My mum's anecdote would probably be considered laughable to an Elizabethan (not QEII - QEI).
The world spins and we move on. I can remember being seriously cold in a house and basically wearing a lot more clothing and having a lot of blankets and later a hefty TOG rated duvet on my bed.
I think I prefer progress but don't think of the past as somehow regressive.
(1) https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fuel-poverty-stati...
It's sad how the UK government has impoverished its people through a bizarre and misguided pursuit of "Net Zero".
Who is this author and what is effective altruism and why do I feel like I’m being given a backhanded lesson in morality by someone who is insufferable? I hope I’m wrong.
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Today will be the brutal past in the future.
Problematic. There's that code word again.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...
(https://archive.ph/XKBZr)
Elaborate what you mean.
What is "problematic" a code word for?
Its generally code for: "Thinks different than I do". What generally follows is a value judgment that lets someone believe they hold a moral high ground that someone else does not.
Mm but that's not what you're doing, no. You're being "fair and balanced" and very much neutral and objective.
For whatever reason I am reminded of this HN comment after reading this blog post:
> Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274237
Especially towards the end of it.
The past was not “cute” and neither is the present. But in spite of its edges the past afforded one a greater sense of whatever abstract phenomena is related to the word “cute” that escapes the present.
> My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past.
It's slightly surprising to me how many people think this. Like they think that boomers are selfish because that generation are more selfish people. No, people are inherently selfish.
Or old people think young people are lazier than their generation. No, pretty much everyone is and always has been lazy.
I agree; however, I also disagree: the culture and systems in which people live do affect their behavior, and the boomers moved their youth in a different world than the youth of today and that did affect them as a group and how they could express their natural pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth
Romanticizing the past is hot again right now, and kind of comes in two political flavors: trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left (whom I consider to be left-trads).
It’s always important to repeat the PSA that this is always survivorship bias and mythologizing. The past was very often much harder and worse than the present. When it wasn’t worse, it was just different. People back then faced existential angst, fear about the future, depression, and alienation just like we do. There were wars, crazy or idiotic politicians, popular delusions, plagues, depressions, atrocities, and all the rest.
That’s not to say that all things always get better, or that they get better in a straight line or in an orderly fashion. History is a mess. I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age. That is bullshit.
> Romanticizing the past is hot again right now
It would be better to understand _why_ rather than _who_. Since this same sentiment has arrived in previous eras it seems like a human phenomenon rather than a political one.
> I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age.
Or perhaps they're just attempting to avoid thinking about their bleak future.
"trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left"
Where would I find formal definitions of that scatterfest of terminologies?
I'd like to engage but I'm not up to speed on the lingo. I think PSA means Public Service Announcement - am I on track there at least?
We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.
In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is that supposedly some black people, while remembering their shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least related to kings.
And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.
It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!
This is what happens when you use history as a political tool. This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget what we are and where we come from so we side with the oppressors.
Everyone is the star of their personal movie. They shine it up on their own.
A good friend of mine had an awakening when he realized that his civil war ancestor suffered and sacrificed so that rich men could own other humans, and use those people to suppress his wages.
Reality is people are people and those before us had the same struggles we have about different things. We’re no smarter, but have access to the worlds information.
That's not how population genetics work.
Almost every European-descended person has ancestry from Kings and peasants alike. Even the very recent Oliver Cromwell has way more than 20k living descendants in the UK. If you have any substantial English ancestry, there is a Plantagenet somewhere in your family tree to a mathematical certainty.
On the continent, and in other aristocratic societies like Dynastic-era China, things are much the same. If Qin Shihuang's progeny weren't all put to the sword, just about every Han Chinese person is descended from Qin Shihuang.
Read about the "identical ancestors point". Past that point, every individual alive is either: (1) ancestor of everyone alive today, or (2) ancestor of no one alive today.
I'm definitely aware of this.
This is a very very far stretch from saying your family was royalty. Though i do guess you are technically correct. Forgive me, your highness. lol
Let me add that you've delineated a technicality with no real consequence to my argument. If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
> If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
This could potentially be a good argument for more democratic systems.
My grandmother was very proud of the fact that we were descendants of King James (one of them, I couldn't tell you which one, probably the one that abdicated!)
What she didn't understand is that something similar was true of almost everyone she knew.
What?!
Many people romanticize their past so much that they side with historical oppressors. Oppressors who most likely subjugated most of their ancestors.
This is not a coincidence, but is the result of consuming media from people who engage in this same act of romanticizing their history, or this media comes from people who were themselves actually related to these oppressors.