This 1000 times. Not to sound like a tankie but it’s part of the propaganda machine.
Divide, isolate, conquer. Add to that, consume. Boom, perfect profitable complacent public.
“Figure it out”
“Just do it”
“It’s your responsibility”
Materially no; socially yes.
Materially, our ancestors would murder to have days off every week and limited work hours in exchange for sufficient food and nutrition, and they did so in constant, careful, worried concert with their entire community. And that has an emotional burden far in excess of what we endure, make no mistake.
Socially, the ascendency of industrialism and labor mobility during the Cold War - in both ideologically capitalist and communist states - has splintered communal ties and atomized families, making many emotional and social endeavors much more taxing than they once were. Combine that with the slow death of ‘third places’ in the post-Cold War era, and you have a recipe for some… arduous emotional ordeals.
Also, please remember that pre-modern societies are often immensely repressive themselves, and that ‘closeness’ is often at the expense of individual expression and self-actualization.
Materially, our ancestors would murder to have days off every week and limited work hours in exchange for sufficient food and nutrition, and they did so in constant, careful, worried concert with their entire community.
It’s not a fair comparison cause you’re not going back far enough. There is not much debate comparing being poor today to being poor during the Middle Ages.
If you compare modern life to pre agricultural times, then it gets tricky, they worked a lot less and weren’t constantly starving. They were athletes by today’s standards, with their own challenges and hardships. Life was harder but it matched the human needs/desires better than modern life. Hopefully we can reach a society that is better than all of history, not just cherry picked bad parts.
I’m thinking of dishwashers, clothes washers, automobiles, and grocery stores. I consider those my “support” network since I don’t have to grow my own food, raise horses, or wash everything down by the river. Think you’re tired now? Imagine having to do that.
Its true that there’s a lot of labor saving devices now (especially clothes washers), but in a lot of cases we didn’t reduce the amount of work we did, we just increased productivity.
For some other things I think its true that we really have gone backwards. Consider how sleep deprived new parents can be, with one or both people not getting a good nights sleep for sometimes weeks at a time. And (depending on where they live), having to go to work like that. I just don’t think humans evolved to live that way. Historically new parents would have had a lot more help from their extended families (since not everyone would have children at the same time that would help spread the load).
My grandmother had no clothes washer or anything similar, not even running hot water (at first not even any sort of running water). She told me how doing laundry actually got a lot harder after washing machines came around because with them came the expectation from other people to always have a neat new outfit on every day when before most people had like two pairs of outfits, one for normal days and one for church. The church one hardly got dirty so it didn’t have to be washed much, and the other one got washed like once a week.
Yeah, the massive increase in the number of things we have and the effort involved in keeping them clean/maintained has been a massive increase even with automated processes. Laundry day is an undertaking because there is so much laundry.
I guess in the context of the post it depends on the cards you were dealt in the first place. In a world that’s almost entirely commodified almost every aspect of human/animal labor into something that can be purchased and utilized with either money or personal ownership, the question is at what stage of independence does the tradeoff of our world seem better?
Granted, for people who are privileged enough to grow up in a modern urban environment who are not homeless, most of these are simply quality of life improvements. However, for those who are not privileged enough to have these opportunities (grow up in an area without reliable electricity or food supply, accessing the internet through their phone exclusively, started out their independent lives homeless or indebted, etc…), it can feel like you are having it worse than people in an era where you exchanged your physical labor for the resources and outcomes you desired.
To bring an analogy, a middle class or wealthy person of our modern day would be unlikely to desire to go back to an era of having to live off a natural landscape devoid of much of the technology we enjoy today. They are beneficiaries of our current system, so that makes rational sense. On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
On the other hand, the working poor or the precarious working class would feel betrayed by the promises of modern day society and would be much more interested in living in a world where they felt rewarded for their work directly, because they don’t have the opportunities to enjoy it today.
Bruh, I live under the poverty line. Most of the people I grew up with lived under the poverty line. I grew up in one of the poorest regions of America.
There is still no comparison between the living standards of today and those of, say, 200+ years ago.
I come from a family where coming home to see all the lights off because the electricity couldn’t be paid on time was not an abnormal sight, wherein I, the child, had to be shuffled through family members to whomever had their lights on at that particular moment. Where meals had to be skipped 'til payday. Where we lived in crumbling apartment complexes in high-crime areas. Where single-parent families working two jobs was not an abnormal setup. Where my mother lived in constant fear of losing her job due to declining economic conditions in the region.
It still had nothing on the crushing poverty of working-class existence in the past.
Yeah I total can confirm this - source: My exhausted ass
