I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.
I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.
No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse.
Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.
“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.
I've been to two LWL open air museums near my region. They gather original buildings in their respective area (not a particularly rich one) from the ~15th to ~18th century, as well as tools, legal documents or weapons and while that doesn't represent an entire village community, I wouldn't want to live in any of them.
Nideggen Castle also didn't look very comfortable, to put it mildly, but apparently it was luxury accommodations for the aristocrats.
Hygiene, food security, personal safety, the justice system all pretty much sucked back then. Not saying everything was bad all the time, but many more things were bad much more often. Let's never go back.
P.S.: Highly recommend these open air museums!
That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune
There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?
I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem.
I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.
The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute.
In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable.
Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity.
I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.
Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes.
And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all.
In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true of me for you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that.
And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.
This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer.
Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it.
Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life.
oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards.
We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.
I do believe buying expensive real estate in a city like Bangalore is pointless. You can put the same money in a good mutual fund, and buy a home in a Tier 2 city around Bangalore. You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things.
The pollution, population density and pace are all a lot lower. Plus if the idea is to retire early, this is like the best plan you can come up with.
* Then it takes 2 hours to reach your office in Bangalore.
* It just postpones the actual problem. Gradually the tier-2 towns will get crowded too.
* It means your local tier-2 town won't develop, and economy will be centred at these metropolitons.
Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview.
In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it.
Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies.
I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get.
Even 2000 years ago: I read an article about trying to find archaeological traces accompanying the spread of Sami languages into Scandinavia. They've only found one, tenative one: it seems there was a stop in making bog iron around the same time. And that's not because they didn't need iron, or forgot how to make it: it's just because they had good enough trade networks that they didn't need to.
Those YouTube shows you mention: many of them are outright fakes, you know.
I didn't really say anything about the agrarian urban divide. I just pointed out the problems of going out trying to live in your own in an agrarian commune. If enough people did it, of course it could be viable in theory, if everyone were really committed to it and bloody determined to not dip into the modern economic context.
And none of this stuff is faked, there is nothing to fake. The Townsends (and other similar groups) are just historical reenactors who happen to have some amazing skillsets. Watching the Brandon guy from that channel work with a wood lathe, blacksmithing, or pretty much anything you can do with your hands is part of the reason I won't be teaching my children to code, but will be nudging them towards wood and metal working. What you can do in the real world is just so much more inspiring than anything in the digital world.
These sort of little sub-cultures generally make revenue from these videos and by selling merch, either produced by their group, or by providing relevant stuff that's otherwise difficult to find, like historically accurate 18th century costumes, gear, etc for the Townsends group.
You're talking past me here. I think old-fashioned crafts are very cool, and certainly people were more self-sufficient 200 years ago. I've been doing genealogy, and verified a family story that we're descended from a famous local woodcarver, who made the most gorgeous church altar pieces during the 1750s, most of which are still in use. He allegedly carved them with a common pocket knife (tollekniv), or, according to other stories, with self made tools fashioned from scythe blades. Fantastically cool. But no one alleged that he used his own bog iron!
In fact, when I dug into the story, the more connected to his society I understood that he was. Art historians have commented that he was clearly in touch with artistic trends from more central European countries. It turned out, he wasn't just a woodcarver, he was also the local schoolmaster, so he was perfectly literate and may well have corresponded with artists in other countries. He had also made musical instruments.
If he'd lived alone, he wouldn't have been able to do much of what he did. We underestimate how connected everyone was 300 years ago - or even 3000 years ago. Bog iron is one thing but try making bronze on your own!
So it can give you a tremendous feel for how "society" in the past might have felt in terms of scale and layout. And a decent sized city, would typically be smaller than a large suburban neighborhood now a days, in spite of there being hundreds of millions of humans alive at the time. And so I wouldn't view stuff as like 'society vs outsider', but rather large numbers of mostly self sufficient societies.
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The channel discussion is really interesting! The original Primitive Technology channel [1] is 100% authentic and an amazing channel. But its growing popularity spawned a bunch of imitators including the Cambodian one (or 10) you're referencing. The imitators began doing ever more elaborate stuff for clicks, except it pretty much begin being obviously faked at some point - like multi-story spring fed swimming pools with crystal clear water, all constructed with extensive cuts and editing that was the video version of this meme. [2]
For the original you can watch him do stuff in real time, with no cuts or editing. And it's very doable yourself. Townsends uses edits and cuts, but again there's nothing like 'zomg how could they possibly do that' - it's just historical recreations, like building a log cabin, blacksmithing, and so on. All the stuff that would have been carried out in beginning one of these many little autonomous 'mini societies.'
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
[2] - https://s3.amazonaws.com/marquee-test-akiaisur2rgicbmpehea/w...
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...?
Five parts. This, the last gives a sense of what life was like.
I guess most people imagining those days think they'd be amongst the rich nobility, not in the peasant class.
There'd be few today that would want to go back to life at that time.
But honestly, even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your median modern person has a better life. People seriously underestimate just how much of our modern life would be unattainable luxury in the Medieval period.
And the question I always ask when people make this claim - now would you rather be a median modern person or one of the richest kings of the medieval era? It emphasizes that there's far more unquantifiables to having a good life than there are quantifiables, yet we almost entirely socially neglect them.
In modern times? The median personal income (US only) is $45k. [1] That's something that's very easy to forget, especially on a forum like this. And at that income, doing anything, besides accumulating meaningless gadgets, will be a challenge. Even having children, the most fundamentally critical responsibility for a society to sustain itself, is a challenge. I don't think the skyrocketing rates of psychological, mental, and other disorders is simply a coincidence.
We've created a dysfunctional and unsustainable society. This can still be quite a nice place when you're way above the median, but the median lifestyle is going to be quite unpleasant. It's certainly not a lifestyle I would ever even consider preferring over that of a medieval king.
I might go with being one of the richer medieval kings, in the latter case. Global median is pretty bad.
Only things that might sway me otherwise are antibiotics and if we’re factoring in the whole “sword of Damocles” aspect for despotic rulers.
The study went something like this. Which do you prefer? 1. You earn $250k but all your friends earn $500k. 2. You earn $125k, but all your friends earn $75k.
It was more refined then that, but anyway: most people picked (2).
Imagine I give you a guaranteed $100k/year with the nuance that you're not allowed to earn any money beyond that, as the study implied that was your personal earnings. Where are you going to go live? In an area where most people are earning $200k or in an area where most people are earning $50k? It's the exact same question in effect, but now the phrasing makes it obvious that the choice is completely rational.
It's not about wanting to psychologically dominate your peers, but about making your money go further. If your friends are all earning twice what you do, then you're likely to struggle to afford even a decent house in a reasonable part of town. This logic breaks down at extremes of wealth, but $250k/year is nowhere near that point.
There’s a flood of AI-generated slop around this nostalgic content and many of them are generated as documentaries but with ridiculous claims, fictitious characters, and timelines that never happened. It’s the enshittification of YouTube and the new rickroll.
"Prior to the twentieth century, when life spans were shorter, a shepherd might have known hundreds of songs, poems, and stories and several languages, how to play several musical instruments, tan leather, make butter, dry and preserve meat, build a shelter, and prepare the dead for burial."
There is so much potential in all of us!
Why middle ages? Most people born in villages of many countries during 50's or 60's would not have seen electricity, running water, toilets, roads, radios, candy, plastic toys, shoes etc until decades later.
Just like how the writings from ancient times were mostly about royal and religious figures, historians of modern times mostly looked at the history of the western world, Europe specifically.
By projecting what I saw in the remote parts of India in the 70's, I can say the following about peasants of old times:
* they didn't care about recording their lives or their appearances in any form except as folklores that were passed on through generations. The lores were sung by a special class of society telling children of higher classes, about their ancestors.
* they didn't care about having distinct names for family members
* they didn't like being portrayed (as in photographed)
* they didn't like outsiders
* they don't record their birthdays
* they didn't try to avoid risk and demography stayed young, with about 10 children per woman.
* if there is any pandemic or famine, they deserted villages and moved to new places
* there is no money involved in transactions. Grain, jewels, land, water, bride and livestock were the stores of value
Oh, and a devil might jump out of the shadows, or a witch might kidnap your child, or a fairy, or...
I guess maybe we replaced outright fear with stress.
quxfoobarbaz•2mo ago
rkovashikawa•2mo ago