7 ms·

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather nea

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

Ekaros 3y ago
Then guilt trip others to donate to you money and their inheritance and end up filthy rich... Still doing the same... Kinda weird end result... Who did profit anyway, apart from upper management.
- random_upvoter 3y ago
  Sure such systems tend to end up getting corrupt if they amass too much power. That was not my point. I guess my point was that given the bleak state of today's social landscape, I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another. And maybe these monasteries didn't only exist because of fervent religiosity but also as a practical way for single men and women to have a better life.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another." Sure and it is happening since a while, take a look here for example: https://www.ic.org/ https://www.ic.org/ So far most of the projects are rather in dreamland than in reality, but some are well established and working. edit: you will also find actual monasterys there if that is your thing
    - apomekhanes 3y ago
      Very interesting - hadn't come across this before, thanks!
- gcr 3y ago
  You might be confusing "monastery" with "church." EDIT: damn, I stand corrected!
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Not really, quite many monasteries themselves ended up very wealthy. Though they could have acted as proxies by churches. But did not mean they did not hold land what was the wealth back then. And did not have to divide it as inheritance had to.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    "An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > You might be confusing "monastery" with "church." Many religions besides the catholicism have monasteries, and exploit the same social loophole. Countless Buddhist monasteries also operate as a spa hotel of sorts.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  It's all just one giant pyramid scheme anyway... https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down": And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene) And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth". What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD
vladvasiliu 3y ago
How so? As a single person, one of my best purchases was an instant-pot type appliance (not the actual one, but one probably inspired by it, with less control over the temperature and especially the pressure release). In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans. Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.
- gear54rus 3y ago
  Can you mention this appliance by name? Also, what are some fun recipes?
  - sph 3y ago
    I got the actual Instant Pot. This is my second actually, I got the one that also does air frying. It's a great purchase. Get some cheap protein that needs to cook for long, get some vegetables, brown the protein a bit (can be done in the Instant Pot), add chopped vegetables, salt, spices, and a little water; pressure cook for 1 hour. Shorter version: add meat, add vegs, add water, turn on. You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew. My favorite recipe is chilli con carne, which is little more than minced beef with onions peppers and beans in tomato sauce. Stews, chilli and random salads are 90% of my diet.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the same, twice as many taxes, twice as many cars, more spending, more consumption - it's a win-win for the ruling class, while family-units and non-wealthy individuals lose. You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating and vilifying homemakers by observing how furiously most moderns rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating homemaker by observing how most moderns fruoously rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing. Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    The sci-fi story solution I've come up with is we put everyone into a lottery. Everyone draws a number. Evens get their salary doubled, odds are no longer allowed to work. Everyone find a partner.
    - user982 3y ago
      Evens will pair up with evens to quadruple their unit income (why attach yourself to a deadweight odd?), with odds becoming a shunned caste largely doomed to death.
- LVB 3y ago
  >and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.
eternauta3k 3y ago
Nowadays you can join a commune, shared appartment (Wohngemeinschaft) or multi-generation home.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
It’s a culture problem, not an economic one. Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. We’ve just had a few generations of western parents not teaching their children to cook anything. So when those people realise they have to figure out how to feed themselves, they simply don’t know any reasonable ways to do it, even though plenty exist.
- stakhanov 3y ago
  > Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. ...depends on what you find "unreasonable". The internet is full of delicious "10 minute" recipes or "30 minute" recipes or whatever, but that doesn't count the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, cleaning your kitchen, washing your kitchen towels, (un)loading your dishwasher, etc. The reality for me is that I spend maybe 10 hours each weekend shopping for groceries and pre-preparing things that I need to have on hand in the freezer/fridge to even be able to cut the workload to only an hour on a weekday. This adds up to 15 hours a week, so it's maybe half the hours I spend each week being truly productive at work. By some measure, that's actually a lot. And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to. And I don't think my expectations are unreasonably high either: Not living in a major city and spending a ton of money on eating out, and not wanting to fill my body with additives from processed foods is basically what's forcing me.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    > And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to You sound like exactly the sort of person I’m talking about. I’d spend a maximum of 2 hours per week grocery shopping, and I can make dinner at a couple of dollars per portion in 15-30 mins with no prep. I’m not sure what anybody could be forcing you to spend 15 hours per week doing.
    - bob1029 3y ago
      I think you will find an extreme range in mastery in the kitchen, just like you will find it in programming, blacksmithing, construction, plumbing, or literally anything else. In most cases, the master craftsman is orders of magnitude more efficient than the apprentice. Solving problems without any tools. Solving two or more problems at the same time (hint, hint). Etc. The best way to approach this discussion is to respect it as a skill issue and come to terms with that reality. I think we could find a lot of constructive advice to share in this environment. Attitude also helps. If you have the right mindset, it is a lot easier to overcome these concerns. If I really want to keep eating home-cooked meals and enjoying all of the benefits that go along with it, I would absolutely find a way to optimize these activities. At some level, you have to want it. No one is going to hand you the convenience being advertised throughout this thread. For example, I get my ass out of bed at 530AM and arrive at the grocery store as they are opening so that I can avoid crowds and get in/out in <10 minutes. I can literally go from home->store->home in ~25 minutes, but only if I do it at the right time of day. If I wait to go when everyone else does, it will take at least an hour.
vanderZwan 3y ago
If you think monasteries were a solution thought up by poor people to be less poor, then I don't think you know much about the history of monasteries. Not that I'm an expert either, but from what little I gathered monks were relatively privileged people.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  The fourth son of the landed gentry...
tiffanyg 3y ago
...live together in a big building, work together, pray together, ~~cook~~ eat together... What, kinda like this? https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w ... monastery. Ooh. Very nice, eh? Do I get to take a turn as a "sort of executive officer for the week"? https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s More seriously, where do I sign up? ... The older I get, the more I think those monks were / are onto something...
kragen 3y ago
monasteries were already at least a millennium old when the middle ages started, maybe several millennia old; a pilgrimage to a monastery is central to the plot of the ramayana, which depicted its events as impossibly ancient when it was written, at least 900 years before the middle ages. in particular, the kingdom where it began did historically exist but was conquered 1000 years before the middle ages; the ramayana doesn't bother to mention the kingdom that conquered it all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed

Ekaros 3y ago

Then guilt trip others to donate to you money and their inheritance and end up filthy rich... Still doing the same... Kinda weird end result... Who did profit anyway, apart from upper management.

random_upvoter 3y ago
Sure such systems tend to end up getting corrupt if they amass too much power. That was not my point. I guess my point was that given the bleak state of today's social landscape, I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another. And maybe these monasteries didn't only exist because of fervent religiosity but also as a practical way for single men and women to have a better life.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another." Sure and it is happening since a while, take a look here for example: https://www.ic.org/ https://www.ic.org/ So far most of the projects are rather in dreamland than in reality, but some are well established and working. edit: you will also find actual monasterys there if that is your thing
  - apomekhanes 3y ago
    Very interesting - hadn't come across this before, thanks!
gcr 3y ago
You might be confusing "monastery" with "church." EDIT: damn, I stand corrected!
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Not really, quite many monasteries themselves ended up very wealthy. Though they could have acted as proxies by churches. But did not mean they did not hold land what was the wealth back then. And did not have to divide it as inheritance had to.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  "An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
- rewmie 3y ago
  > You might be confusing "monastery" with "church." Many religions besides the catholicism have monasteries, and exploit the same social loophole. Countless Buddhist monasteries also operate as a spa hotel of sorts.
tiffanyg 3y ago
It's all just one giant pyramid scheme anyway... https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down": And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene) And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth". What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD

vladvasiliu 3y ago

How so? As a single person, one of my best purchases was an instant-pot type appliance (not the actual one, but one probably inspired by it, with less control over the temperature and especially the pressure release). In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans. Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.

gear54rus 3y ago
Can you mention this appliance by name? Also, what are some fun recipes?
- sph 3y ago
  I got the actual Instant Pot. This is my second actually, I got the one that also does air frying. It's a great purchase. Get some cheap protein that needs to cook for long, get some vegetables, brown the protein a bit (can be done in the Instant Pot), add chopped vegetables, salt, spices, and a little water; pressure cook for 1 hour. Shorter version: add meat, add vegs, add water, turn on. You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew. My favorite recipe is chilli con carne, which is little more than minced beef with onions peppers and beans in tomato sauce. Stews, chilli and random salads are 90% of my diet.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the same, twice as many taxes, twice as many cars, more spending, more consumption - it's a win-win for the ruling class, while family-units and non-wealthy individuals lose. You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating and vilifying homemakers by observing how furiously most moderns rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating homemaker by observing how most moderns fruoously rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing. Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?
- fragmede 3y ago
  The sci-fi story solution I've come up with is we put everyone into a lottery. Everyone draws a number. Evens get their salary doubled, odds are no longer allowed to work. Everyone find a partner.
  - user982 3y ago
    Evens will pair up with evens to quadruple their unit income (why attach yourself to a deadweight odd?), with odds becoming a shunned caste largely doomed to death.
LVB 3y ago
>and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.

eternauta3k 3y ago

Nowadays you can join a commune, shared appartment (Wohngemeinschaft) or multi-generation home.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

It’s a culture problem, not an economic one. Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. We’ve just had a few generations of western parents not teaching their children to cook anything. So when those people realise they have to figure out how to feed themselves, they simply don’t know any reasonable ways to do it, even though plenty exist.

stakhanov 3y ago
> Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. ...depends on what you find "unreasonable". The internet is full of delicious "10 minute" recipes or "30 minute" recipes or whatever, but that doesn't count the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, cleaning your kitchen, washing your kitchen towels, (un)loading your dishwasher, etc. The reality for me is that I spend maybe 10 hours each weekend shopping for groceries and pre-preparing things that I need to have on hand in the freezer/fridge to even be able to cut the workload to only an hour on a weekday. This adds up to 15 hours a week, so it's maybe half the hours I spend each week being truly productive at work. By some measure, that's actually a lot. And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to. And I don't think my expectations are unreasonably high either: Not living in a major city and spending a ton of money on eating out, and not wanting to fill my body with additives from processed foods is basically what's forcing me.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to You sound like exactly the sort of person I’m talking about. I’d spend a maximum of 2 hours per week grocery shopping, and I can make dinner at a couple of dollars per portion in 15-30 mins with no prep. I’m not sure what anybody could be forcing you to spend 15 hours per week doing.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    I think you will find an extreme range in mastery in the kitchen, just like you will find it in programming, blacksmithing, construction, plumbing, or literally anything else. In most cases, the master craftsman is orders of magnitude more efficient than the apprentice. Solving problems without any tools. Solving two or more problems at the same time (hint, hint). Etc. The best way to approach this discussion is to respect it as a skill issue and come to terms with that reality. I think we could find a lot of constructive advice to share in this environment. Attitude also helps. If you have the right mindset, it is a lot easier to overcome these concerns. If I really want to keep eating home-cooked meals and enjoying all of the benefits that go along with it, I would absolutely find a way to optimize these activities. At some level, you have to want it. No one is going to hand you the convenience being advertised throughout this thread. For example, I get my ass out of bed at 530AM and arrive at the grocery store as they are opening so that I can avoid crowds and get in/out in <10 minutes. I can literally go from home->store->home in ~25 minutes, but only if I do it at the right time of day. If I wait to go when everyone else does, it will take at least an hour.

vanderZwan 3y ago

If you think monasteries were a solution thought up by poor people to be less poor, then I don't think you know much about the history of monasteries. Not that I'm an expert either, but from what little I gathered monks were relatively privileged people.

BashiBazouk 3y ago
The fourth son of the landed gentry...

tiffanyg 3y ago

...live together in a big building, work together, pray together, ~~cook~~ eat together... What, kinda like this? https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w ... monastery. Ooh. Very nice, eh? Do I get to take a turn as a "sort of executive officer for the week"? https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s More seriously, where do I sign up? ... The older I get, the more I think those monks were / are onto something...

kragen 3y ago

monasteries were already at least a millennium old when the middle ages started, maybe several millennia old; a pilgrimage to a monastery is central to the plot of the ramayana, which depicted its events as impossibly ancient when it was written, at least 900 years before the middle ages. in particular, the kingdom where it began did historically exist but was conquered 1000 years before the middle ages; the ramayana doesn't bother to mention the kingdom that conquered it all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed