> Your great-grandfather may have built his own house, your grandfather probably climbed the roof to replace some tiles which got blown off in a storm, your fat

> Your great-grandfather may have built his own house, your grandfather probably climbed the roof to replace some tiles which got blown off in a storm, your father may have stood on a ladder to paint the walls. They all seem to have survived long enough to reproduce so you are able to warn off people from trying to be self-reliant because it may hurt them. Survivor bias. Look at average life expectancy up until the 1950s... it was shockingly low. Most people had many MANY many children just to see one or two live to adulthood - accidents and pandemics claimed their lives, workplace injuries and wars took them as adults. Your great-grandfather likely had four to five siblings [1], earlier generations were at around seven in the US [2]. It's only because of vaccines, OSHA, antibiotics and medicine that human life expectancy has exploded over the last decades. House fires are among the most stubborn killers that still remain, the numbers are going down extremely slowly [3]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-fertility-has-halved https://ourworldindata.org/global-fertility-has-halved [2] https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/average-number-children-per-us-family-historic-infographic.pdf https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a... [3] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/residential-fires/ https://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/residential-fires/