17 ms·

The past was not that cute

• Swizec 11mo ago
  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”
  • nonceNonsense 11mo ago
    [flagged]
  • tolerance 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • JuniperMesos 11mo ago
    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.
    • Swizec 11mo ago
      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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/
  • Spooky23 11mo ago
    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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
• techblueberry 11mo ago
  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?
  • samdoesnothing 11mo ago
    I wonder why it is that the past seems more real and the present dishonest and fake? Is it simply that it is?
    • margalabargala 11mo ago
      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.
      • vacuity 11mo ago
        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.
        • pixl97 11mo ago
          >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.
• williamDafoe 11mo ago
  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 ...
  • gyomu 11mo ago
    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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • landosaari 11mo ago
    See Bullerby syndrome [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullerby_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullerby_syndrome
    • aspenmayer 11mo ago
      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/Hayao_Miyazaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai 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 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.
• tinkelenberg 11mo ago
  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.
  • pixl97 11mo ago
    >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.
    • venturecruelty 11mo ago
      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.
      • pixl97 11mo ago
        >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.
      • Qwertious 11mo ago
        AC is fine, with sufficient PV and insulation - most of the time, hot days are sunny days and thus easily renewable. Most people shouldn't own personal automobiles, because most people live in cities and cities shouldn't be built around the personal automobile in the first place.
• Atlas667 11mo ago
  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.
  • A_D_E_P_T 11mo ago
    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.
    • Atlas667 11mo ago
      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.
      • 11mo ago
• IshKebab 11mo ago
  > 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.
  • readthenotes1 11mo ago
    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
• lysace 11mo ago
  Problematic. There's that code word again. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-with-word-problematic/620289/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi... (https://archive.ph/XKBZr https://archive.ph/XKBZr)
  • mystraline 11mo ago
    Elaborate what you mean. What is "problematic" a code word for?
    • sertsa 11mo ago
      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.
      • venturecruelty 11mo ago
        Mm but that's not what you're doing, no. You're being "fair and balanced" and very much neutral and objective.
• api 11mo ago
  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.
  • themafia 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • gerdesj 11mo ago
    "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?
    • scott_w 11mo ago
      Trads: reference to “tradwife.” Follow an idealised 1950s lifestyle that they saw on Mad Men where the wife submits to the man. But they don’t want a conservative woman, they want to force liberal women into it instead. Neo-monarchist: wants a dictator to replace democratic rule, where that dictator is a tech CEO like Elon Musk or Sam Altman (used to be Zuckerberg). Greens: environmentalists. Anarcho-primitivist: wants to end all technological advance and return to hunter gatherer society while miraculously somehow maintaining all the benefits of technology (medicine, relatively comfortable lifestyle).
• KaiserPro 11mo ago
  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-kitchen-at-hampton-court-palace 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)
• delichon 11mo ago
  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.
  • johnfn 11mo ago
    This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can’t tell which side you’re arguing for.
    • DaiPlusPlus 11mo ago
      Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • _DeadFred_ 11mo ago
        Hacker News really is full of luddites now.
    • temp8830 11mo ago
      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.
    • ineedasername 11mo ago
      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.
• tolerance 11mo ago
  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 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.
• constantcrying 11mo ago
  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.
  • themafia 11mo ago
    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.
    • pixl97 11mo ago
      >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%.
      • themafia 11mo ago
        Did the clothes in 1900 last longer than they do today? Did they even have polyester?
        • AlotOfReading 11mo ago
          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.
• bluedino 11mo ago
  > 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.
  • pixl97 11mo ago
    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.
    • verbify 11mo ago
      > 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.
      • brabel 11mo ago
        It was shocking to me to see how huge onions are in Vancouver, and I guess the same applies to the US… those things can’t be natural!! In Europe they are half the size.
• venturecruelty 11mo ago
  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".
  • skybrian 11mo ago
    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-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/ 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-brief https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br...
    • PeterHolzwarth 11mo ago
      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.
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
• gerdesj 11mo ago
  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-statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fuel-poverty-stati...
  • nradov 11mo ago
    It's sad how the UK government has impoverished its people through a bizarre and misguided pursuit of "Net Zero".
    • hexbin010 11mo ago
      Our high energy costs are far more complicated than that.
    • Qwertious 11mo ago
      It's so weird how people in the UK blame their economic woes on renewables and not the fact that they sanctioned themselves against their main trading partners with Brexit. Like, what were you expecting? Breaking out of the EU (a primarily economic union) results in economic problems. Import controls requires stopping incoming trucks (sorry, incoming lorries) and that requires building major truck stop to avoid backups, and it increases shipping costs on everything. You(r govt) didn't build the truck stops, didn't set up any sort of plan until after the import controls went into effect, and were somehow surprised that putting up a trade barrier resulted in less trade, and a resulting economic slowdown.
• stevenwoo 11mo ago
  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.
• Jordan-117 11mo ago
  Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-century-enjoyed-by-sub-1819565927/ https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...
• slowhadoken 11mo ago
  Today will be the brutal past in the future.
  • 1718627440 11mo ago
    Not necessarily. They are also times of cultural decline. Late roman live was more comfortable than some time in the middle ages.
    • slowhadoken 11mo ago
      People arbitrarily point at periods in the past to say they were worse or better. Some people idealize the Middle Ages over Rome. A Ren Faire is a hodgepodge of Medieval/Renaissance larping. But the past as a sum total is usually worse, hence the concept of progress. While the beginning of someone’s life is usually best and the end is worse. Historically speaking it’s complicated.
• ridgeguy 11mo ago
  My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.
  • munchler 11mo 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.)
  • PeterHolzwarth 11mo ago
    Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful or two decades ago.
• Animats 11mo ago
  This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.
• inshard 11mo ago
  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.
• JoshTriplett 11mo ago
  "Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." -- Ovid
  • ascorbic 11mo ago
    He would've loved Tumblr
• PeterHolzwarth 11mo ago
  "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.
  • missedthecue 11mo ago
    I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand, but that's shockingly intensive labor.
  • danny_codes 11mo ago
    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.
    • margalabargala 11mo ago
      People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
      • euroderf 11mo ago
        And also beer became possible.
      • UltraSane 11mo ago
        Initially but the excess food allowed population to increase and the only way to feed them was to keep farming. So in a way humans trapped themselves.
• barfoure 11mo ago
  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.
  • cindyllm 11mo ago
    [dead]
• zzo38computer 11mo ago
  The past is not perfect and there are some things that are improved in some ways these days (and in future), but other things are being worse these days (and in future) than they were. It is not so simple. I also think that you should not rely on (or overuse) modern technology too much, even though it can sometimes be beneficial (so it is not the reason to avoid it unconditionally, nor necessarily to avoid it generally). Many things now are excessively artificially, including (but not limited to): light, music, communication, food, transportation, and now even also creativity. (Some of these (such as food and music) are mentioned in that article but some are they do not seem to mention it) This is not the only problem (there are many other problems too), but it is one aspect of it.
• tacitusarc 11mo ago
  This hits on a pet peeve of mine: representing the past as dull and colorless, because we mostly have access to b&w or sepia photos from the time. I’m not saying that the overall point isn’t true, just that juxtaposing photos propagates an already deeply-embedded and mistaken intuition that the past was somehow less colorful, less vibrant than the present. To try to combat this, I had ChatGPT colorize the “actual farmer” photo: https://ibb.co/1tkcLKmY https://ibb.co/1tkcLKmY
  • pezezin 11mo ago
    This is something that I have been noticing for years. Whenever I try to imagine "the past" (any time period before I was born), I tend to imagine it with fuzzy colors and film grain, like and old movie. It takes me some conscious effort to remember that the past looked the same as the present!
  • techblueberry 11mo ago
    Yeah, I actually love the “cottagecore” photos I think she’s trying to use as evidence that the past wasn’t cute? But the stone farmhouse with straw roof is exactly the image I have in mind when I romanticize “cottagecore of the past. (While understanding it was a bit drafty, but “cute” is about aesthetic and I totally dig the aesthetic) But actually I do admit this is the best part of living today, if you want it, you can have some level of that aesthetic and lifestyle with some of the efficiencies of modern technology (not having to worry about dying of starvation if a harvest doesn’t work out)
• sssilver 11mo ago
  I do wish I were born early enough to have been a software engineer in eighties and early nineties.
  • pezezin 11mo ago
    I was born in 1985 and sometimes I wish I was born 10 years earlier to get to experience the heydays of the 8 and 16-bit home computers.
• Waterluvian 11mo ago
  I’m convinced that the fatal flaw of humanity: forgetting the lessons of the past, is a function of our lifespan. You don’t have to be empathic or educated or wise if you still have a grandparent at the dinner table who will straighten you out on how bad Polio or the Great Depression or Nazis, etc. really were. Our social herd immunity weakens as we lose a critical mass of people who were there and experienced the horror.
  • integralid 11mo ago
    >I’m convinced that the fatal flaw of humanity: forgetting the lessons of the past, is a function of our lifespan Counterpoint: some lessons deserve to be forgotten. Like there are many old people in my country that hate Germany and Germans for the things that happened in 2nd world war. Yes, nazis were bad and Holocaust was a nightmare. But modern day Germany moved past it. In fact, in Europe almost every country both did and was a victim on many atrocities. Dwelling on that forever would make peace or things like EU impossible. We would still be angry at things that happened 500 years ago. Unfortunately we forget more than we should, but maybe it's the price we have to pay to evolve as a society.
• gostsamo 11mo ago
  I'm blind and even 50 years ago my life would be 10x more limited than now. 100 - years, outright miserable. 1000 years - beggar or a fake oracle. There is a marked difference between living with someone's help and on their mercy. Living with no modern facilities and technologies is pretty easy only when you don't encounter the reasons they are created for.
• dogemaster2028 11mo ago
  Something I haven’t seen discussed here is the role of capitalism as the biggest lift to the quality of humans lives (in addition to things like vaccines and health departments or generally science). The notion of Incentives in human nature to drive innovation, with efficient allocation via prices and value, plus competition, all leading to capital accumulation that just then be efficiently allocated to generate further value was amazing. If you think about the current situation in Venezuela, China or Russia on useless missions that led to famine or to killing of millions of people, we cannot argue that capitalism wasn’t a huge influence in the impact in humans lives I was looking at AOC’s comments about capitalism somewhere and could not believe my ears. Then Thomas Sowell gave a masterclass rebuttal to each of AOC’s ignorant points. Everyone should listen to it: https://x.com/cubaortografia/status/1997272611269525985 https://x.com/cubaortografia/status/1997272611269525985
• Aloha 11mo ago
  This is a bit meta, but looking at the comments on this thread - Nostalgia is a hell of a powerful drug, probably the most powerful one our brains can self generate (because of the complexity of feelings generated). While I like some bits, some tech, some ascetics from yesteryear - I know one thing for certain - the world today is better for basically everyone than it has every been, by virtually every measurable standard, even the poorest of the poor are better off in 2025 than they ever have been at any point in history. So while I might want to go visit the past if I had a time machine, I know I would never want to live there.
• zkmon 11mo ago
  >> I want you to have a life I didn’t have. But they said it imagining some contemporary lifestyle that was not "servitude". That's not what your current life is. If they had a chance to look at your life now and compare it with their servitude life, they would probably not say that. The reason is, modern life has lost core abilities of innate resilience and community. The comforts such as the oven-baking came at the cost of losing some other things, which you ignore. So it all depends on what you value.
• vintermann 11mo ago
  "We can buy a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear", sang the Beatles, and that was a thing retirees did when they sang it. Those retirees would have been born in 1890-1910, and be perfectly aware of what life was like without running water and electricity (or the old age pension which made buying a cottage in the Isle of Wight an option!), yet they still obviously saw something in the "cottagecore" life. I'm thinking also of one set of great-great grandparents. He was from a very poor farming family, who had decided to look for work in the city instead of emigrating to the US. She was from a considerably wealthier farming family (which owned their own farm, his didn't), and also had decided to move to the city, probably more out of a desire to see the world (and the wonders of fin de siecle city life) than necessity. They did well for themselves in the city, but in their old age they moved to a rural cottage near the farm she grew up on. (I think actually she inherited the land, and considerably more, but that they sold off the rest). I think that with money, cottage core can be a desirable life. A big part of the reason life was hard for life-on-the-prairie people was that they had debts, and need for a good deal of things they couldn't grow themselves. With a little money, like both my great-great grandparents and the stereotypical Beatles retirees had, cottage life can be fine.
  • ascorbic 11mo ago
    Well, yes if you're a retiree then thing are always a bit different, but the cottagecore lifestyle is about raising a family, not retiring. Ironically, the Isle of Wight is still a great example. It's a lovely place for a holiday, and a great place to retire. I spent a weekend there a few weeks ago and had a great time. Lovely landscape, beaches with dinosaur footprints and loads of fossils, great pubs. I recommend it! But it's really not a good place for a working age family. I'd never choose to live there. There's a reason it's among the most deprived areas in England. It's badly isolated, with a crazily-expensive ferry the only connection to the mainland. The jobs are working in tourism, agriculture, or at the prison. Housing is totally unaffordable, because of all the second-homeowners, holiday cottages and – yes – retirees. The story is the same in many tourism areas.
  • brabel 11mo ago
    Don’t they buy cottages anymore? In Sweden that is still extremely popular. Almost everyone who can afford one owns one, to my foreign eyes amusement as to me that’s just finding something to work on every summer. There’s a satirical reference to this in the series “Welcome to Sweden”, which makes fun of lots of stereotypical Swedish behavior.
• Simplita 11mo ago
  Funny how nostalgia smooths out the parts that were actually painful. The post is a good reminder that every era only looks simple in hindsight.
• rhubarbtree 11mo ago
  I think it’s really revealing to see so many folks defending views like “hunter gathering was better” and “the past wasn’t dickensian.” I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was a better life for humans. It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress, because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful capitalists that rule the world. But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what already is. We’re pretty good at anticipating and appreciating the new, but if it’s already there then, like a spoilt child living in a luxury home, we take it for granted. I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in winter don’t use your heating or hot water. For me, it was travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful (at least for a while).
  • deleted 11mo ago
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  • senfiaj 11mo ago
    We are definitely better at survival and safety. In modern societies we are less likely to starve, die in infancy / childhood, have longer life expectancy, etc. But when we compare by other metrics, such as mental and physical health, it becomes more complicated. The problem is that out brains and bodies aren't well adapted to the modern world. In the past there were stresses (predators, hunger, conflict), but they were more acute, big spike of stress, but you usually had a lot of time to recover. For example, predator appears, huge spike in stress, run/fight, either you die or it's over. But afterwards (if you survived) you usually had a lot of rest. Also you more or less directly saw the results of your actions. For example, you hunt means you eat, you build shelter means stay dry, etc. Meanwhile, modern people tend to have chronic low-level stress caused by the complicated and fast paced society: money worries, grind, bureaucracy, deadlines, school / college / university, burnout, job insecurity, notifications, news doomscrolling. Our stress systems are constantly activated which is devastating for long-term mental health. It's no wonder that we have higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality. Today's stress is more akin to death by thousands of small cuts. The same is for our physical health. I'm not claiming hunter gatherers' lives were not challenging. There were a lot risks, physical hardship, famines, etc. But evolutionary speaking, our bodies / minds were more equipped to deal with those types stresses. Here is a good video that talks about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo
• another_twist 11mo ago
  > My mother pointed out that a lot of the songs along the lines of “my own true love proved false to me” were about unplanned pregnancies. I was this years old when I realized it.
• acessoproibido 11mo ago
  It's ironic how HN spends a whole thread gushing about how easy and nice the life of paleolithic hunter gatherers was as reaction to a article that talks about how we romanticize the past...
• systemtest 11mo ago
  The Coca Cola poster on the impoverished wall is eerie. Reminds me of developing countries where to this day I see the same, run down shanty towns with Coca Cola signs all over.
• bloomingeek 11mo ago
  When I was a child, my Father's Father was considered a black sheep of the family, thus most extended family held my Father at arms length. The exception was his first cousin, Imogene and her husband. They farmed land in northern Louisiana, and we visited them at least once a year while I was growing up. I loved going there and enjoyed their large family, which had two boys my age who taught me how to hunt, fish and ride horses. I remember the early years when they didn't have running water or indoor plumbing, which my Mother hated, but I thought was fun. As the years went by and the price of the main crops that were grown increased, the "shack" was updated more to Mother's liking. When I reached my tween years, I was asked if I wanted to earn a little money by working in the fields, I was thrilled. My first assignment was to work hoeing cotton, a semi-brutal job performed on endless rows in scorching heat. I was working with a black family who, I was told, worked on that particular piece of land for generations. They took care of me and, after a few days, I began to understand their accented speech. As a kid from a middle-class white family who lived in a city hundreds of miles away, it was my first time to experience a culture shock. It was a lot to process being so young, but I do have fond memories, especially of the Mother of the family. I didn't have any contact with the family except in the fields, so I can't pretend to know how they felt about their lives, I do know they worked very hard in the summer and found whatever work they could in the winter. This all took place in the seventies.
• dash2 11mo ago
  This is true and fair, yet there is another mistake which I see a lot of: thinking that because people didn't live lives as comfortable as we do, their lot was unremitting misery. Kind of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail view of pre-industrial life. It's important to have some nuance. Different places had different living standards. The French village life depicted in Peasants into Frenchmen sounds grim; English village life around 1900 was nice enough to generate nostalgic books like Lark Rise to Candleford after the rise of the motor car. The peasants in Brueghel paintings are having a lot of rough, unsophisticated fun. That doesn't mean we should not be grateful for (say) modern dentistry! Of course we should. But if you paint an entirely black picture of premodern life, you may subtly dehumanize the people who lived it.
• ManlyBread 11mo ago
  I think I don't understand the point of this site anymore when this is what makes it to the front page.
  • anonyfox 11mo ago
    guess people upvote what they're right now interested in. still a lot better than the next AI slop trying to hype
• class3shock 11mo ago
  I think the interest in cottagecore and similar things is less about people finding them cute and more about people looking for meaning, something we've always struggled with as technology advanced. Look at the Arts & Crafts movement in the US and Art Nouveau in Europe in the early 1900s, both were a response to the industrialization and dehumanization of work and art. Read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut from the 1950s which imagined a future where basically all work was automated and the terribleness of that path. History might only rhyme but this is one that has happened a number of times.
• nntwozz 11mo ago
  Look at this astonishing graph: https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
  • libraryofbabel 11mo ago
    Yeah, I thought of this first as well. There is nothing that hammers home the point that the past was a horrible place better than childhood mortality statistics. I’m surprised the author of the article didn’t mention it, given all her focus on families - I mean, good for her for realizing she didn’t understand what life in the past was really like, but she still seems a little focused on “it wasn’t cute” rather than the really big differences. Related recent HN thread on the Bills of Mortality from early modern London: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46045061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46045061 The tldr of my post there is that life before the mass availability of antibiotics after WWII was pretty terrifying.
    • dan-robertson 11mo ago
      People sometimes say that people in the past would have been familiar with the idea that mortality is high and therefore fine when half their children died. While there would have been cultural rituals in these cases, it seems like there is reasonable evidence (epitaphs, cultural practices eaves-drip burials or stillborn baptisms, etc) that the loss was still very dearly felt and so people’s lives were just much worse.
    • kakacik 11mo ago
      If that would not be enough, any lack of medical care could be another. 10% chance of dying for every birth for the mother. Flu, any tooth ache, appendix inflammation or any more severe cut would be easily deadly for young and old. Everybody had tons of parasites and smelled horribly including royalty, think working out hard daily and wearing the same cloth, bathing once a year (maybe). Freedom we consider a basic human right was basically unheard of, everybody was a prisoner of some form of somebody else.
• kaluga 11mo ago
  [dead]
• dmix 11mo ago
  I learned this recently. I got into waxed canvas/cotton jackets for outdoors stuff, where people would oil it for waterproofing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton The jackets look nice but they are heavy, don't breath well, and are usually expensive for quality, and they are more water resistant than waterproof. Compared to modern ultra-light synthetic jackets (down etc) that are legitimately water/windpoof which feels much nicer and warmed doing high activity stuff in poor weather. The only downside is they aren't as rugged, like getting a scratch walking through a bush or cuts from tools/dogs. Old stuff always lasts longer but the IRL experience doesn't always outweigh the cons.
• MarkusWandel 11mo ago
  The present isn't all that cute either. But if from the view of 100 years in the future, all you saw was the idealized lives of everyone as posted on social media, you'd think it was a lost, happy time too. That's how nostalgia works. You preserve the good stuff, you let the boring and crappy stuff be forgotten. At least relatively.
  • woopwoop 11mo ago
    If the Canterbury Tales had been actually representative of the time in which they were written, it would not have been the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, etc. It would have been the Subsistence Farmer's Tale, the Subsistence Farmer's Tale, the Subsistence Farmer's Tale, etc.
    • nephihaha 11mo ago
      The Canterbury Tales were trying to show the viewpoints of people from a wide variety of social backgrounds.
      • woopwoop 11mo ago
        But in this world the distribution of social backgrounds in the population had very low entropy. Over 90% of people were just working the land.
        • nephihaha 11mo ago
          If Chaucer had just had subsistence farmer after subsistence farmer telling their tales it would be very boring. Even in such a society, there were a number of different roles at the bottom of it. Some people were shepherds or drovers rather than just scraping the soil, others were producing cloth and clothing, others were fishermen, others were midwives and so on. All these were useful at the time and used by peasants.
          • woopwoop 11mo ago
• throwawayffffas 11mo ago
  The past was so cute, for certain people. A certain landowning leisurely class. The whole point of cottage-core is to role-play as an English aristocrat visiting their "humble" hunting lodge.
• didibus 11mo ago
  Also known as "The Golden Age Fallacy". It's a very common one nowadays as we've all romanticized the past in media and our subconscious.
• pcrh 11mo ago
  Cottagecore is almost entirely an aesthetic and nostalgic trend. Such aesthetics have a long history, well illustrated by bucolic visions of "simple" peasant life from the classical Greek and Roman era , e.g. Theocritus in 300 BC [0], to the 19th century paintings by John Constable. It has little to do with the actual realities of living a rural agrarian life. Let alone a pre-industrial one. So the tone of much of the discussion in this thread (technology vs simplicity) a little curious, to say the least. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocritus#Bucolics_and_mimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocritus#Bucolics_and_mimes
• potato3732842 11mo ago
  Many here have spent their lives developing skills that produce nothing tangible or immediate so "well the past sucked anyway" is a pretty attractive narrative if one has incurred that opportunity cost. Yes, a world without antibiotics and modern commerce sucked, there was hard labor everywhere but on the other hand these people didn't need pills to get their asses out of bed every morning.
• dreamcompiler 11mo ago
  Here in New Mexico there's a long tradition of flat-roofed adobe house construction; the materials are abundant and it insulates fairly well (by the standards of the 1700s). But the roofs always leak because snow and rain don't immediately run off. Yet even though we now have modern building materials readily available, a lot of faux adobe still gets built especially in wealthy neighborhoods. We have a saying: "New Mexico is a place where poor people want to live in a modern house with a pitched roof and rich people want to live in mud huts."