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When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They gr
by delegate 7mo ago
When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents.
They had a cozy house in the village.
They worked the land, they had a few animals.
They grew their food.
They sold some wine and fruit at the market.
They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy.
They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc.
Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.
Now compare with life in a big modern city.
I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.
Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people.
Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time.
Smiles for money only.
I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
- therealwhytry 7mo agosimple, boomer brain rot subsidized for the last 50 years via currency debasement that leads our "leaders" to feel it is the only path forward. that is probably an easy path forward in their mind, as they are on death's door holding the ladder they pulled up behind them.
- trgn 7mo agoboomers didnt want to let go of the welfare state their parents and grandparents had introduced, at the same time they live longer, work less, not nearly had as many kids, and did not effectuate the required productivity growth to offset that. they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.
- modeless 7mo agoThe lifestyle you describe is very cheap and you can certainly afford it, if you wanted. There are plenty of rural small towns you could choose from. Why not do it if it's what you think you want?
- tokai 7mo agoThere's even places in Spain or Italy where they will give you the house for free, and possibly even cash to move in. Still with these benefits they are not reversing the decline of the country side.
- myrmidon 7mo agoI'd say that is nowadays almost completely just a direct consequence of general population decline, and not some more specific effect; this just hits rural communities harder because attracting new people is already difficult there (=> most job opportunities are elsewhere), and it is much easier to fall below "viability thresholds" (i.e. too small to sustain a general store) than it is for cities. I'd argue that the "real" urbanization mostly finished in the 1980s or so, and the "urbanization" we see now is mostly incidental (and happens at lower rates, too).
- delegate 7mo agoYou can't escape the rat race even if you hide in a cave these days. Life like that is no longer possible, at least not in Europe. I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives. But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?
- lucianbr 7mo ago> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' > I happen to like my life in the city Ahh... you struggle to understand why a life you like is considered better than a life you like less, or dislike? People probably consider it better for the same reasons you like it. It should be obvious.
- keybored 7mo agoThere’s two hundreds years of social science and experience reports to answer that question.
- fasterik 7mo agoThis is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature. Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off. People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week. Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
- jeffbee 7mo agoYeah, but unfortunately false nostalgia for subsistence farming is widespread and has traction in the discourse. I guess it's probably because every American who ever suffered from that lifestyle is dead, in other words the same reason that it is now increasingly popular to die from measles. In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".
- bovermyer 7mo agoFarming is harder than people who haven't done it think, and surviving on the production of only your family's property is really, really hard. Source: I grew up in very rural areas, and I've seen what it entails. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression in a farming community on a homestead. However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two. It's possible to put a little effort into gardening, share with your community, and massively reduce the overall cost of food while still having free time.
- interiorchurch 7mo ago
- jeffbee 7mo agoDepending on how old you are, I might suggest that you were simply not aware of the details of your grandparents' lives at that time. And it just sounds like you have surrounded yourself with assholes in adulthood.
- enoch_r 7mo agoFor millenia, about 50% of children died before reaching adulthood. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past We work less than our counterparts 150 years ago: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever Air pollution has decreased over the past few decades (probably much further, just don't have data). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutants?time=1970..2016 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutan... We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality. It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
- keybored 7mo ago1870 is not a great span of time when OP is comparing to some idyllic village life unencumbered by urbanism. Late 19th century had many people in a “rat race” in the city, like work twelve hour days six or seven days a week in a factory type of dead-end race. But there was something that happened later: > For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries. The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.
- ponector 7mo agoWhile there was a rat race in the city, typical farmlife was more brutal: work from early childhood and then from dawn to dusk. City dwellers had at least one day off per week, while working with animals is a job without holidays.
- greygoo222 7mo agoYour problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.
- antisthenes 7mo ago> it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world. 2 of these aren't bad things. 1 is a complete non-sequitur 1 is a good recipe for staying active/healthy and non-obese if done in moderation. Farming equipment is an option - you don't have to till 2-3 acres just by hand. The one thing you neglected to mention (that is a pretty important blocker) is that with farming/country-side living it's pretty hard to leave your kids a legacy outside of leaving them the farm itself, and locking them into the same lifestyle. Also, hugely increased risks in the 21st century due to global warming.
- delegate 7mo agoThe comment was for the article 'Obsession with growth is destroying nature'. Read it. It's not about me personally. In fact, I live a very comfortable life in a beautiful city. But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another. What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.
- pibaker 7mo ago> you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle Revealed preference wins all the time. See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.
- ericmcer 7mo agoThe only justification would be that we are in some liminal space and are living in the confusing period leading up to some tech utopia. You also can still live in the way your grandparents did. In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city. We are just terrified of uncertainty nowadays. Maybe all the technology and distractions keep us from hitting that tipping point of despair/discomfort that would drive us to take risky actions.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago> In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city Cheap land is cheap for a reason, even in the middle of nowhere. We aren't in the old days of homesteading. Good chance that cheap land has no utility access and it will cost 10s of thousands to bring it in. Another really good chance you don't own the rights to the water beneath it, and spending $30k+ to dig a well that may not even hit a viable aquifer. The land could be cheap because its rocky, acidic, or maybe its prone to flooding. What OP is also probably missing is that it's extremely difficult to grow enough calories to sustain a human life for a year. Most "homesteaders" actually still buy most of their calories at the store. Fine so long as your new farm (assuming you even can farm on the cheap land) can turn a profit for you, but now you've just traded one rat race for another. Point being, the rat race is survival, and there is no escaping it. Happiness has to come from within, moving to the middle of nowhere and starting a farm isn't going to magically make your life better. It will probably actually make it worse.
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- ComposedPattern 7mo agoLiving in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
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- MisterTea 7mo agoI keep hearing this repeated but I have yet to read any proof of it. Might as well be a thoughtless meme.
- chocochunks 7mo agoDetached single family homes use more energy than apartments per resident[1]. You need more sewer pipe, more road, more wiring to service the same number of people living in detached single family homes. [1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/c&e/pdf/ce1.1.pdf https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/c&e/pd... (See site energy consumption per household member by housing type on page 2).
- bluescrn 7mo agoIt's absolutely the worst place to be in any sort of crisis though, whether it's war, pandemic, rioting, natural disaster. So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere. And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)
- t-3 7mo agoThat's assuming that city people do the same things as rural people, and the only difference is whether they own a car and a house. City people earn much more money which they spend more freely and use to do more things, which require orders of magnitude more resources, even if they may be slightly more efficient when traveling within city limits (just think about the multiple flights per year every urbanite I know takes, versus the one or two per decade everyone else takes).
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- Tade0 7mo ago> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into A population of eight billion, at least three of which live in industrialized regions. My currently 99yo grandpa was born when there were approximately two billion people. He spent a huge chunk of his childhood running around barefoot. Whenever he talks about that time I can't help but think this world doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a long time now.
- leonidasrup 7mo agoRunning barefoot can feel nice, but in Africa wearing shoes could eliminate significant source of tropical diseases. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/17/how-wearing-shoes-tropical-diseases-podoconiosis-acc https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/17/h...
- gzread 7mo agoI think the city is cool because of the amount of stuff around, even as there's less free space. I think both options should be available.
- adrian_b 7mo agoWhat you describe also matches exactly my grandparents. Moreover, I also encounter the same problems in the big city where I work and live. Hard to be optimistic.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoYou’re right. Ignore the other comments not recognizing that happiness and health can be had without a constant competition with everyone else. The modern way of life is broken. The old way of lives in many older civilizations are better. We need to stop glorifying our western order and look east.
- api 7mo agoThe answer is that most people did not live like what you remember. For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10. That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived. Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing. But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.