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> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago.

Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate of maternal death in childbirth (play 5+ rounds of not-quite-russian-roulette and the odds get pretty grim). Starvation and disease were ubiquitous. Many people suffered some now-trivial injury and ended up as lifelong cripples. The work was literally backbreaking and elderly people’s (i.e. >50 years old) bodies were just wrecked after a career of hard manual labor, assuming they lived that long at all. People’s indoor time was spent in small dark rooms with an open hearth worse than the worst second-hand cigarette smoke you can possibly find, and unbelievably uncomfortable beds. In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) and everyone was slightly malnourished, especially in the winter. People generally just shat outside near their houses and hoped the dogs would take care of it. If they wanted water (for drinking, bathing, ...) they’d have to carry it on their heads/backs from the nearest well or stream; water is very heavy.

People had to make literally everything in an extremely labor-intensive way from scratch: clothes, food, housing, furniture, toys, tools, etc. Raising sheep (or finding some other fiber) and then carding the wool, spinning the wool, weaving every piece of fabric on a hand loom, sewing fabric into clothes takes unbelievable amounts of human time. Making a small hut by hand takes weeks if not months of work (and the result is usually drafty, leaky, and not very comfortable). Making bread by hand including growing the grain and grinding it is nearly a full time job for everyone in the society.

If for whatever reason you were different from the expected norms (or just got unlucky and crossed the wrong gossipy neighbor) the rumors about you would mercilessly destroy your social life, and possibly result in exile or death if neighbors decided you were (e.g.) a witch.

The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.

Etc.

There’s a reason that the world has now experienced several centuries of dramatic migration away from rural peasant farming and toward horribly exploitative urban factory labor.

GP is talking about pre-WWII civilization, not medieval serfdom.

@Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII".

I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides.

And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.

I did indeed have medieval serfs and particular feudal society in mind in my comment, and meant 500-600 years ago by "a few". I probbaly should have said "several".

The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.

The feudal system (summary: rule by gangs of heavily armed thugs who force their local peasants to work by threatening to kill them otherwise, and take whatever liberties with them they like, including theft, kidnapping, rape, murder, ...) is given a “bad rap” because is was and is horrendously exploitative, leading to very bad outcomes for nearly everyone.

It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.

> This is how things were a few hundred years ago.

I’m talking about rural Mexico up through the 1960s, within the living memory of elderly people (with some of the features I mentioned persisting today or only recently changing). The US South was like this at least through the first few decades the 20th century (after WWII the US Federal government made a tremendous effort to bring jobs and infrastructure to underdeveloped parts of the country), as were many parts of Europe. Some places around the world still look largely like my description.

People quickly forget many of the hardships their own great grandparents faced.

Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial amount of time as a child in the 1990s visiting an indigenous peasant village, sleeping in a dirt-floored hut with a hearth fire nearby, with no electricity and water carried on people’s heads from half a mile away, high infant mortality, belief that diseases are caused by witches (vs. germs), etc.

The past was fairly horrible, of course, but we've definitely lost elements of it which were good. For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar. Remnants still exist, but the mass market replacement, supermarkets, are missing a lot that was once better in the past. We've certainly vastly exceeded any previous material lifestyle, I don't feel like we've exceeded a lot of the cultural aspects of the past. Not, of course, that I want a return to conservative rural culture or something, but there's definitely something uniquely atomised about modern life in the West.

I really enjoy real markets. They can be found in many parts of the world including in developed metropolises, and still existed in many places in the USA within living memory.

Their illegalization and displacement by supermarkets has been at least partly a deliberate political choice, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable part of modern life.

(Working as a vendor in a market stall is not necessarily a great career though.)

> For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar.

There are farmers market around my area and my impression is that, if anything, people selling there can be more dishonest than the big chain stores - i.e. they will try selling a batch of bad apples, because they're not wealthy and they just need the money. Whereas big chains have quality standards and will just throw away bad food.

I think that's because at a farmers market you're still trading with somebody completely foreign to you. Pre-industrial societies were smaller, and based around tighter knit communities. Much harder to rip somebody off if they live 3 houses down and look after your kids twice a week, compared to some random person off the street.

Nobody's glamorizing rural poverty, the point was that our over-compartmentalized work culture is a relatively very recent phenomenon with negative consequences for many people such as decreased work satisfaction, decreased sense of social safety net/community, and loneliness.

It's kind of annoying how every time someone discusses aspects of society that may have regressed from the past, somebody chimes in to remind us that technology has advanced so life is better today. Well obviously, what's your point? Nobody's claiming we should get rid of 21st century technology and start living like medieval peasants.

There are a lot of negative aspects to a career spent «working the land» and «living in a small town where everyone knows everything about you, anonymity/privacy are impossible, and you depend on your neighbors for survival» even if you leave aside the «before modern technology» part.

But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago. In practice it was a hard and stressful life both physically and socially.

The summary of the downsides of peasant life was:

> Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this.

This is a dramatic understatement, to say the least.

> in our current society you are just a drone. [...] Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't.

Rural peasants have been treated much more like “just drones” for the past 8 (?) millennia since large-scale civilization built on agriculture than any modern office worker. (Hunter–gatherer societies are different in many ways, though also often precarious.)

Rural peasants do not lack for work anxiety. Or anxiety in their interpersonal relationships. In rural peasant societies many people feel alienated. Domestic abuse is rampant. And so on.

There are many beautiful and nostalgic things about historical rural life. But we shouldn’t get carried away.

> But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago.

No they weren't, like I said in my last comment, they were talking about the negative effects of the modern overcompartmentalization of work. It's not hard to see that there are certain benefits to working for oneself in one's own home vs. being a cog on an assembly line in some factory.

I imagine they were talking about farmers, not peasants. By the way the average medieval peasant had more time off than the average American worker since the work was seasonal. The takeaway there isn't "let's return to medieval technology and start living like medieval peasants again", it's "maybe there's something wrong with our society if despite the enormous technological advances from the past, certain elements of society like autonomy over one's time have regressed, controlling for technology".

Again, the original commenter was not arguing that we should all start living like the Amish. It's a failure of reading comprehension if that's how you interpreted it.

> In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar)

> The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.

You are cherry-picking examples that are in no way representative of the life of most humans.

Plenty of evidence shows otherwise.

My “cherry picked examples” are the life stories of people I have personally met (and with high likelihood of your own ancestors and their neighbors within the past 150 years – certainly of my ancestors ~5 generations ago who were European peasants). It obviously wasn’t the case that every peasant was raped and then murdered by a local lord, but such violence was common and a constant threat.

Rural peasants were and are typically a foot shorter than people living in wealthy industrialized countries today (or people in hunter–gatherer tribes for that matter). Almost all of their calories come from staple starches, which they supplement as best they can. Periods of extreme hunger are common enough that most peasants experienced them at least a few times over a lifetime. What kind of good nutrition do you think people have/had?

Life expectancy was under 40 years old. Even life expectancy after age 5 was pretty short.

Thanks for this. I find articles like this on HN tend to be full of rosy-eyed nostalgia. It's rather annoying.

>There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people.

How is this rosy-eyed?

I think many people today use the idea that even though some things are miserable today it ok, because they've been miserable always. It's a sad, self-defeating coping mechanism, a lame justification for how things are.

It's possible for some things to have been better in the past, much like some other things may be better in the present. Progress like regress is unilateral.

But still I would argue, we keep forgetting: - Food - Health - Shelter - Freedom - Family is safe, not killed or taken away by barbarians or the plague or a demon

are pretty much at the top of “things that really stress us when we don’t have them.

I mean, everything else is icing on the cake. Not too long ago, people didn’t know whether they would starve to death during the next winter, their wife would die from childbirth or some local bogeyman would just burn down your house and enslave your family.

Which era in history are we referring to here? I feel like you’ve covered a couple.

jacobolus, you have missed the point. He did not glamorize rural living or poverty

Anecdotally, the best professional experience in my 15+ career in tech was one startup. There the founders were very into doing “work-life harmony” instead of “work-life balance”. They made a point to have their friends meet your friends and each colleagues’s friends. Our partners and spouses knew each other. There was a big push to make sure your work is not simply something that you work and leave in the office, but that you’re part of the tribe. They genuinely cared.

It was an incredible experience. Everyone was very passionate. The company grew in revenue 1000%.

Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there.

I’m obviously massively oversimplifying here and there were more factors, but the feeling of belonging was very real. And I know it was not just me as we have ex-colleagues gatherings from time to time and the sentiment is shared.

That sounds like a work cult. We're all these families still your friends after leaving the company?

Yeah I admit it was a little bit cultish. Exactly what my partner complained of when I joined the startup. But as time went by it became a lot better.

I mean real cults short-circuit normal human tribal behavior for their own survival. And we usually consider it bad as the stuff the cult demands usually go against the society at large.

But in my case it was a rather productive and a moderately lucrative enterprise for all involved. Its just that instead of “oh honey your off to work see ya in 8hours” it was more “oh say hi to this and that for me” kinda thing. Just more human all around.

Anyway to answer your question - yeah we do stay in touch with some, not all of course.

>Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there.

Got a little essay on that:

https://realminority.wordpress.com/

Nope, not in a hundred years.

I go to work for 1 reason: compensation. I expect to get paid, and get the benefits agreed upon when I agreed to work here. I will be friendly to those I work with, so that I don't hate to come in to work every day.

Does that mean they have the right to meet my SO or friends or things/people/hobbies outside of work? Absolutely not. If I choose to do so, that's on me.

Work != outside of work. That's a hard boundary.

> This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health.

Alternatively, it extends the reach of companies further into the home environment, and may exacerbate the existing trend for people not to switch off, which in turn makes it harder to achieve a good life-work balance. Imagine having a pressurised call-centre type role from home. Some people may feel greater pressure to appear 'corporate' in the home environment, others might not mind their kids or cats interrupting a Zoom meeting. Not everyone can create a suitable WFH environment in a nice spare room.

Whether this actually happens depends on corporate culture, the personalities and goals of the managers and employees, whether a crunch is on, and many other factors. But I'm not convinced that a tighter integration between work and home is necessarily always going to be a positive, from a mental health perspective.

True. I am hoping for a trend where it becomes normal that a kid interrupts some business meeting, or you talk to your coworker or CEO in a video chat while they are cooking or folding clothes or something. Almost as if you were talking to real people.

Ask a parent (usually mother) what happens if they try to bring a kid to their (non coronavirus era) office because they don't have anyone else to care for the kid that day. Almost always completely unacceptable, for reasons ranging from arbitrary fake professionalism to lack of interest in setting up a support structure and expecting employees to sacrifice their personal lives for the company.

I can only hope this "fake macho work persona" bubble-burst carries forward into post-covid.

I will try to overlook the sexism in your posting. In my company, its not umgingen that someone brings their kid to work. Be it to show the kids what they are doing all day, or because of some logistics thing, or daycare closed or whatnot. Never a problem. Also not uncommon to work from home for the same reason. And it's usually the men who do that (sorry if that doesn't fit into your stereotype).

> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago.

I always wonder where and when exactly when people say things like that. Because whatever period I look at, there were wast groups of people who did not lived like this happy ideal.

It is like that right now in many small villages in Italy, Spain, Germany, and possibly other places I haven't visited.

This overwhelming sense of anonymity is in my opinion typical for US suburbs and US mega shopping malls.

Most other countries have smaller and more intimate town squares, optimized for waking rather than driving.

They have huge unemployment.

Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".

Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field.

Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror.

You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.

I take issue with this drone nonsense. If you are helping people for money you are doing good with your life. If you are comfortable at work and not being physically or emotionally abused, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "drone". Not everyone should be a celebrity changing the world in their own big way. Imagine if the whole world was being constantly reshaped in 7 billion ways!

I think what drone means isn't that working typical office jobs at megacorps is bad and you should rather go and try to change the world, but that you are very replaceable in such jobs and there's not really a personal connection and that is the issue.

>I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this.

This is the best way to put it! It's all make believe and facade. As naive as this sounds, we have to separate our work time and personal time. I don't know if that means we should have dual personalities akin to having different themes/profiles on phones, or we should have a clear separation of activities, but without one, is what leads to OPs path, and I have been there.

> I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives.

Division of labor is a tragedy. In the long run, it destroys the soul.

And non-division of labor starves the body of actual food, shelter, and medicine.