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Comment by mymythisisthis | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to somewhat disagree. We've never seen such great urbanization. In almost a generation we've moved from rural to urban. We moved from collecting firewood, by hand, and growing our own food. To being completely dependent on electricity, and the electrical grid. I've been luckily enough to meet many elderly people. People who grow up on farms, and moved to cities. Now in their 90s. The 20th century was such a great leap into the future.

I've heard countless times, of a person growing up on a small farm with 8 siblings. Seeing electricity come to their village, the first phones. Them seeing planes for the first time. Being able to afford to make an international phone call. I live in Canada.

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Reminders like this send a shiver down my spine. Reality works on such a grander timescale than humans that it’s easy for us to convince ourselves that something is working when in reality it’s only worked so far. My family relies on the trucks to keep rolling. As much as I love post apocalyptically stories like zombies and what not, I firmly understand that I can’t feed my family and would likely be forced to watch them starve if the current world order broke down. Here’s to hoping that great leap into the future wasn’t into a really deep hole with a long fall before we hit solid ground.

The lose of being self-sufficient is one moral of the story. But, their is another that we've forgotten.

The absolute joy of modernity.

People abandoned those farms as quickly as they could. It was no fun working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day. A cow needs to be milked, or its utter bursts. Animals needs food and care. Wood needs to be chopped, or you get cold.

Factories were clean (compared to the farm), well lighted. You got Sunday off. You could save some money from your paycheck, take a vacation. The workday ended a 6, you'd be home and and have dinner at 6:30.

Exactly, something that few are willing to recognize these days. Same people who will pay for any tiny convenience also tend to glamorize the past. None of them would put up with a day of an average person from 150 years ago.

> The absolute joy of modernity.

Oh my god, No. This is not an absolute. Are some things better? Yes. Are some things worse, Yes. The relative mix of the two depends on who you are and what you have access to.

People abandoned those farms on the basis of optimism that certain things would improve, which you’ve pointed out, but how many of them had a crystal ball that foretold of environmental collapse, community collapse, loneliness, mental health issues, and massive and growing inequality?

Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.

You clearly have never been a farmer. People left the farms because the alternatives were BETTER. Not because of "optimism" but because working 12 hours a day for a guaranteed wage you could use to buy food / clothing / shelter was better than working 16 hours a day to try and grow food only to still potentially starve due to environmental factors outside your control. Modernity certainly has its problems, but for the vast, vast majority of people its much preferable to the drudgery, toil and uncertainty of being a subsistence farmer.

> Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.

A husband and wife team of sociologists tried this experiment and set up to live like the late 1800s.

The wife broke down after 3 weeks. The husband likely wasn't very far behind.

The wife spent ALL her time cooking and cleaning. The husband spent his time exhausted from physical work. Period. Repeat ad nauseam. There was a reason families had 10 children back then.

Electricity and the electric motor was HUGE. If you sent people back to the world before electricity, they would regard it as a literal hell.

Compare to the large groups of Amish, Mennonites and similar, who live like this currently but with the benefit of community and other things I mentioned above as negative components of modernity. One of the groups (Amish I believe) has something called Rumspringa, a time when teens leave the strict confines of the community to experience modernity. The vast, vast majority return to their communities.

A husband and wife team trying out the 1800s lack community and the other things I mention above. Also, using a husband and wife team of sociologists (meaning, educated, employed and highly employable with job security, salaried, with health care coverage, etc etc) as the quintessential example of a human under modernity seems fishy to me.

My point is not that modernity has no benefit whatsoever. My point is that it is ridiculous to called it an “absolute” joy, indicating no downside. Sure, for the privileged that may be true, but for many it is not the case.

It's not really fun being in those communities if you don't believe, or are gay. It's also hard to leave, as you might not have the resources to do so.

There are lots of things that need to be improved upon. I've seen enough miserable people, living alone, watching TV all day with no friends. Yes, for far too many this life is just the dregs.

20th century has certainly been revolutionary, no doubt about that. It is a bit of a apples-to-oranges comparison though. We can't resolve solved problems.

The starting point for, dunno, 1970, is a world where people don't have to plough fields by hand / oxen, at least in the developed world. This is the shoulders of giants we are standing on. The information revolution that happened since is enormous.

The societal changes, where expectations on women went from make-babies-and-stay-at-home to forge-your-own-destiny is massive (WIP sadly, but going in a good direction). Access to education and real access to democracy have hugely improved in the last decades. Internet revolutionised information access. How crazy it is that any aspiring teenager, in US, India or Tonga, can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, download state-of-the-art programming language frameworks, follow free tutorials on-line, do courses on Coursera... that is, to me, as liberating as the farmland-to-downtown transition, just in a different sphere of life, and, well for people who live "far away" - doesn't make it any less impressive...

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