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Comment by disneygibson | Hacker News Reader

No, they wouldn’t, considering that they explicitly set up difficult lives for themselves according to their values.

And no, you can’t read the minds of long dead people either.

Is it really so difficult to consider that we live in a scared, lazy age?

Pretty sure my great^9 grandmother who never saw her parents again after leaving an impoverished village in Alsace for Louisiana, married some widower she’d never met, died of one of the epidemics that swept through coastal Louisiana on the regular in the 18th century, or her daughter (my great^8 grandmother) who was married a few months later at age 14 to an older man, pumped out at least 7 children, then died of another epidemic at 24 wouldn’t have minded my life of relative wealth, ease and personal freedom (college! Moving abroad but flying home each year! Marrying around 30! Having a kid only after I really, really wanted to! Vaccination against a new epidemic a mere 18 months after it started!)

The idea that people made their lives intentionally harder in the past is absolutely ludicrous. Almost every person in history would swap places with me right now in a heartbeat.

It may seem hard to believe, but not every civilization throughout history has put consumerism and comfort above all other values.

Do you have a citation of a society that is stronger because it made its citizens suffer a decreased quality of life?

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a good place to start.

Spengler in his works has a cyclical view of civilizations, which you might also enjoy.

Many “cyclical” ideologies also have similar ideas going back millennia. Hinduism for example sees the world as occurring in cycles. According to some, we are in a materialistic age, which is a consequence of losing spiritual values and a focus on comfort and pleasure.

The Roman Empire fell so I don’t know if it’s a great argument that intentionally lowering the life quality of your citizens is a good idea.

You are misunderstanding me. These books argue that Rome partially fell because it became too focused on luxury and pleasure.

China

> And no, you can’t read the minds of long dead people either.

And yet that is exactly what you are doing throughout multiple comments.

No, I’m saying that when faced with the choice between comfort and difficulty, many people in the past chose difficulty. To insist that they would trade their religious beliefs, for example, for internet and Uber eats is rather myopic.

This is where your total loss of credibility happened, just so you know.

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