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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Such statements are profoundly ahistorical. Pre-modern life was far more fragile, temporary, vulnerable than anything which people in developed countries experience today. Life for most people involved constant risk of violence, starvation, and disease.

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The statement doesn't make any claims about what pre-modern life was like, it only describes what it means to be modern and how that word changed over a hundred-year period.

Yeah but I didn't have to learn how Spear.JS worked in the new monthly update in order to go catch food. The skills I needed and my relationships did not change as often.

Food is actually a profoundly bad example to make your point, because food security before modern times was non-existent pretty much everywhere, even if you had the necessary skills to grow or catch it. :)

The supply of food was unstable but the means to find it was not changing all the time. Once you built up a certain foraging / hunting skill the skillset is done. You don't have to relearn it 10 times.

While that is true to a certain extent, what is also true is that the overall rate of change for pretty much everything was much, much slower before modern times. If your situation was relatively stable, that slow pace of change could mean a certain amount of safety and security in certain contexts.

Nonsense. Pre-modern life was anything but stable, safe, or secure. People were subject to invasions, pestilence, bad weather, plagues, accidents, the list goes on. Anyone who believes that the rate of change was slower in pre-modern times is simply ignorant of history and archaeology. There are many types of change beyond just technological change.

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