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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

If you were to go back to 1625, so 400 years ago.

What did people do to be happy on your average midweek night? No shakespeare every night. No festival. Just the average night?

You went to the local pub, had a good meal, got drunk, and smoked some pipe.

But can the modern guy go do that anymore?

You cant afford to get drunk, federal alcohol excise tax is $13/litre. LCBO(govt monopoly) markup is 100%, ontario basic alcohol tax is 30-60% retail price. environmental levy is 10-20cents but you can return that to get a refund. You still pay a sales tax of course.

You go to the LCBO and $40 for 1Litre but that's >75% taxes.

You then reach for the tobacco pipe and they have >90% taxes on tobacco.

So what happens? People dont go socialize at the pub anymore. Smoking is uncommon, no smoking socializing.

You sit at home alone and shakespeare and chill from your curated streaming choice. How depressing.

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I hope this is parody. The average life expectancy was 35-40. The average person was working 12 hours/day with much of it being heavy labor. No one was going to the pub or having a good meal, they were just trying to survive. I don't understand this romanticization of the past. Does everyone just assume they would be the king? Even then, they would still be worse off than nearly everyone in a modern economy today.

>The average life expectancy was 35-40.

I'm not even arguing that we drink and smoke ourselves to happy. The point was the socialization. Our society has not replaced this.

High taxation on alcohol and tobacco does not by itself increase life expectancy. That's absolutely not a thing.

You also obviously fact checked this before posting not realizing that it was bubonic plague year and that infant mortality is the key problem here. People who were 35 werent expected to die any year. If you were 35 you'd still live several decades.

No I dont think smoking and drinking at a pub causes infant mortality.

>The average person was working 12 hours/day with much of it being heavy labor.

And high taxation on alcohol and tobacco does not reduce the amount of labour hours per day.

You're arguing against living in the era which is not something I was arguing for.

>No one was going to the pub or having a good meal, they were just trying to survive.

No actually going to the pub was fundamentally something you did every single day regardless of social class.

> I don't understand this romanticization of the past. Does everyone just assume they would be the king? Even then, they would still be worse off than nearly everyone in a modern economy today.

I was never doing that.

You literally said lets think about 1625.

If your point is we should socialize more, I agree! I don't agree that somehow taxes are the primary reason we don't socialize.

IMO, socializing is hard because with the good comes challenges. Technology has given us a fake version of socialization with apparently fewer challenges, so many people opt in for that instead. Only later do people realize the fake version doesn't have most of the benefits of real socialization, and by then it's often too hard for people to switch course.

Honestly, 50 Cent said it best, Sunny days wouldn't be special, if it wasn't for rain. Joy wouldn't feel so good, if it wasn't for pain. Death gotta be easy, 'cause life is hard It'll leave you physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred.

The life expectancy was primarily due to child death. Which, while tragic, doesn’t have much to do with the parents point.

During the mini warming period in medieval England peasants had enough free time that they contributed their labor to building beautiful churches we still see today. Generalizations like “everyone was happy/angry at all times in the past” are not accurate. There were times of both, and we should look to the times that were good to determine what needs to change in our future.

You don’t need to be king to be happy. A meaningful job with a family, friends, and a country you feel connected too is likely enough for most people.

Your average hides the shape of the curve: the life expectancy for those who managed to make it through the first 15 years was 35 to 40 additional years, so there were plenty of 50 year-olds around.

lol and any children you have will likely die horribly before your eyes, good chance you'll die of something terrible like diarrhea or the plague, and whenever you need medical care there's no anesthetic (your wife will LOVE childbirth)

oh and you're probably dragged into war at some point, and you eat stale bread once a day. you didn't "have a good meal" at the pub.

the lack of perspective priviledged westerners have blows my goddamn mind. and no, people didn't get "happiness" in the past by being in a constant state of alcoholism - they did it because they couldnt' afford clean water

modern man isn't happy because they have no resilience and are deeply entitled. that's why you have more than any of your ancestors could have dreamed of but you think you're opressed and struggling

sorry but it's pathetic

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