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Comment by Aboutplants | Hacker News Reader

We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming.

Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.

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So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian...

Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.

Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.

But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.

From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35):

"""There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""

This is absolute nonsense, for most of history most people were at the edge of starvation, balancing on the knifes edge between "not enough people to work on a farm to provide enough food" and "too many people for the food we grew".

Of course, most of history didn't even have concept of depression or a sizeable count of medical professionals to diagnose it.

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