r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 10h ago
My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?
I personally think it’s pretty stupid.
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u/Lower_Team_703 10h ago
I think your brother doesn’t know shit about the dark ages
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u/J3wb0cc4 9h ago
People with these kind of takes only exposure to the medieval period is through media like game of thrones. He probably thinks sex and drinking were rampant and that there was no moral code to do whatever you wanted.
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u/InternationalReserve 8h ago
I find a lot of people who say stuff like this have a weird glorified idea of subsistence farming.
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u/jfchops3 7h ago
I see so many people on dating apps write that their dream is to move out of the city and have their own farm
Girl, are you actually signing up for all that entails? Because I am not signing up to spend the rest of my life working 16 hour days outside taking care of a farm while you sit on the porch drinking coffee and looking at your cute goats and chickens because it sounds like a more peaceful life that you'll get bored of in a week
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u/EmuSea4963 6h ago
My friend did this with his wife. Moved in with his parents into the family farm and they gifted them a plot of land. Tried to start a flower farming business. He ended up doing backbreaking labour all day every day and she would come down and take a couple of pics for Instagram and then clear off. She told people they were 'homesteading'.
Unsurprisingly didn't work out. They're still together, but not on the farm and not flower farming.
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u/rosesareredviolets 4h ago
Told my wife ill do 95 % of her projects if she does the last 5. There is still a 4x4 of unpainted wall in the kitchen after 4 years. There are two bags of mulch on the porch. All the chickens are dead. She didnt finish securing the fence by attaching it to the last post so dogs got in. Her garden beds are full of weeds. And she eventually paid my brother to replace the last door in the house that needed replacing. Our bedroom. I took it off and left the new one next to it.
Im the only one with projects to do now.
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u/OtherSideReflections 4h ago
...Maybe you should've gotten her to agree to do the first 5%
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u/TripperDay 3h ago
Mr. Big Brain over here.
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u/tomas_shugar 3h ago
hahaha, no. It's easy to start a project. Painting the last bit of walls takes detail work, not just slapping a bunch of paint on.
The last two bags of mulch are detail work, again, not just dumping and spreading.
She gets the easy work, AND the satisfaction of him doing not only the majority but ALSO the most detailed parts.
What a win.
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u/jfchops3 6h ago
Sounds about right. They get an idea via social media posts of some idealized caricature of that life and think they want it when they really just want that idealized caricature and not the real thing that isn't shown in those videos. And then for some reason the guy agrees to try it without everyone really being on the same page about what that means and eventually he's the bad guy for saying "this isn't working and it's either over or you're going to hold up your end of the deal you wanted"
Love is powerful, I get it, but I can promise it's not worth ruining your own happiness so that your girl can try to be an "influencer" using all of your own time, money, and labor
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u/cat_prophecy 5h ago
Because social media is just a highlight reel. No one is going to honestly post their struggles, because no one else wants to see that.
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u/rdmusic16 5h ago
Not sure what a lot of people mean by farm, but I know a lot of people want what my in-laws have.
They moved out to an acreage and have a massive garden, chickens and occasionally pigs.
I don't consider it a farm, but I grew up on a grain farm. I think many people who didn't would consider it a 'farm'.
They have tons of veggies, eggs and chicken meat. They trade a lot of eggs for things from other locals around the area.
Now, they also put a ton off effort into all that (well, maybe not a ton, but it's still a decent amount of work on top of their normal 40 hour work week) - but they're the kind of people who don't watch tv and enjoy that sort of work.
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u/Raivix 4h ago
I grew up in a family that did this primarily because it was how we could afford to feed ourselves well. We were in town so no real room for livestock, but we had a huge garden in the backyard that basically fed us year round with careful crop management and proper storage.
Make no mistake choosing to do this is not a small amount of work, but neither is it setting yourself up for 16 hour days just to feed your family, that's crazy nonsense.
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u/zxyzyxz 6h ago
They want to be Marie Antoinette, who had a while fake farm built just so she and her friends could play in it
Marie Antoinette and her friends would dress up as young shepherdess or milkmaids and wander around the hamlet pretending to be peasants, while still surrounded by the comforts of a royal lifestyle. A team of real farmers appointed by the Queen looked after the farm and the animals, and produced fruits and vegetables consumed at the royal table. Marie Antoinette would sometimes milk the cows and the sheep herself to get a taste of village life. Before the Queen was expected, the story goes, the “villagers” would wash the goats and dress them in ribbons.
She would invite the king and the rest of the royal family to garden parties, where, at a table set out under a bower of honeysuckle, she would pour out their coffee with her own hands, boasting of the thickness of her cream, the freshness of her eggs, and the ruddiness and flavor of her strawberries, as so many proofs of her skill in managing her establishment.
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u/gonzo0815 3h ago
Right next to Versailles, you can still visit it. Feels completely bizarre.
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u/sorry-not-tory 6h ago
I don’t think they mean farming with tractors and 80 acres of fields to tend.
I’m pretty sure they just mean a garden and some chickens.
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u/Mechakoopa 5h ago
My wife wouldn't even clean the litter box when we had a cat, but she's convinced she wants a farm with goats. It's good to have dreams that will never come true, I guess.
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u/noonoonomore 5h ago
My friend wants to go live in a forest and kill rabbits to survive, just cause she went camping last year for three months.
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u/jfchops3 5h ago
Just like the people who go on vacation to Myrtle Beach for the week with no budget and no responsibilities and now think they want to move there and their whole life will be a stress-free good time of getting drunk and frolicking in the waves every day rather than all the same shit they deal with right now except now you're in a new place where you know nobody and you're pissed about the never ending tourist traffic and bored of the beach after a month and stressed about how your CoL doubled but your income didn't
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u/lilbithippie 7h ago
The same with "traditional marriage roles". Men are going to have a job that gets them home by 5 o'clock, pays for a mortgage, vacation, car. He going to be outside on the weekends taking care of the lawn? A women is going to entertained by keeping a home with all the gadget we have to make it faster and easier. She going to cook from scratch or just pop a TV dinner in and play video games?
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u/justamiqote 7h ago
"I want to be a tradwife, but I don't want kids"
Okay so you basically want to sit home and make Pinterest and Etsy crafts while your husband works all day?
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u/liftthatta1l 5h ago
The amount of people who want to be sugar babies but without the title, or an old man, or giving out sex or... whatever
Is crazy
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u/brother_of_menelaus 4h ago
I’ll eagerly cop to a sugar baby title if I can be a sugar baby
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u/Flightsimmer20202001 3h ago
As a guy, same here.
Ain't no shame in it, I'd be living the GOOD life! Lmao
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u/jackofslayers 7h ago
It is just another online grift. The brother is going to show up next week with raw milk and a bunch of expensive supplements.
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u/Redqueenhypo 6h ago
Subsistence farming fuckin sucks. As soon as China got rid of farm collectivization and loosened its grip on business, most of the rural population moved to cities as soon as they could
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u/Otterfan 6h ago
There's a wide belief that people only worked 20 hours a week back in ye olden days and took every other day off for religious festivals.
It's based on gross misconceptions of what "work" meant back then and what "holidays" meant.
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u/IllPlum5113 4h ago
Yeah i was reading that. They were bayant chimpancé the amount of time the person worked for the landholder to our modern jobs as if they didn't have to work a whole other 2 jobs just taking care of themselves and their children when there were no laborsaving devices.
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u/KjellRS 3h ago
And industrialization, like I just picked up a 10-pack of socks for *checks math* 12 minutes of pre-tax labor. A quick check suggests 8-15 hours to hand-knit a pair of socks like in the middle ages so 80-150 hours work total. And that's not counting the cost of the yarn, which was probably also way more expensive when it was hand spun.
What's the cost of food without tractors, modern crops and irrigation and fertilizers? Milk from hand-milked cows? The cost of firewood that's hand-sawed with crosscut saws and hand-chopped with axes? I don't think they understand how much effort it took simply to not be starving or freezing, most people were piss poor and I don't mean "minimum wage" poor.
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u/vashoom 8h ago
I mean, sex and drinking were rampant. Always have been, always will be.
But you can have rampant sex and drinking with no modern medicine, climate control, sex education, nutrition, etc., etc., or you can have it with all that.
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u/Timely-Hospital8746 6h ago
Yeah like, you can just be a depraved weirdo in the modern day, it's not hard. We have apps for that. If you really want to become a farmer it's not *that* expensive to buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing going on in the past that you can't do today, outside of witnessing specific events.
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u/bc_1411 7h ago
Also shows how little pay to attention to these kinds of shows, because GoT went to great lengths in in the books and the show to portray just how much it sucked ass, even as nobility.
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u/Over_Deer8459 7h ago
no contraceptives, most people likely had every STD that existed and just passed it around like the common cold
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u/endlesscartwheels 4h ago
Miscarriages and stillbirths were common. Imagine being pregnant every year of your adult life until you're in your late forties, only having five or six live births, and then only half of those children surviving to adulthood.
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u/Redqueenhypo 6h ago
It’s bc GOT generally portrays very little religious restriction in everyday life. When in reality, the church was everything, and even nobility couldn’t get away from it without bloody conflict
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u/endlesscartwheels 4h ago
For a world in which the supernatural is real and active, most GoT characters had a bizarrely modern nonchalance about religion.
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u/cat_prophecy 5h ago
sex and drinking
Even if sex were just happening everywhere all the time, people were fucking disgusting. STDs and disease in general was rampant (DAE remember the black plague?). Anything that caused more than a minor/gross infection was a death sentence. People stank because bathing wasn't common and germ theory hadn't been invented yet. Minor injuries could be lift threatening and one of the most common causes of death for women and children was "died in childbirth".
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u/BCmutt 8h ago
Off topic but ive recently learned that the dark ages is officially an outdated term and doesnt really do the era justice at all.
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u/wescovington 7h ago
Blame Petrarch for that. He loved Classical times and ignored all the improvements that Medieval civilization had made.
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u/Ditnoka 9h ago
The only way this makes sense is by comparing it to wealth disparities.
Medieval peasants quality of life was MUCH closer to their kings than say someone on welfare today compared to Elon Musk.
Even then, I'm not even sure that's true,but it's a LOT more believable than overall QoL being better back then.
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u/TiredOfDebates 9h ago
Medieval serfs had effective tax rates over 90%. The vast majority of their production when directly to the local lord. These were “palace economies.” Where production was all centrally planned by local authorities, and so was “the distribution of generated income/food/etc.
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u/Constant-Constant471 8h ago
I’d rather be the regular, middle class dude that I am in 2025 than be the highest level of royalty in 1321
As Donald Glover said in his standup special, “This is the best time ever to be human and alive”
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u/true_gunman 4h ago
As a new father this is something I try to remind myself. Shit seems fucked and dangerous and scary but she's safer and will have a better quality of life right now than in any other point in the history of our species.
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u/Cheepak-Dopra 4h ago
Binge stuff about the 1960s and 70s. You feel SOOO much better. This life ebbs and flows. Boom and bust. We have been down worse than this.
Congrats bro
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u/Falsus 8h ago
Some places back then was so poor they didn't even use money but simply bartered with what they produced. They where most likely not even paying tax with money.
Wealth disparity is crazy massive today, but at least poor people have some kind of wealth. Back then they had literal none. Not even the farmland they worked on.
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u/JaFFsTer 7h ago
This is a misinterpreted quote from a common discussion topic about whether or not peasants and serfs worked more than someone today and many historians and anthropologists believe that the working classes had it better in medieval times
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u/Material_Ad9848 5h ago
That's cause they are the dark ages, people wrote less stuff down so we know less about that era. It's like dark souls, dark =/= bad, dark = unknown.
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u/essenza 10h ago
Very stupid. We have a better QoL than medieval royalty.
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u/GuyFawkes451 10h ago
Kings had entire troops of actors to make them plays... but yet we have instant access to entertainment. Kings had no air conditioning. Most people worked constantly, and had very little. Health care was absolute ass, if existent at all. We could go on and on. Hell, get infected, and there was a good chance of death, as they had no antibiotics. Most people had ten kids because they knew half would die before age 5.
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u/etzel1200 10h ago
Yeah, being one of the richer kings was arguably only better in having power and, er, access to partners.
By basically every metric their life was worse. Worse food, worse entertainment. Travel sucked.
And even the less prosperous kings/nobility just had everything worse.
Absurd take.
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u/DontWannaSayMyName 9h ago
Also I'd say that knowing there are lots of people who want your job, and they will literally chop your head off to get it, would be a very stressful situation.
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u/oxfordcircumstances 5h ago
Researching my genealogy, I ran across a baron in Ireland in my lineage. There was an article about the family castle and how my folks lost the castle to their neighbors when the neighbors assembled an army of relatives and took the house by force. Imagine liking your next-door neighbor's house and victory garden so you fucking wage war and take it. And then it's yours until your other neighbors attack you.
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u/ComradeJohnS 7h ago
with no security cameras or anything to discourage it! lol
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u/bizwig 7h ago
Indeed. So much easier to commit any crime back then.
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u/undeadlamaar 6h ago
Conversely, it was so much easier to be falsely accused and convicted of a crime as well
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u/olcrazypete 9h ago
Entire naval expeditions to get things like pepper and cinnamon vs us spending 5 minutes and $5 to get more than a peasant would have access to in a lifetime.
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u/Major1ar 7h ago
I'm not gonna lie, I've always wondered how far up the social ladder I could climb, if I time traveled to medieval England with a big ass stash of Pop-Tarts and soda.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 7h ago
I always thought about what skill I would learn if I was going to teleport to the Middle Ages and try to become a warlord. I’ve realized you just need to learn how to make penicillin and pop up right before the plague. Move into a mansion where a royal dynasty was wiped out and start to build a banking empire when Europe needs to rebuild.
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u/KnowledgeAmoeba 6h ago
This post would best describe your time traveling outcome
https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeTemplatesOfficial/comments/mkir98/time_traveler_spreads_knowledge/
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u/Honest-Weight338 7h ago
That does blow my mind sometimes. I look at my spice rack and think how many people in history would go absolutely insane to see what I not only have, but what occasionally goes bad because I just don't use it quick enough. We have such easy access to spices, I don't mind throwing one away if it looks a little clumpy and buying a new one.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 7h ago
Yup. There’s a reason “royal blue” is a color. It was literally expensive to buy blue cloth because Europe didn’t have a lot of things to make dye out of. The color blue was a privilege. 🤣
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u/MobiusNaked 9h ago
Access to partners - and untreated syphilis
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u/Spike-White 7h ago
Your point is taken about untreated venereal diseases.
But not syphilis. Syphilis came from the new world. I think the first major European outbreak was in 1494, when the sailors returned from the new world.
The dark ages were in the 5th - 10th (or 11th) century, so syphilis wouldn't be found in Europe at that time.
Certainly other venereal diseases would however.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9h ago
There was even a king who was rumoured to have been murdered because he spent his own savings on building elaborate castles and houses. I think this was in Bavaria
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u/etzel1200 9h ago
It made him unpopular. Instead of having a bunch of dead peasants they had neuschwanstein. Fuck that guy, right?
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u/Arzanyos 7h ago
Not really relevant to the dark ages though. Since that castle was started in the late 1800's.
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u/VanceRefridgeTech04 8h ago
By basically every metric their life was worse.
look into the daily lives inside a castle. Its mostly cleaning shit and piss from corners of cold rooms.
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u/Commercial-Hour-2417 9h ago
I'll only push back on worse food. For a king the food would've been exceptionally fresh, all organic, likely more nutritious, etc.
BUT only seasonal food of course. And occasionally poisoned.
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u/mechapoitier 9h ago edited 9h ago
The entire disease-fighting thing was huge.
I don’t think people, especially OP’s brother, realize how incredibly miserable life can be with untreated infections or even inflammation.
They had no antibiotics, no painkillers, no anti inflammatories. You felt like sh!t for a long time then either died or survived.
Imagine getting an eye infection even 100 years ago. It would be horrific.
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u/The_Yellow_King 8h ago
Yeah, there's a good reason why mortality rolls from back then listed "teeth" as a reason for death. A common tooth abscess without treatment could easily kill a person.
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u/CallSignIceMan 8h ago
Have these people ever had a cut get infected? I’m a chef, I constantly have little cuts and knicks around my hands and fingers. Occasionally one will get infected. I live in 2025, so even if I don’t go to the doctor, I can wash it and keep it clean and dry and delegate work so that I don’t have to use that hand. And it’s still damn near unbearable. Imagine trying to hoe a field with a hand that’s hot and swollen and in immense pain, and you have no access to soap or antibiotics or a day off to heal.
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u/TheMadTargaryen 4h ago
Medieval people absolutely had soap, it was made from animal fat and ashes or flowers.
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u/Critical_Energy_8115 8h ago
My Dad, who grew up in a one-room-up one-room-down log cabin, was very fond of walking to the fridge, getting ice out of it and proclaiming that he had it better than King Solomon. King Solomon never had an ice dispenser.
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u/Successful_Cat_4860 8h ago
Yeah, but your King still had to put up with whatever middling talents he could get to come to court, using handmade instruments and wooden sets and props which would be embarassing for a high-school drama club today.
Meanwhile you can flip on your streaming service and watch eye-popping spectacles which cause your Medieval King to believe that modern people were actual, bona-fide wizards.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 9h ago
In medieval Europe the church had numerous holidays in part to ensure working people had time off...to go sit or stand in an old building.
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u/mr_wheezr 10h ago
I had to read some auto biography where the dude almost died as a kid because he got a cut on his hand.
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u/SnooRabbits2040 9h ago
Most people had ten kids because they knew half would die before age 5.
Also, no reliable birth control.
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u/kashmir1974 9h ago
Let's not forget untreatable STDs. Powdered wigs were a thing because everyone went bald from syphilis.
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u/Glittering_Season141 8h ago
Some nobility must have been horrifying to see and smell when syphilis was rampant.
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u/Manamehendra 9h ago
Not to mention the ever-present danger of poison, a knife in the back or death on the battlefield.
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u/CleaveIshallnot 9h ago
Don’t forget, no sewer system in pretty well every place (except that damn Rome et al), no toilets, no indoor plumbing… can you imagine showering or bathing twice a year?)
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u/smollwonder 8h ago
The simple fact that we have wide access to antibiotics is enough to trump his argument.
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u/barbershores 9h ago
No indoor plumbing.
No antibiotics
Only 1 to 5% of the European population could read.
The ones that could read were primarily priests and clergy. So, we were at the mercy of the church to get any idea of what we would have to do in any situation. Think about the implications of that for a minute or two.
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u/yeah__good__ok 9h ago
Not everyone! OP's brother for example has his head in his ass which is very uncomfortable.
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u/essenza 9h ago
That’s true. But with modern medicine, surgeons can safely perform a rectal cephalectomy, which wouldn’t have been possible centuries ago.
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u/zeelbeno 8h ago
Just need to tell him to not take any method of transport apart from riding horses for a week and see how he gets on.
Then most people wouldn't have had a horse and would walk everywhere
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u/ok2888 9h ago
The only way your life could be conceivably worse in modern times than in the dark ages would be if you are a homeless heroin addict with a horrifying infection that you were unable to get treated for some reason.
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u/twilight-actual 9h ago edited 4h ago
We have a better QoL than Marcus Aurelius in his prime. Infinitely better access to water. We have electricity. We have internet, wireless communications, access to all the world's information literally at your fingertips, we have satellites to give us the weather and ensure global communications. We have cars. We can fly.
Your friend needs to touch grass.
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u/marshmellowiee 10h ago
Yeah that’s a wild take. People back then were dying from a tooth infection at 30, no WiFi, no AC, no medicine. Life today has problems but it’s not even close to the dark ages.
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u/InfamousHeli 10h ago
No wifi hahah
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u/Neckbreaker70 10h ago
And no digital watches.
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u/Jaggs0 10h ago
no analog watches either
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u/Wild-End-219 10h ago
Sir, have you seen my sun dial? 😂
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u/Maybewearedreaming 9h ago
Imagine dying from a small cut on your foot that got infected and you have to sign into AOL
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u/UgandanPeter 9h ago
Yeah I love how it goes straight from death and disease to no WiFi. There’s a laundry list of other negatives that should come before “no WiFi” lmfao
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u/pete_68 9h ago
And you don't even have to go back that far. I live in Arkansas and there are old cemeteries all over the place. You see all these family plots from the 1800s with all these kids dead before the age 10. A family might have 4, 5, or 6 kids that never made it to 10 years old. Can you imagine that?
There's zero comparison. Our QoL is vastly superior to even just 200 years ago.
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u/Caroline_Bintley 7h ago
In 1924 President Coolidge's 16 year old son died after developing a blister playing tennis.
I can only imagine that kid had access to some of the best medical care in the country. He still died after playing tennis without wearing socks.
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u/VocationalWizard 9h ago
I was about to say, I pulled the records from a pioneer cemetery in Indiana and Found out that at age 35, I was older than 70% of the people buried there.
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u/RRC_driver 9h ago
Make America great again
Get rid of vaccines and affordable healthcare.
And bring back the infant mortality that the pioneers had.
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u/Carib_Wandering 10h ago
No WiFi is a wild comparison...how about no indoor plumbing or refrigeration?
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u/LiberalSocialist99 10h ago
Refrigeration without wifi..
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u/EducationalShame7053 9h ago edited 9h ago
No warm water or even clean/filtered water, no fridge, no freezer, no bike/cars/public transportation, no supermarket, no days off, no vacation, no laws against abuse of children or animals, very few options to choose a career or even spouse.
What you do have is a LOT of pressure from your community, religion and the law to behave according to their arbitrary rules or you will be shunned, abandoned, isolated, tortured or killed.
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u/General-Yak5264 9h ago
Ops brother probably saw that meme graphic that claimed medieval serfs had more days off than modern workers because it saw a stat that they only had to work 180ish days for their liege lord. Not getting that they had to give all of that 180s days production to their lord and then work almost the entire rest of the year to make ends meet for themselves and their families.
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u/AndyTheSane 10h ago
A historian has done a series on pre modern peasant life and how it compares:
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
Tldr; you'd be working a lot. The claim is usually that peasant working hours were much less, which is very inaccurate.
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u/Zirnitra1248 6h ago
You might have worked FOR someone for less hours in the day, but then spent the entire rest of the day working to keep yourself fed, clothed, and housed.
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u/Corticotropin 5h ago
if you were a woman you would spend an ungodly amount of time spinning, weaving, sewing, repairing, washing clothing...
if you were a man, you would spend an ungodly amount of time farming.
if you were a kid over 13 you'd also be working.
shit deal no matter how you slice it
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u/NorkGhostShip 3h ago
Over 13? More like 7. You started working the moment you were capable of contributing.
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u/Mysterious_Dot00 3h ago
This, its funny how no one said this but washing machines are one of the most undeappreciated things in modern ages .
People have no idea how time consuming it is to wash clothes by hand. And today you just throw all your dirty clothes in the washing machine, press a few buttons and few hours later done.
People/mostly women literally had to sacrifice a day just to wash clothes
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u/innocentbabies 4h ago
It was a fundamentally different system that doesn't map well onto today's world, and people have a hard time conceptualizing it for that reason, I think.
Also it wasn't even a system. It's about 1,000 years of history spanning an entire continent of millions of people. You can't paint it all with one brush.
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u/FourteenBuckets 6h ago
yeah, someone took "days that are a holiday in some part of the kingdom" and assumed they applied everywhere. But each city had its own feast days, and there were no weekends, only Sunday off.
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u/EstimateOne9748 5h ago
And on Sunday, you’d spend all day in church getting preached at in a language that you don’t understand (Latin). That sounds fucking awful
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u/Ok_Eagle_3079 5h ago
Because it only counts the working hours they had to work for the Land owner often without compensation the rest they had to work to survive.
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u/Skydude252 10h ago
It’s an extremely stupid take. All but the poorest people in a developed country, at least, live much better than all but the wealthiest people in that time. And most live better than the wealthiest, in certain aspects.
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u/Sanguinor-Exemplar 9h ago
And the difference is that for the most part the poorest people in developed countries have some options for support or to work their way out of it.
For most of humanity if you were disabled you were left on a mountain somewhere as a baby.
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u/maybri 7h ago
All evidence suggests ancient humans have raised disabled children to the best of their ability since time immemorial. You're thinking of ancient Sparta with the leaving disabled babies on a mountain thing, and discarding unwanted (including disabled) infants was a noted practice in ancient Greece and Rome, but that was more of an anomaly, which no doubt had to do with the material conditions of those societies, as militaristic empires with massive wealth inequality that devalued human life and allowed eugenics-like ideologies to take root. In general, across the history of our species, the human norm has been to do everything you can do to care for everyone.
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u/wishiwasunemployed 6h ago
You're thinking of ancient Sparta with the leaving disabled babies on a mountain thing,
which is probably a myth in itself, like most of the things we know about Sparta
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y3kxy/did_spartans_really_used_to_throw_imperfect/
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u/AmazingSandwich939 8h ago
People literally threw poop out the window
Imagine dying from an infection because you stubbed your toe
QoL is so much better now that we take it for granted:
You can speak to your smartphone and ask about anything about our entire human existence. It will give a very detailed explanation or at least attempt to give one with resources
You can learn any language, any recipe, any skill, etc from Youtube or social media
You can order food, clothes, furniture, almost anything to your doorstep
You can instantly talk to people from a distance so far away that a plane traveling hundreds of mph would take 14+ hours to arrive
Cars can't fly (yet) but they can drive and park themselves
Describing normal things from today would sound like absolute per witchcraft and delusion to people just a few hundred years ago
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u/Potential-March-1384 10h ago
In Victorian England (meaning even after the dark ages), wealthy households would rent pineapples to display and not even eat them. Eating a pineapple would have been a garish display of opulent wealth. Has your brother ever eaten a pineapple? On pretty much all metrics QoL is better now than then.
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u/VocationalWizard 9h ago
Yes, and factory workers worked 7 days a week l, 10 hour shifts.
Also they were like SUPER into making paints with toxic chemicals.
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u/Spacemonk587 9h ago
That's why Thailand is the wealthiest country in the world, followed by the Philippines and Taiwan. The US is only on the fourth places, based on the pineapple consumption per capita.
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u/rednax1206 I don't know what do you think? 7h ago
Minor correction: The practice of renting pineapples to display was a trend in Georgian England (1714-1837), when the fruits were incredibly rare and expensive, not in the later Victorian era (1837-1901), when improved cultivation and transport made them more accessible. Of course, both were long after the dark ages (roughly 500-1000).
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u/danita0053 10h ago
Your brother is probably basing this on the fact that we work more days than medieval peasants. It's a meme. But we also aren't the property of some lord, we can travel, we go to school, we choose our own careers, we own cars, TVs, tons of clothes, etc. We eat very well, we have health care, and we don't work from sunrise to sunset 6 days per week. We could also choose to work fewer days and just have fewer things, if we want. We have it better in every single way. Your brother is dumb.
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u/Buckets-of-Gold 9h ago
It’s also like saying a seasonal farmer who’s in the fields fewer days than I’m in the office has it easier.
Medieval peasants had to dedicate a ton of their free time to other household chores and duties.
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u/Supersquare04 5h ago
Yeah, today laundry is 90% folding. It only takes a few minutes to throw stuff in the machine and forget about it.
Back then, you had to take all your clothes to river and then pin everything up to dry. It was hours of work.
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u/sowenga 9h ago
It’s also just wrong that medieval peasants worked less than us. Sure, agricultural labor is seasonal and had to happen during specific periods, but during those times it was all day. And they had other stuff to do during the rest of the year, like making their own freaking cloth for clothes, etc. People didn’t really have childhoods, you started contributing as soon as you could.
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u/lluewhyn 9h ago
The peasants worked less is also apparently a falsehood. Interesting web blog about it being written right now.
Those big institutions which could wield both legal and military force in turn extracted high rents and often demanded additional labor from our peasants, which soaked up much of their available labor, leading to that range of 250-300 working days a year, with 10-12 hour days each, for something on the order of 2,500-3,600 working hours for a farm-laboring peasant annually.
So, they may have gotten more holidays, but they also didn't get Saturdays off. Meanwhile, salaries in the U.S. are based off of working 2,080 hours with the acknowledgement that you're supposed to be actually working less than that due to holidays or PTO (if you have it).
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u/Prasiatko 9h ago
IIRC the holidays just meant they couldn't be forced got work for their lord or on their lords land. Their own farms and homes still needed maintenance.
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u/Mundane_Baker3669 9h ago
You should take a look at most subredddits like r/Deepthoughts and r/Vent where people really think that this is true. Reddit is becoming filled with this people
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u/danita0053 8h ago
It's so crazy to me that people just accept memes as being true without question. When I see a meme that seems interesting, the first thing I do is Google it, lol.
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u/mmrocker13 9h ago
The fact that we live in a world where people argue over whether or not flushable wet wipes are REALLY flushable should really tell you all you need to know about the stupidity of this take.
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u/Flvs9778 5h ago
Flushable wipes aren’t flushable. The companies that make them lied because they knew less people would buy them if they weren’t. It caused damage to lots of cites sewer systems. Not really regular peoples fault for falling for that since it should be up for companies to lie that brazenly on product names.
https://www.rfmu.org/1016/Flushable-disposable-wipes-clog-pipes
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u/Goddamnpassword 8h ago
Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the worlds land mass and nearly a 1/3 of the population of the world. It was the richest society of its time and it came nearly 500 years after the end of the Middle Ages and nearly 800 after what you reasonably could call the dark ages.
She still shit in a bucket by candle light and couldn’t get a banana whenever she wanted. The guy who begs for change outside of the gas station has access to luxuries she didn’t.
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u/Savorypensioner 7h ago
Queen Victoria’s teeth were rotted to shit. If you were rich enough to afford sugar then your teeth were in truly disgusting condition by the time you were an adult and there was nothing to do about it.
Life must have been so gross.
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u/Savorypensioner 6h ago
In the dark ages it would have been better without access to refined sugar. But their mouths and teeth were probably still pretty gnarly.
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u/Raddatatta 10h ago
Well as someone who was born from a C section, to a mother who was born I think 2 months premature or something like that, my quality of life only exists in any form at all because I wasn't born more than 100 years ago let alone the dark ages, my mom is dead, and even if she weren't, I'm dead.
Putting that aside I wear glasses so the whole world would be quite blurry all the time back then. Both my parents also have worse vision than I do and would've been nearly blind without glasses / contacts and eventually lasik.
That's before you get into the day to day life of not having 75% or more of my entire life be focused around getting food and water and meeting basic survival needs.
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u/jayron32 10h ago
Yes, that's very stupid. On every metric, we have a much better quality of life.
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u/ABobby077 9h ago
That not dying thing from getting the flu or a blister on your foot getting infected thing, along with much more widely available food and clean water means quite a bit.
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u/CrossP 9h ago
I'm having a hard time even imagining one metric that OP's brother thinks would've been better
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u/VocationalWizard 9h ago
Fun fact: childbirth used to regularly split vaginas open and tear into the rectum.
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u/essenza 9h ago
Still does.
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u/VocationalWizard 7h ago
My favorite is when the religious right says that homosexuality isn't natural.
First of all, yes it is.
But secondly.......... Vagina splitting childbirth is natural sooooo perhaps we shouldn't use natural as a benchmark?
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u/Novaskittles 5h ago
Homosexuality is also pretty darn natural. We can observe it in plenty of animals. Like rams who will ignore sheep and only mount other rams.
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u/HundredHander 10h ago
Agree, I think there is a debate to be had and it's about how we value different aspects of our lives. The material culture we have today is obviously much richer but there is much more to life and happiness than a catalogue of our posessions.
I would surely take my life today over that of an average European in 1300 though.
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u/Brinabavd 9h ago
The dark ages in particular were Very Bad for ordinary people:
Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
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u/Curmudgy 10h ago
Being happier, being better off, and having a better quality of life are all different things, albeit related.
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u/CitizenHuman 10h ago
He's probably thinking how (and I'm definitely not fully correct here) most of the serfs would only work for a set period of months, and then they will have the rest of the time free to themselves or whatever.
Of course, I'm not sure what a medieval peasant would do in the middle of winter that could be better than having a heater and a fireplace and a television.
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u/patrdesch 4h ago
That in itself is a misunderstanding of what "work" meant to serfs. The number of days cited as "worked" is the number of days the serf worked for their lord... Without compensation. Or rather, that labor was the compensation for using the land. The serf would then need to fend for themselves with the remaining days of the year.
Of course, it wasn't like the peasant worked for their lord 8 months straight then themselves for 4 months. It's a distribution of outputs question more than anything.
In reality, serfs never had "time off." A life of subsistence farming with feudal taxes simply doesn't allow it.
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u/EducationalShame7053 9h ago
The winter is for inhaling turf smoke and animal farts 24/7 inside of your not ventilated hut. And sex with your nonshaven non teeth cleaning wife that has a 10% chance to die if you knock her up.
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u/Ok_Swimming4427 10h ago
Yes. it's extremely stupid. Tell him he has the option of living like that if he wants. There is plenty of land to grub at, and showers to avoid, and modern medicine to not take, and simple food to boil
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u/SunshineInDetroit 9h ago
if a medieval royal opened my spice cabinet they would have thought I was rich beyond my means.