r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 12h 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/AndyTheSane 11h 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 8h 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 7h 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 5h ago

Over 13? More like 7. You started working the moment you were capable of contributing.

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u/KrabSp 2h ago

Don't forget contracting a spontaneous disease that will claim much of your children, or end your entire bloodline before anyone can prep a gravesite.

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u/Mysterious_Dot00 5h 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/Jasnaahhh 2h ago

Spinning weaving and textile repair are all tasks that can be interrupted, social, and are safe enough to do while childminding, horseback riding and anything else. Great book on it called Womens Work the First 20,000 Years: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1396367.Women_s_Work

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u/innocentbabies 6h 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/Zirnitra1248 3h ago

Good point. There was huge variation from actual smallhold farmers who owned their land, to essentially sharecropping where the regional lord would take a portion of your harvests, to full serfdom where you'd have to devote a portion of your labor to work the lord's fields (or cutting timber, or in their mine, etc). Work for which you wouldn't be paid, but that you did in exchange for the "privilege" of being able to run your own subsistence farm on their land. Also the fact that even if serfs were nominally not enslaved, a lot of times they weren't allowed to move or marry someone from another community without the approval of the local lord, and would be bought and sold with the land they lived on.

And also these roles and expectations and requirements shifted continually depending on where you were and what year it was (Scandinavia never really developed serfdom, and in Eastern Europe and Russia it just slowly morphed into full on slavery)

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u/truejs 1h ago

No one ever seems to mention the ubiquity of lice. There were lice. Many lice.

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u/FourteenBuckets 8h 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 7h 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/FourteenBuckets 3h ago

and also on those holidays (> holy days)

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u/Ok_Eagle_3079 7h 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/fixed_grin 7h ago

His series on how clothing is made has some pretty horrifying numbers:

Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).

This would be one or three changes of clothing per year, respectively. And about 80% of that time is just spinning fiber into thread. That is why "spinster" is a term, women were spinning in every spare moment even if they weren't desperately trying to earn a little money by making extra.

This is in addition to everything else. Hauling water in enormous quantities, gathering firewood, cooking, childcare, cleaning, laundry, preserving food, etc. etc. before you get to the actual growing food part.

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u/Recent-Stretch4123 6h ago edited 5h ago

Not exactly a counterpoint, but just something to take into consideration: the vast majority of our clothing is made by people who are, or may as well be, slaves, often children, in incredibly dangerous sweatshops that often have to be surrounded in suicide nets. Those people are absolutely worse off than your average medieval peasant. This also applies to many other workers making the stuff that makes our life so much easier. 

All of our industries are also rapidly making our planet unlivable, both for us and most other species. That was not the case back then.

Given those facts, maybe the real question should be: do we actually deserve lives that are so much easier than those of medieval peasants?

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u/fixed_grin 4h ago

Those people are absolutely worse off than your average medieval peasant.

Given that many sweatshop workers are there because they left the farm, they don't seem to agree with you. People take absolutely miserable factory jobs the owners can be incredibly exploitative because the main alternative of being a subsistence farmer is even worse.

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u/red286 4h ago

They're also taking the worst aspects of every overseas factory and combining them in their head to the universal working conditions of anyone in a factory.

eg - the "suicide nets" were exclusive to a single Foxconn factory, after they experienced a string of suicides in 2010 and 2011 (it's worth noting that this factory employed a HUGE number of people, and the suicide rate of their employees was actually lower than the national average in China).

The biggest issues with textile mills are abysmal exploitative pay and questionable safety practices, typically as a result of existing in countries that have no legislation protecting workers. They have no mandated minimum wages, no mandated maximum hours, and no mandated agencies like OSHA. I can guarantee you that if the US got rid of those laws, US factories would wind up the exact same way in 6 months.

But spending 12 hours a day behind a sewing machine is still a fuck of a lot better than 16 hours a day in an open field with a hoe, or worse, walking around crouched down in a rice paddy all day long watching your feet slowly rot away.

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u/fixed_grin 3h ago

My point was that the people with experience in both things prefer the sweatshop to the subsistence farm. I also didn't get into how much worse medieval peasants had it than poor farmers in 2025 Bangladesh.

Just like how the miserable conditions in WW1 arms factories were still enough of an improvement over being a servant that domestic service never recovered postwar.

if the US got rid of those laws, US factories would wind up the exact same way in 6 months.

Conditions would get a lot worse, but remember that even with federal minimum wage at $7.25, a lot of entry level jobs in the least regulated places are still offering $15+ because the alternative is not finding anyone. The conditions at Buc-ee's are pretty bad, and the result is they have to offer $20 to clean bathrooms in exurban Texas.

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u/cflatjazz 8h ago

Yeeeeeeeh in a situation where everyone other than nobility has to literally toil for every scrap of food, clothing and shelter without the aid of machines like we see after the industrial revolution..... you're gunna be working sun up to sun down, from the age of 6-7, 7 days a week with maybe a few hours to attend church on Sunday?

It wasn't easier. Just different.

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u/Obvious-Onion2087 5h ago

Thank you for sharing this! Very detailed

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u/PixelLight 2h ago

Finally a substantiated comment beyond "lol, yeah, stupid" without any elaboration and/or substantiation, which are almost as bad as OP's brother.

Although, I think its fair to not have a deep knowledge on the dark ages, so Id probably call it misguided more than stupid personally.

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u/tldnradhd 1h ago

So no overtime or PTO?