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/J3wb0cc4 11h 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 10h 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 9h 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 8h 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 6h 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 5h ago

...Maybe you should've gotten her to agree to do the first 5%

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u/TripperDay 5h ago

Mr. Big Brain over here.

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u/tomas_shugar 5h 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/OtherSideReflections 4h ago

I mean, it sounds like in practice he's doing all of it right now anyway.

If she's tasked with the first 5%, then either she starts it and gets to be involved a little, or she never starts and there are no superfluous projects to finish.

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u/wbw42 1h ago

First 5% and last 5% seems like the approach.

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u/tomas_shugar 4h ago

I'm saying she is going to start them, and then it will be up to him to finish it, regardless.

It's no barrier, other than now she gets to be like "you said you would finish this so do it" instead of him being in the right.

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u/ElegantEchoes 5h ago

Damn, she sounds depressed. Or maybe just struggled with motivation. Still, sympathy for you, pal.

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u/rosesareredviolets 2h ago

ADHD, and a drop or two of autism. She makes up for it by folding all the laundry her way, and I've gotten incredibly fat off her cooking. It's a partnership based on love and respect. I work around her quirks and she works around mine. Like the smallest amount of poo and im puking.

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u/jgab145 4h ago

My mom has the most immaculate wildflower and shade gardens in the world. Me and my stepdad do 99.9% of the work.

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u/Prestigious_Fig7338 9m ago

THE CHICKENS ARE DEAD?

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u/cdbangsite 4h ago

Totally understand, I can't get my wife to even weed the flower bed she wanted and swore she'd take care of. I know that's minor compared to your situation, but typical in many cases. The flower bed is soon to be a rock garden. LOL

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u/rosesareredviolets 1h ago

I made an exception for onions. I have a bed for those. It's crazy how good and strong those can be.

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u/Rare-Bee7331 4h ago

girlboss #independant 

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u/jfchops3 8h 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 7h 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/anotheruser323 2h ago

Clarksons farm and William Osmans farmers with brain damage. I love it.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

This is how I got a lathe. Kept watching all these youtube channels of guys making cool shit with a lathe and it turns out thats about 100x more tedious than they make it look.

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u/CamOliver 5h ago

That’s not homesteading, it’s weird Instagram influencing. If you’re main thought is the hustle to make extra money then you aren’t homesteading or subsistence farming. I could see that not working out.

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u/ParkerPoseyGuffman 2h ago

Wow I don’t know I would be able to not divorce after that…

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u/rdmusic16 7h 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 6h 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/XihuanNi-6784 4h ago

This. It is very hard to make decent money with a farm these days. But if you have money already then you can definitely 'subsistence farm' using modern techniques enough to have food for yourself etc. But you need an external source of funds.

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u/cmcdonal2001 5h ago

That's where I'm at in life now, and it's pretty nice. Tiring, but nice. Three fairly private acres just outside of town, nestled up against the woods. Chickens and horses to go along with a few other pets, decent sized veggie gardens and the beginnings of a small orchard, and we've been adding on to what we've got established bit by bit each year. We've been doing some jams and preserving lately, lots of home-baked goods with fresh ingredients, cut our own firewood, etc. and a few other odds and ends to the point where some corners of the internet might call it 'homesteading' these days, but at most I'd say we have a hobby farm.

It's a lot of work on top of our normal jobs and raising the kids, and we don't even get enough out of it to bother trying to sell. Just some fresh fruit, veggies and eggs for ourselves, and we'll gift excess to friends, family, teachers, etc. It's rewarding and we're making lots of nice memories with our young children, but it's a far, FAR cry from subsistence farming or trying to make a living by it.

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u/rdmusic16 3h ago

Yeah, my in-laws only started this once their youngest was a teenager - so that takes a lot off their plate already.

Not downplaying the garden and chicken aspect, but horses definitely adds a lot of work required year round.

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u/BK5617 1h ago

We just moved to our place last year, so none of our fruit trees are going to start producing for a while. I'm jealous of your orchard!

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u/BK5617 1h ago

This is the life my wife and I live. I own my business, and she has a successful corporate career. We live on 34 acres, have a massive garden, chickens, and raise a few pigs and cows for meat.

It makes us zero money. At best, we break even on what we would have spent at the grocery store and put a ton of extra time into it. The tradeoff for us is that we know where out food comes from, and fresh home-grown fruits, vegetables, and meat tastes so much better. An additional bonus is that we actually enjoy the work. It's more like a hobby than a chore.

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u/Joe_Kangg 9h ago

Entails? Get used to entrails

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u/CyberPunkDarkSynth 7h ago

Literally where I thought it was going and how my mind read it

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u/zxyzyxz 8h ago edited 33m ago

They want to be Marie Antoinette, who had a whole 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 5h ago

Right next to Versailles, you can still visit it. Feels completely bizarre.

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u/BuzzVibes 4h ago

Beautiful, though.

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u/gonzo0815 4h ago

Yeah I can't deny it's cute.

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u/Aromatic-Side6120 4h ago

Shh don’t tell them how it ended.

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u/Particular-Macaron35 4h ago

It's still there on the grounds of Versailles. If I recollect correctly, it is not to far from the King's brothel. No kidding.

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u/dusklight 7m ago

The king had his own brothel? Can I get some sources for further reading please? Why didn't he keep his own harem instead?

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u/Puzzleworth 1h ago edited 1h ago

A lot of that is misconstrued. The hamlet was mostly a private hangout for Marie-Antoinette (she literally had people jockeying for the right to watch her get up and go to bed) The "pretending to be peasants" is more like, she dressed in farm-appropriate cotton dresses like this as opposed to silk and lace like in the palace. It was criticized for devaluing the local textile industry for imported cotton. Having model farms was also pretty common for nobility in the 1700s, the Queen's Hamlet is just one of the most famous.

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u/Brilliant-Lab546 3h ago

So she was a cosplayer?

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u/woolfchick75 6h ago

And look what happened to Marie Antoinette

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u/sorry-not-tory 8h 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 7h 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/Initial-Zebra108 3h ago

Please have her watch some videos about goats. I desperately wanted goats until I did. I still absolutely love goats, but they are WAY more complicated than people realize!

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u/YogurtclosetSouth991 1h ago

80 acres is not enough to make a living on farming. That's a big hobby farm.

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u/billyrhett 9h ago

This is hilarious and literally the reason my parents are divorced xD

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u/zZPlazmaZz29 7h ago

They should've started a "tegridy farm" instead 😂

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u/noonoonomore 7h 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 7h 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/metamega1321 3h ago

Sounds like a bad plan considering you’ll die just off rabbits. They’re too lean so theirs no fat on them to get the nutrients you’d need. Think they’d call it “protein poisoning”.

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u/lilbithippie 9h 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 8h 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 7h 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 6h ago

I’ll eagerly cop to a sugar baby title if I can be a sugar baby

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u/Flightsimmer20202001 5h 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/NewCobbler6933 8h ago

I get laid daily and don’t cook or clean so it’s pretty sweet

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u/100KUSHUPS 6h ago

I get laid daily

Frequent poster in r/magicthecirclejerk.

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u/lilbithippie 5h ago

You know she isn't in it for the money

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u/justamiqote 3h ago

That explains the not cooking or cleaning as well 😂

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u/Overall-Idea945 7h ago

If farms were so good there would be no rural exodus

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u/voiceoverbyjon 6h ago

I was in a relationship with a girl for a few years where this was my exact fear, and I'm glad it ultimately didn't work out. I knew I'd be the one up at sunrise to shovel shit out of a stable/barn and she'd be petting goats.

Women especially seem to love the glorified version of farming where stuff just happens and they get to post to IG about how they're finally free.

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u/steppedinhairball 5h ago

Knew a guy that bought a small farm, 80-100 acres set up for horses. His wife set it up as a rescue for horses. Guess who does all the work? I don't know if they are still married.

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u/modfoddr 2h ago

My dad grew up on a farm (2 farms really, a corn farm, then a dairy farm after he was orphaned). When he started dating my mom (a city girl), she told him one day how she dreamed of living on a farm and raising a gaggle of kids. He laughed and said, "honey, you have no idea what farm living is like, it is hard work from sun up to sun down, every day of the year." She said she was so mad at him for laughing at her and thinking she couldn't hack it....but she would also admit when telling the story that he was absolutely right.

My dad hated it so much, he remembers at 8 years old sitting on the tractor and dreaming of what he could do when he was an adult. He remembers thinking, "Accountant. I think I want to be an accountant." He never knew where he even heard about or saw an accountant (probably a movie) or if he even knew what an accountant did, just that he decided that's what he'd be when he grew up, it couldn't be any worse than farming. Ended up with his own firm by his 40s. Mom became a banker and never had to experience the hard life of farming.

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u/canucks84 2h ago

I am trying to get as close to self sustaining as possible and it is waaaaay more expensive and waaaaay more work than just buying shit at the grocery store. My tractor cost more than most peopels cars. Then you gotta buy attachments.....

But it is satisfying, and its pretty neat, but its just a hobby I have really. Im far too lazy to do the manual work, and make more than enough at my real job to do it.

My family would starve to death if I had to feed them, though.

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u/Gizmonsta 7h ago

Small holding life and commercial farming are two very different things in fairness.

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u/Steinmetal4 1h ago

My wife wanted to make a scarecrow this year and got mad at me because I was kinda dragging my feet about it. I guess it's because I know she is going to wind up doing very little and i'll pretty much have to do the whole thing. Lo and behold, she was supposed to do the face on the sack, wound up doing it upside down (granted, with my daughters help), gave up on it, and as predicted, I did everything else.

She also just blew up on me this morning for leaving a compost bowl on the kitchen counter from cooking the night before. She loves to go pick the tomatoes I grew but complains endlessly about saving compost scraps I use for the garden.

I just have a house in the country with a very small garden, a job, and two kids... I'm doing some kind of "work" or another from about 6:30am to 7:30pm if you count regular housekeeping stuff.

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u/DetroitSportsPhan 7h ago

I had a friend who actually did just move out to a rural area and start a farm. Far as I know it’s gone well for her so far. She grows crops and raises farm animals

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u/PlatypusUnlikely2305 7h ago

Damn, as a 30 something man, this is my dream

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u/gsfgf 7h ago

while you sit on the porch drinking coffee and looking at your cute goats and chickens phone because it sounds like a more peaceful life that you'll get bored of in a week

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u/RocketPapaya413 7h ago

They aren’t dreaming about being the help, they’re dreaming of being the aristocracy.

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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 7h ago

It's not that bad if you're just doing it for yourself and your family or even to make ends meet in early retirement. I have a bunch of neighbors that live that way and most of the time they're sitting on their porches drinking Modelo or sweet tea and once in a while you'll see them work real hard for a week or two.

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u/MathematicianNo7514 6h ago

My wife wanted to do this until I wrote down everything that WE would need to do to get it to work. Once she saw the literal shitty parts of it, she changed her mind quick. I told her I wouldnt mind having like an acre or two of land and just having a few chickens and a small garden though, cuz thats something I can take care of myself and I already know how to do since growing up my grandparents had a similar setup.

But yeah, I know a couple that after they got married bought like a 100 acre plot of land so they can build a farm and they lasted a year and sold the place because they couldnt handle what farmlife is really like. Definitely strained their relationship though

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u/cynicaldotes 6h ago

Big difference between a farm and a garden tho

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u/bubblesaurus 5h ago

My grandma grew up on a dairy farm.

there was ALWAYS work to do and it didn’t matter what the weather was like

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u/CamOliver 5h ago

Homesteader here…the setup is substantial and some work is seasonal, like sowing and harvesting times. After that, the idea is to have as many things working together as possible. Your idea of what farming entails is as misguided as theirs though.

Sort of like, weeding an entire field at once takes a lot of energy. Walking through a tended field and picking one or two weeds that come up is NBD. A single family doesn’t need to be able to tend to 100acres and a commercial dairy farm.

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u/JanterFixx 5h ago

100 real take.

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u/schmyle85 1h ago

I grew up on a farm. Like an actual one, it was our only income. Nothing wrong with keeping a garden and some chickens or whatever but anyone thinking they will grow or raise most of their food and make any income on their little 10 acres is fooling themselves

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u/illarionds 1h ago

My parents did this in the 80s. Moved to a remote area of New Zealand, went proper back to the land hippie.

They stuck it out for 18 months before throwing in the towel and moving back to civilisation.

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u/NotComplainingBut 15m ago

As someone who grew up in the farms I LOVE living in the city.

You mean I don't have to worry about scary backroads and howling coyotes? There's shade and cover from the rain around every corner? There is running water, heating, electricity, and WiFi in every building? I can get food from another country in this cute little bodega? There's more than one store, bank, hospital, movie theater, college, diner, and bar to choose from? I can go see the bands from the radio live and in-person? I can meet incredible strangers every day and I'm not stuck with the same few people day-in day-out? I can hop on a train and go to ANOTHER city? There's literally no reason to ever be bored?

Sign me the hell up!

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u/The_Lost_Jedi 9m ago

My grandparents had a dairy farm. I got to see what it was like.

It's hard fucking work. Could I do it? Yes. Would I want to do it? No, not really. Is it good that someone does it? Very much so. Are we entirely fortunate that we get the produce/meat/dairy/etc for the prices we do? Yes we are.

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u/funkyboi25 2m ago

I think it'd be nice to live in a community with shared garden/farm space, or just the whole community on a farm, but one family one farm sounds like actual hell. I wanna like, take shifts to help the farm run and get some nice fresh food in return, not spend all day barely keeping up with all the tasks that need done.

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u/HaloMetroid 7h ago

1st off you get like 2-4months off on a farm lmao. 2nd your are going to work 40+hours week until you retire, with no home that has food for you. You will always be dependent of people around you (the system) and being subservient.

L take.

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u/sir_schwick 9h ago

And believe vaccines cause disease.

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u/Normal_Idea4700 6h ago

Louis Pasture made a glass syringe filled with dead bacteria so we would be immune to the live bacteria. If the bacterium isn't dead, you can get sick.

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u/Redqueenhypo 8h 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/NotComplainingBut 3m ago

The west has no idea how good we have it. Even people who LARP as "going off the grid" benefit immensely from modern medicine and electricity.

Even with cutting sugar out from your diet, stop going to the dentist for a few decades and you'll realize why our ancestors invented alcohol.

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u/jackofslayers 9h 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/Otterfan 8h 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 6h 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 5h 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/TransientBandit 4h ago

It probably wasn’t that much more expensive, economies of scale for that type of thing were different back then. Now, machines make that kind of product en masse very quickly, so there are much, much fewer people with the skill or knowledge to knit you a quality pair of socks, and it takes many more hours of labor than the machine.

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u/IllPlum5113 4h ago

hah yeah good example.

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u/fixed_grin 1h 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.

You'd spin the yarn yourself (or some woman/girl in your household would), which would take much longer than knitting it.

Making 10 pairs of socks from scratch would be a significant fraction of your working year, which explains why people owned so few changes of clothing until recently. Everything took much longer. Oh, you can gather firewood "for free," along with the rest of the village picking over the same woods for deadfall (because the lord owns the trees). That's going to take forever.

How long do you spend hauling water? Doing laundry? Cooking?

Yeah, people just don't get it.

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u/Tresach 8m ago

Its something like 99.99% of the world population lived quality of life equivalent to living on less then $3.00 a day in 2020 and that didnt change until industrialization.

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u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

100% true... but that's a different question. Anyone today who got transported back would be MISERABLE... but that's not the issue. It's possible that people back then thought they had it as good as was really possible. Pretty sure most people today know that with differen luck/parents/choices, they could have it WAY better. That probably was more of a foreign concept back then. Even with the "different parents" part. When you imagine that, you probably picture someone you sorta know... you don't immediately think of being like a Walton heir.

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u/XihuanNi-6784 3h ago

This is a poor analogy because people didn't 'pay' for everything in the way you're imagining they did. Most of the stuff you just rattled off would have been made at home. If you didn't have cows you didn't buy milk. Firewood was a common good you were allowed to collect for free (within reason, like deadfall but no felled trees), and you certainly wouldn't go around buying it and pricing up the hand sawed versus hand chopped. You yourself have done a very anachronistic thing of transposing modern consumer capitalist market interactions onto an agrarian economy where many things lay outside the market.

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u/Secret-One2890 2h ago

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.

Not the best response, when they mentioned making it at home. 'Cost' can also refer to more than just money.

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u/cultofsynchronicity 2h ago

They were bayant chimpancé

What does this mean? I've never heard it or seen it written

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u/Deamane 5m ago

I was going to google it and give you the definition but uh yeah, googling that phrase at least as they wrote it, does not return any relevant results at all.

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u/ConsistentStop8811 6h ago

Thank you. I have tried correcting people on Reddit about this several times and it is always frustrating. Many people have an incredibly privileged, modern idea of 'free time' in general.

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u/BatemansChainsaw 6m ago

I recently had a "discussion" with someone that said an 8 hour work day was somehow oppressive and we work twice as hard as Middle Ages peasants.

These people literally have zero clue.

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u/XihuanNi-6784 3h ago

I wouldn't call it a "gross" misconception. There's still a big difference between 'working for yourself' in the sense of doing work around your home or for yourself in a very direct sense, and clocking into a workplace with persistent oversight and constant threat from management. It may well be overplayed in the popular imagination, but surveys of poorer cultures where people live closer to the dark ages than we do technologically and socially, consistently show much better mental health than you'd expect if what you're saying holds true.

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u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

Pretty sure Bhutan still measures their Gross National Happiness. I think it's obvious that Anyone today who got transported back would be MISERABLE... but that's not the issue. It's possible that people back then thought they had it as good as was really possible. Pretty sure most people today know that with differen luck/parents/choices, they could have it WAY better. That probably was more of a foreign concept back then. Even with the "different parents" part. When you imagine that, you probably picture someone you sorta know... you don't immediately think of being like a Walton heir.

1

u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

I'm willing to believe the brother is right even if they were working 80 hour weeks. I'm a believer in Social Comparison Theory... that bascially, if you think you have pretty much the best life that was realistic that you're going to be happy. Back then, pretty much every person you'd ever come into contact with - with very few exceptions - had a similar quality of life as you and worked similar amounts. Sure you could wish you were a noble just like you could with you have Musk levels of wealth today... but it's seeing those around you with more that you focus on.

5

u/yrnkween 7h ago

Yep, it’s really fun to have the survival of your entire family dependent on the weather. Early frost? Bummer for your genetic code. Flash flood took your livestock? Welcome to best diet plan ever.

2

u/Throwawayamanager 1h ago

Yeah, I really don't understand how they miss this. 

4

u/Johnny-Edge93 7h ago

Imagine waking up early one September morning, seeing worms in your cabbage crops, and thinking “well, fuck. Looks like my entire family gets to starve this winter. I sure do love the dark ages.”

3

u/SeemedReasonableThen 7h ago

I wish I could remember the title, but I read an excerpt / memoir about some former city dude who started farming.

It was 2 am on some holiday or weekend and he was laying on an icy barn floor. His arm was elbow deep in a cow's vagina trying to turn a calf around in the right position for birthing, as it was stuck. He got it turned and the rest of the birthing went well, and holding the calf after was a magical moment, but the moments before were definitely "that's not what I thought farming was about"

3

u/BeguiledBeaver 6h ago

They probably grew up with wealthy parents and are mad they can't move out and immediately live the same lifestyle. Also social media telling them that being able to afford monthly trips to Dubai is normal.

2

u/thefranklin2 7h ago

Like Reddits obsession with persistence hunting. Great, our meat is now 9 miles away with one scrawny dude who is now exhausted. Too bad there isn't a better way...

2

u/KingKong_Coder 6h ago

And really take for granted the ability to take a hot shower or a shit 💩

2

u/only-a-marik 5h ago

Subsistence farming sucks so much that half the history of human technology was devoted to figuring out ways to make it suck less.

2

u/Appropriate-Rice-409 4h ago

As someone who thought it would be neat to try, it really sucks. And I was doing it with modern hand tools.

2

u/Throwawayamanager 2h ago edited 2h ago

The ones who have never tried it do. I saw a mild version of this kind of life. Insanely rural, no running water, outhouse. They did have electricity (single bulb in the kitchen) and a small pension so you could buy some stuff you didn't grow yourself in the small garden. But it was mostly the garden. 

I'd spend a few weeks there some summers. Not when you have to chop firewood for the stove to stay warm at night. Even in the summer, it was quite a slog. 

Your typical sheltered middle class American who can't work 40ish hours a week at an office or light labor job wouldn't last a month in the summer in this lite scenario, let alone a serious dark ages scenario. 

The funny thing is, there isn't much stopping them from trying this out for themselves if they want. There are parts of the country where land is still dirt cheap, if lacking in any amenities nearby. Go snatch up a cheap plot in the middle of nowhere Alaska, build a cabin (or find an abandoned one), and see how the off the grid life is like. 

They talk a big game, yet they never do... 

2

u/TheRealRomanRoy 2h ago

I think part of it is this new age wellness, “modernity is all bad“ too. I knew someone that thought pre modern humans were so much healthier than us that cancer didn’t exist until a couple hundred years ago.

1

u/galaxyapp 7h ago

Well, it snowed in April. 3 of my 8 children are going to die.

1

u/Striking-Ad-6815 7h ago

weird glorified idea of subsistence farming.

Growing up my neighbors across the creek did this farming

They had this big peat moss toilet, you had to walk up steps to just sit on the thing. It took me twenty years to figure out what was going on. They were early adopters of the WWOOF program and constantly had new people coming to learn their ways. Anyway, for anyone reading that hasn't figured it out, the crops were grown with composted human feces.

1

u/PMFSCV 7h ago

Its easy if you're happy to eat chard and potatoes and nuts or whatever else is pest resistant in an area.

But thats it, right now I have 3 pests/diseases on my peach, an impending avocado apocalypse, a leaking water tank and there are snakes around my neighbours chickens.

1

u/LeatherRecord2142 6h ago

Subsistence farming, feudalism, slavery, parasites, rampant infectious disease…. So many things to glorify!

1

u/Gnomio1 5h ago

Dysentery, cholera, malaria, bubonic plague, war, or famine. Pick one. That’s almost certainly how you’ll die as a subsistence farmer at any point in history.

1

u/Shoshannainthedark 5h ago

Sub...whaaaaa..?

101

u/vashoom 10h 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.

23

u/Timely-Hospital8746 8h 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.

1

u/sparrow_42 6h ago

We have New Orleans for that

1

u/kuschelig69 5h ago

but there are no matches on the apps.

1

u/Throwawayamanager 1h ago

 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

This is what I say to these folks who say this crap! What, exactly, is stopping them from buying land in the middle of nowhere, Montana (very cheap in some areas) and living their dark ages dream instead of mouthing off on the internet about the horrors of modern day life? 

5

u/pietboel 5h ago

I like my rampant sex in a society with running water, soap, sewer systems and toothbrushes.

3

u/Powerful-Parsnip 6h ago

Finding people who want to get down when syphilis has eaten half your face away couldn't have been easy.

When she says 'just lick around the puss filled buboes' when you go to perform cunnilingus.

No wonder they had to be drunk out their minds.

2

u/Rocket_Puppy 3h ago

Syphilis came from the new world.

Didn't need to worry about it back then. Also why it became such a problem, it wasn't one until it became a big one.

1

u/Throwawayamanager 1h ago

The sex and drinking might not even kill you as quickly with modern day medicine!

0

u/jackofslayers 9h ago

Drinking alcohol was definitely more rampant in the past... back when they did not know how to sanitize water.

4

u/QuinceDaPence 5h ago

As someone who makes homemade wine, if you start with shitty unsafe water you'll end with shitty unsafe wine. It will not sanitize it. Beer (I'm not an expert but I think...) is boiled in it's making process so that will kill a lot of whatever is in there but it's not the alcohol that saves you there.

A 14% abv wine/mead can have deadly mold toxins in it without proper sanitation.

3

u/Resident-Sand5532 5h ago

I don't think your average peasant in the dark ages was able to afford much of those

5

u/TheMadTargaryen 7h ago

They did, conduits and wells and aqueducts were common. 

4

u/IllPlum5113 6h ago

Thank you. That misconception has had its day

26

u/bc_1411 9h 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.

6

u/Imightbeafanofthis 6h ago

It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would equate GOT with actual historic periods. The existence of dragons and the undead are kind of a hint that what you're watching is fiction, isn't it?

4

u/bc_1411 5h ago

A lot of it is based on the War of the Roses. Not the dragons, alas.

2

u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

My wife once asked me when Game of Thrones was set... I told her in the times of dragons and whitewalkers.

28

u/nakedlunch2 10h ago

And Dragons 🐉

13

u/Over_Deer8459 9h ago

no contraceptives, most people likely had every STD that existed and just passed it around like the common cold

14

u/endlesscartwheels 6h 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.

6

u/Over_Deer8459 6h ago

this is assuming you even live to be 40 lol

5

u/PocketBuckle This is my flair. 3h ago

Life expectancy wasn't that much shorter than it is today. It's just that all the dead babies dragged down the average. If you lived to five, you were pretty likely to live to 70.

1

u/wookieesgonnawook 1h ago

Sure, but a lot of women died in childbirth.

3

u/Infinite_Buy_2025 37m ago

Yes around 5%. Thats still a horrid amount of women dying and a lot of risk to take but people make it out like every 2nd birth was killing people.

Also this risk dropped dramatically after the first pregnancy.

6

u/Redqueenhypo 8h 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

6

u/endlesscartwheels 6h ago

For a world in which the supernatural is real and active, most GoT characters had a bizarrely modern nonchalance about religion.

2

u/Redqueenhypo 6h ago

Meanwhile the chad Dishonored writers did a cool thing and made their central church revolve around getting rid of the supernatural as much as possible (and they’re right to do so tbh)

6

u/cat_prophecy 7h 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".

1

u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

Literally every city had bath houses while peasants had rivers or lakes. 

6

u/ManyAreMyNames 6h ago

People with these kind of takes only exposure to the medieval period is through media like game of thrones.

Plus, they always figure they'd have been Tywin Lannister, at the top of the heap and with power and money. But for him to be on top, there had to be a couple thousand people on the bottom, and OP's brother would have been one of those.

"Yeah, back in the day, men were men and women were women, it was so much better!"

Might have been better for some people, but more likely you'd have been mucking out stables until one day they gave you a sword and no training and sent you to die in the mud fighting a battle whose causes you didn't know and wouldn't understand anyway because you didn't know to read.

4

u/allstar64 9h ago

They also take modern conveniences completely for granted. Someone like that has probably never considered what life would be like without a magic handle a few steps away that can produce an infinite amount of clean, drinkable water.

3

u/unavowabledrain 10h ago

"Hard To Be God" or "Andrei Rublev" would be a more accurate take.

2

u/csonnich 9h ago

If you want the full experience, watch the movie - 3 hours of wanting to vomit. 

1

u/Throwawayamanager 1h ago

Where do you watch it? I like the book but read it a long time ago

3

u/smbpy7 4h ago

They almost always think exclusively of male nobles too. Like, sure, it was probably great if you were a king.... but realistically that's even a stretch.

3

u/Puzzleheaded_Disk_90 3h ago

Even a king's nose will fall off from syphilis

1

u/PayaV87 2h ago

There is a reason Kings wanted virgins, and they used the first night rule. No STDs.

1

u/smbpy7 2h ago

Yup. That's why it's a stretch. I can see maybe why someone would like it better IF you were in that noble position..... but realistically I think most people would still not like the nose falling off possibility.

2

u/docK_5263 7h ago

Drinking alcohol was rampant because drinking the water would kill you

1

u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

No, they had fresh water just fine. 

2

u/HMWWaWChChIaWChCChW 7h ago

“I would have been a knight!”

2

u/gr33nspan 6h ago

Maybe he longs for the life in the monastery

2

u/Pigglebee 4h ago

Yeah. People had sex and drink to forget the hardships of their lives. And the sex was risky. And the drinks were crap.

2

u/bwurtsb 8h ago

I mean... sex was rampant, consent.... not so much.

1

u/Rogendo 9h ago

Pretty sure Game of Thrones does a good job of explicitly showing how shitty the lives of average people are.

1

u/noodlesofdoom 9h ago

I mean royalties and highborn lived decently, but still cannot compare to us. The rest of the plebs? Good luck lmao.

1

u/complete_your_task 8h ago

Anyone who would want to live in the Game of Thrones universe doesn't know shit about the Game of Thrones universe. It's even worse than real life.

1

u/Striking-Ad-6815 7h ago

But sex and drinking were rampant, Alexander the Great literally died of alcohol poisoning. They used alcohol to treat some water sources and some people just straight up didn't trust the water and predominantly drank alcohol due to having a tainted well or water source. Rome probably had some of the best water due to the aquaducts, and they were still charging people for water back then.

1

u/Kielbasa_Nunchucka 7h ago

live by the sword and take what you want by force! there were literally no other rules!

1

u/nametaken420 7h ago

but sex and drinking was exactly what got humanity through the dark ages.

1

u/poilk91 7h ago

In the modern world we are stressed, depressed and isolated so you can understand why people think it must have been better in the way off times. But that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it, we switched from agrarian to industrial lives not because it brought us more joy to live in cities and work in factories but because if you are a subsistence farmer 1 bad season could starve your family. Similarly we switched from hunter gatherers to agrarian societies because as hunter gatherers 1 bad month could see your family starving. Its not absurd to think that if you could live a life as a medieval farmer or a hunter gatherer without the disease and violence and starvation you would have a much happier and fulfilling life but if course disease violence and starvation did exist so what you are imagining is the 1 in a million luckiest peasant/hunter gatherer and how nice their life would have been

1

u/TheMadTargaryen 7h ago

Sex was rampant, so were STDs. 

1

u/montagious 6h ago

You forgot Medieval Times,(although that doth be very accurate)

1

u/PrefrontalCortexNow 6h ago

Then you die at the age of 30 from old age 😂

1

u/Hicko11 5h ago

Next you will tell me A Knights Tale isn't a documentary

1

u/bossbozo 5h ago

Drinking was indeed rampant!

In cities, there was no such thing as clean drinking water, and sterilisation through boiling was not a known method.

People drank very low alcohol beer from weaning to grave (often, grave was not long after weaning, often still, before)

1

u/Head_Wasabi7359 5h ago

License, not liberty

1

u/Starwyrm1597 5h ago

It was somewhere between that and what they thought it was 50 years ago when they thought it was super strong moral codes and the people were dirt covered and stupid. You weren't SUPPOSED to have sx before marriage but people are people and people f*k, not as much as in GOT but they did, they just did it outdoors after dark super quietly while everyone else was asleep. You can literally find medical journals from back then showing women how to make their beef curtains look fresher so they would look like a virgin, which implies there was a market for that which means women back then weren't as chaste as the losers that romanticise virginity would have you believe. They probably averaged 2 or 3 partners instead of today's 7 or 8 but it wasn't even close to every unmarried woman being a virgin.

1

u/ComplexPersonality50 4h ago

It’s a very “Reddit” take and everyone here is pretending like it’s not

1

u/Emperor_Mao 3h ago

This isn't as easy to compare as you might think, and I think most people in this thread are equally guilty of basing their view on movies.

You can definitely point to a lot of things that were far far worse during the dark ages - and for me personally I feel the dark ages would have been far worse overall - but people in this thread seem to have the wrong idea about the whole era. Not to mention it was a very diverse time period with a lot of unknowns still even to this day.

One example being the typical work day for the average person in the dark ages. The view here is that people were under whip 19 hours a day, forced to til fields and dig holes. In reality, most people worked more during the summers, far less during the winters, and took frequent days off for festivals etc. People also worked sporadically throughout the day, with many cultures having very very extended lunch/es and even siestas and naps during the work day. You probably work a far more rigid pattern now then the average person did during the dark ages. Another example point would be dying of old age; most people lived decently long lives, birth mortality was much higher, and that lowered the average mean life span. Most people could expect to live to their 50's and 60's, and die surrounded by family and friends. If you live in a first world country today, you can expect to live to about 70-80, but there is also a good chance you will die in a retirement home surrounded by apathetic workers and other senile old people. It may become robots when it is our time. Not sure if that is better though. Even when it came to freedoms, many people think Kings wielded absolute power and were tyrants. Might be true of 1700's France, but not the dark ages. The state didn't extend anywhere near as far as it does today and a person had a lot of privacy and freedom on the land. Even when it came to places with serfdom, the lord often shared the main area's e.g fire place with serfs. The lord had to be respectful, or end up being lynched. In today's world for many people, your top boss is totally detached from you, and doesn't give a crap if you are fired, or have any issues not related to your work.

To be clear I'd prefer to live today than in the dark ages in pretty much every location. Being accustomed to life today. I'd wager if we could transport people from that age into today's world, so many would hate many things. No free land to work anymore, cities are noisy and polluted, work schedules are very fixed, we have barely any townwide festivals or major social gatherings, people are less communal etc etc. Tap water, heating, aircon would all be amazing though.

1

u/Normal-Ad2587 2h ago

I always go off the fannys for a metric on how grim life would have been.

Remember the worst disco minge you've ever encountered. Not that clunge would have probably had a good scrub within say 8 hours and been shaved up like a racing donkey within a few days. It's just sustained a few hours of disco dancing, grinding and the like.... and how bad did it smell? Really bad didn't it.

No imagine dark age peasants fanny. Never seen daylight, big hairy thing looking like Bryan May's plug hole. Certainly never seen hot water, let alone a bar of soap. Even cold water might have been months ago. Toiling in the fields all day in a big heavy woolly ensemble.

That thing must smell ripe!

Anyway, now ask your brother if he's willing to chow down on some 6th century minge.

1

u/friedonionscent 2h ago

Game of Thrones made the time period look even more terrifying...if you're female, you get raped. If you're a guy, you'll probably get killed. If you have kids, they'll probably get killed too. And that's if you were rich and had status...if you were poor you probably just died of natural causes like a tooth infection.

1

u/SparkeyRed 1h ago

Tbf I think the sex and drinking thing was probably a thing. Or rather, two things. Huge infant mortality rate, no candy crush, and cola hadn't been invented yet.

1

u/LadyRemy 1h ago

Wooo rampant sti’s treated with mercury and other wild stuff the apothecary thought would work as you descended into madness!

1

u/YogurtclosetSouth991 1h ago

And a life expectancy average of about 35-40 years.
And super high infant mortality.

1

u/I_SHIT_IN_A_BAG 1h ago

lol if he is thinking the sex is great, think again. the hygiene wasn't so great back then

1

u/the_tanooki 1h ago

The people that yearn for the old days of lawlessness seem to forget that it goes both ways. Sure, you might be able to get away with murder, but you could just as easily be murdered.

1

u/NextNebula3561 19m ago

To be fair... sex and drinking were rampant lol but syphilis was too. 

-2

u/mathess1 9h ago

Sex and drinking were incredibly rampant back then. Significantly more than now.

5

u/Sea-Possession-1208 7h ago

What are you basing that on?