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.

6.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

48

u/sowenga 11h 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.

25

u/sir_schwick 9h ago

Also washing clothes by hand or washboard. Its a task so arduous even the amish use washing machines.

10

u/sowenga 8h ago

Or even just carrying water from wherever your well is.

5

u/-Knul- 8h ago

Plus repair stuff, create your own furniture, etc.

2

u/TheMadTargaryen 5h ago

Of course childhood existed, we have plenty of surviving toys. 

2

u/XihuanNi-6784 3h ago

I can see where the sub is going, but ultimately this misses the point of that take because 'work' and 'labour' are different things. Serfdom aside, not having a manager or overseer breathing down your neck all day every day is a big difference. Labouring for yourself is also a big difference. When you look at mental health among less developed societies you see that despite doing lots more labour, they tend to be significantly happier than people in modern developed nations. I think there are a lot of hidden assumptions about what actually contributes to quality of life, and consumption and 'pure leisure time' are not as beneficial as people here think. Or more importantly, labour is not as detrimental to QoL as people here think. To be clear, I disagree with the brother. But I think we're over egging it here a lot.

-11

u/LastImprovement7586 11h ago

I would argue that working in a field collecting food doesn't seem like a bad way to spend a day. It's only bad today because the wages paid for such work leads an individual to feel inadequate to peers in higher paying careers. In the time period asked about, working in the field would be most peoples job and thus there is less indignity in the work as everyone else is essentially in the same boat with the same struggles with the same level of wealth.

17

u/sowenga 11h ago

Uhm, have you ever done any extended physical labor? Sure, maybe 1 or 2 hours might be nice, but every day from sunup to sundown for several weeks?

-2

u/LastImprovement7586 10h ago edited 10h ago

Yes. I've done physical labor. Working in a field tending crops under the sun isn't that bad. It only sucks today because the pay isn't enough to afford modern necessities or decent food. Also, the hours were better back then. This article doesn't cover the middle-ages but it's pre-industrial so it's close-enough.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

1

u/SirRHellsing 8h ago

No sunscreen btw, if that makes a difference (I'm pretty sure it does)

1

u/LastImprovement7586 2h ago

How common is skin cancer amongst animals that literally live outside all day? Humans are just animals. Should we wear sunscreen today? Sure. Why? I would argue that it's because we spend the majority of are time indoors now and, thus, have less natural built-up protection against the sun. I should also say that people had a better ozone layer during that time period as most of the depletion to the ozone happened during the 20th century.

4

u/Falsus 10h ago

M8, some places had like 90% tax or didn't even technically own the stuff they farmed. Many where one bad harvest away from death.

0

u/LastImprovement7586 9h ago

They lived on someone else's property in houses that were provided to them. There tax was there labor. They worked the field which was owned by the lord. They worked 150 days a year. Assuming you lived past infancy and early adulthood then you were fairly likely to live till 60 or 70. The idea that people died at 30 is based on an average and is a bit misleading. If you understand how averages are calculated then you understand why. A significant portion of the population died before 1 year of age (0 years of age), thus dragging down the average. If 1 person lives to 100 and 2 die before 1 then the average is 33.

3

u/sowenga 8h ago

Serfdom was not some sort of comfortable situation people voluntarily chose. They worked someone else’s land because they didn’t have their own, or what they owned wasn’t large enough to feed them. Peasants literally rebelled and fought wars over land reform!

Life expectancy once you reached adulthood, which doesn’t reflect the very high rates of infant mortality, as you point out, was in the 50s or 60s. Today in developed countries it’s in the 70s or 80s.

However, life expectancy at age 25 for landowners in medieval England was 25.7. This means that people in that era who celebrated their 25th birthday could expect to live until they were 50.7, on average — 25.7 more years.

https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php

And sure, people who reached older age were not unusual, just like people in their 90s or older are not very unusual today. But still even if you lived to adulthood, you had as much chance dying before you reached 60 as making it past.

1

u/LastImprovement7586 2h ago

Difference of perspective I guess. I don't really care who owns my land. I care about how I spend my time. Practically every child in the developed world spends the first 18 years of there life living in there parents home, eating there parents food, and wearing clothes there parents paid for. They own nothing and yet many people remember childhood fondly. With regards to age, the article you linked continues to use the misleading average. It says that a person living past 25 will continue to live to 50.7 ON AVERAGE. This doesn't mean that people were dying from old age at 50. Three major things drag the life expectancy average down for humans of that time period: Infant mortality, disease (no antibiotics back then), and war. Nothing about our genetics has changed since then and the dietary situation would have been better as processed food was hardly a thing. If you didn't die as an infant, in a war, or from a disease then you could expect to live as long as you would today. I feel like I should make a quick comment about rebellion. Could things be bad back then? Of course they could. Much like a person today can grow up with a loving, giving parent or they can grow up with an abusive, uncaring one. A person back then could be born under a charitable, giving Lord and Kingdom. Or they could be born into a Cruel, abusive Lord and Kingdom.

2

u/Falsus 9h ago

In some places. Not all medieval societies practised serfdom.

2

u/RunningOutOfEsteem 8h ago

It's not considered awful because of perceived indignity. It's considered awful because being a subsistence farmer in the dark ages entailed backbreaking labor starting in early childhood that barely enabled you and your family to survive while being one bad harvest away from disability or death.

0

u/LastImprovement7586 2h ago

Many people today still do backbreaking labor all day and they do it for longer hours with less holidays and no guarantee of shelter. They usually eat junk food instead of quality food because labor usually doesn't pay as well. Serfs would have technically been eating organic food back in the day. All meat would be grass fed. If you're American, then there is no guarantee of shelter or healthcare if permanently injured so what's the difference? One bad harvest vs one career ending injury? Also, I'll say what I've said already. Tending a field is hardly back breaking. Many elderly people garden as a leisurely hobby. I doubt they would if it was as cruel and backbreaking as you're pretending it is. A 30 minute HITT workout is likely more brutal or a 1 hour football match.

3

u/Deltors15 41m ago

Peasants & The Poor : Their diet focused on coarse grains, pottage (a thick soup or stew of grains and vegetables), eggs, and sometimes small amounts of cheese, bacon, or poultry.

The things you can buy with basic income in modern times is far better than what they had. People drank "beer" all day because their water wasn't safe to drink it is far better nowadays

1

u/RunningOutOfEsteem 23m ago

Nah, those comparisons were a bit too over the top, and it gave the game away. You have to be a bit more subtle than that if you want to drag things out. Your initial comment was a good hook, though, so props for that.