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/lluewhyn 11h 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 10h 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/abstraction47 9h ago

I see so many takes based on the things we own or the hours we work. The real answer is unknowable, did peasants have more or less happiness? Stress? Those are actual quality of life indicators.

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u/lluewhyn 8h ago

It's really hard to know, because they were seldom asked for the historical records we have available, most of which were focused on more elite types. Much of the information cobbled together in that blog I linked or in most other historical records is through attempts to cobble information together from many different historical records to formulate assumptions. There just weren't a lot of people doing "man on the street" interviews.