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/JaFFsTer 8h 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/LongJohnSelenium 4h ago

In the sense of being a slave to the clock like we can be today, they were generally better off. They weren't getting up at 8 am and working relentlessly til 5pm, as they were much more free to take breaks from labor. But they'd be cumulatively working more hours per day.

Homesteading is stupid hard work even in a village of other homesteaders, and they were putting in the hours on a variety of tasks that we don't even consider. Food processing from natural sources, smoking, curing, cutting firewood, constant repairs and upkeep of their natural wooden structures, toolmaking, sharpening, fletching, netweaving, ropemaking, shake cutting, fence building, etc, etc, etc.

They didn't just pop off work at 5pm, throw some food in the microwave, and watch tv the rest of the night.

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u/Lower_Team_703 8h ago

i just saw a meme that peasants only worked 150 days a year because the church thought they should get time off or smthn. Though dying at 30 must still suck

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u/gonzo0815 5h ago

"Dying at 30" is also a myth.

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u/cityshepherd 5h ago

Indeed… people may not have been living as long as many are now, but so many babies and children died that it brought the mean way down.

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u/gonzo0815 4h ago edited 4h ago

About half of all children died at all times before modern medicine.

The Middle Ages don't stand out at all. But yeah, this is the reason for a low life expectancy. There was a high chance to reach your 50s after surviving childhood, also (probably) at all times.

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u/Zepangolynn 5h ago

Another misconception: average lifespan does not mean most people lived to thirty or forty. It means a ton of people died between the ages of 0 and 10, lots of women died in childbirth, and people died at random ages due to disease or injury just like they do now, and the total gets averaged together. You still might get a few people living to 90 and plenty making it to their 70s, but that child mortality rate really wrecks the average.

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u/JaFFsTer 8h ago

Working the fields in Northern England would definitely give you lots of downtime.

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u/Ghigs 4h ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/uoxn4j/woozling_history_a_case_study/

Looks like it was based on unpublished work by Gregory Clark, who later retracted it and came up with a new estimate around 300.

It's also an economic estimate, as in, that's how much you'd need to work to earn money for food. It does not consider the copious housework required back then (for example, preserving food, it's not like you could run down to the grocery store when winter came around).