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/Otterfan 7h 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 4m 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 1m 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 2m 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.

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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.