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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Modern middle class people in any developed nation would experience the life of an ancient or medieval king or noble as misery: totally awful sanitation, no modern medicine, limited food options, lack of access to information, slow travel, etc.

The same goes for the life of any hunter gatherer. Lack of modern medicine alone is huge. Living as a hunter gatherer might be okay if you were healthy. Get injured or sick and there’s nothing to be done. Infant and maternal mortality were also high.

The wealth of the present age is utterly unprecedented. If it collapses the fall will not be like other falls. I am skeptical about the value of any comparison with any historical example. This is too different in too many ways.

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There are certainly lots of extra ways for your life to end in the past.

Bit of a silly comparison, though. Material comforts do not make one happy, poke around the internet inquiring about mental health if you are unconvinced. The more relevant comparison to past times wouldn't be a middle class worker vs a king, it's vs being a peasant. Give me the king job any day and twice on Sundays, I'll feel way more alive. I'll get used to the garderobes.

So then the question is... how have we let ourselves, in some of the richest nations in history, re-invent mental misery despite physical comfort? Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?

I mean, middle class menial existences long predate industrialization. Just read Bartleby, the Scrivener.

Being a medieval king would be insufferable compared to being a middle class drone today. That you (and many others!) find your staggering privilege unsatisfying is a lack of creativity and laziness on your part.

> Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?

Work 60 hours a week, sleep 56, suffer 4 hours per day with your kid (28hrs)... That leaves 24 hours (per week!) of freedom, information and wealth the richest king pre 1800 could only have dreamed of.

That's 1248 hours per year, 52 24 hour days, a month and a half of every year where you can travel anywhere on the globe, eat anything, do practically anything. Let's only count age 30-50 as good years, only 20 years of 52 days of pure freedom... That is a total of 2.8 YEARS of free time. No one, not even a king, ever in history up until modernity has had 3 years of not working with so few strings attached. Not even close!

Absolute imaginationless whining. Just because nobody showed you how to live your life doesn't mean there aren't people out there thriving beyond history's wildest dreams.

Sure you have to vacuum and do laundry and go to the dentist with some of that free time (offset by week long vacations not included above), but goodness you have to have no self awareness to complain about laundry. 50% of babies (virtually the same for kings and peasants) died in infancy in premodern times [https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past]. Your free time is greater than the length of the majority of humans lives pre-1800.

This may not be the best we can do, but it is beyond anything anyone could have fantasized accomplishing, and the only way to describe it is wonderful. Life was brutal and now it decidedly is not. You can do practically whatever you want, why decide to complain (about a lifestyle you chose!)?

Make good use of your life! MILLIONS of children died so that you could have the chunk of time you got!

Sitting on top of all this is a system we have evolved that amplifies desire to such a degree that even the greatest comforts in human history are not enough for many.

Almost like an addiction to the desire for comforts. We are like alcoholics given a nearly unlimited supply of cheap rum who think what ails them is the inability to obtain as much top shelf vodka as they desire.

This is a well-established phenomenon known as the hedonic treadmill. It's not a result of some conspiracy. It probably has a neurological basis and occurs among all people. It probably occurs among all living things.

maybe life is about more than comfort

Not an excuse. Just because it's hard to be good doesn't mean we should give up and complain.

We're animals, the brain wants power and control and is not just a statistical machines counting up our wealth. Dogs in cages aren't happy either despite not having to work for their meals like their ancestors.

You throw around terms like "imaginationless" while ranting that "material comfort" is all anyone should be expected to find interesting in life? When you confuse non-consecutive "free time" with consecutive years of leisure and power? Please.

My claim is that we have the means, now, that we can build a better society, with happier people, if we try. We have staggering abilities that people of the past did not. Let's fucking use them better. You're telling me to give up and be a good happy little peon. Raise your sights.

It will always be true that the best you can do is hustle 24/7 as long as your bosses have the ability to collectively replace all of you with immigrants from areas with lower levels of material comfort who are willing to accept worse conditions than you.

For this process to reverse, one of two things must occur: 1. Scab immigration is completely stopped. 2. Every society on earth normalizes to the same level of material comfort.

We didn't re-invent mental misery, globalization created the conditions to allow your bosses to impose it on you. The good news is it is likely temporary.

Presence of material comforts doesn't make one happy, but their absence sucks. It's a different kind of suck, a more immediate physical one, than the social and metaphysical angst experienced by wealthy bored people. You don't have time or energy to contemplate your existence enough to suffer from metaphysical or social issues like this.

The number of downvotes I got for the top message shows how pervasive the romanticization of the past is in the developed world. Romanticizing scarcity and poverty is only possible among people who have never experienced it before.

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