What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)

I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.

I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.

No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse.

Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.

I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem.

I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.

This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer.

Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it.

Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life.

oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards.

We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.

Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes.

And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all.

In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true for me to you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that.

And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.

Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview.

In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it.

Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies.

I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es

And the question I always ask when people make this claim - now would you rather be a median modern person or one of the richest kings of the medieval era? It emphasizes that there's more to having a good life than increased access to modern gizmos.