How to live on $432 a month in America

Your comment does focus in on the interesting point in that connected places have perhaps not scaled as well. Or perhaps there is some pareto front of locations on cost vs connectedness we need to imagine in our heads. Very interesting.

Unfortunately the appeal to ancestry fallacy is always a terrible idea.

You see this in the nutrition space where “influencers” go on and on about how our ancestors ate, forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.

Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.

The reason to complain about the high cost of living is that the U.S. has an incredibly high GDP and yet Americans live highly precarious lives, not that in certain very specific ways our ancestors had it slightly better, which as you point out leads to all sorts of issues.

Starlink and a local grocery store means the vast majority of the US is able to support a lifestyle most of humanity could only dream of until fairly recently without actually being that expensive. Year round bananas for dollars per pound is a fucking miracle of logistics.

Not that long ago one of my coworkers was effectively living in minimum wage in a major US city and tossing everything else into savings. Excessive number of roommates, no car, cooking simple vegetarian meals at home etc. At the other end if he had a major medical condition, drug addiction, etc he’d have been “fucked,” except for the fact modern medicine simply wasn’t available at any price again until recently so should we assume it’s normal.

No they didn't, stop using averages.

They would move 1,000 miles or more, or even across the sea and then send back and forth letters every few months. "Alice had a baby, she named him Robert Joseph. I have secured work at the textile mill, and am saving to buy a plot of land. The weather here is cold in winter, but the summers are somewhat more tolerable."

The interesting thing is, I feel like they moved back then mainly because there wasn't sufficient land or jobs where they came from. Today, the urban dwellers this article is talking about has an equal dearth of land and jobs available to them in the city, but they don't feel like the countryside has anything to offer them either.

Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it. But yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than us.

No, people who say that they “died extremely early relative to modern humans” mean the bunk dying at 40 due to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.

Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1] The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called “appeal to ancestry fallacy”. That we know medicine now (like hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.

[1] This seems typical of “data” outlets.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078093

Our ancestors also had more children, less rates of depression and mental illness and the modern rates of socialization, marriage, etc are all in steep decline.

Therefore maybe the cardboard box apartment, transient friends, and access to all that nightlife isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While we’re a lot richer and more well off it doesn’t seem like people are happier.

That's entirely subjective. My grandparents are no longer alive but I'm confident they would find many aspects of the average life today to be terrible.

As others pointed out these claims are often skewed by high childhood mortality rates.

Beyond that, though, I'm curious why you consider the number of years lived to be a primary concern?

I'd rather live 50 good years than 80 miserable ones. I'd also rather live to 65 than make it to 80 with the last 30-40 years spent increasingly propped up with medications, doctors appointments, and invasive treatments.

While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, it's not really accurate to say that "our ancestors died extremely early". See "Did Ancient People Die Young?" at https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/ :

> Mortality rates in traditional populations are high during infancy, before decreasing sharply to remain constant till about 40 years, then mortality rises to peak at about 70. Most individuals remain healthy and vigorous right through their 60s or beyond, until senescence sets in, which is the physical decline where if one cause fails to kill, another will soon strike the mortal blow.

While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, the point is that it was absolutely routine for people to live into their 60s, and not uncommon for them to live into their 70s or 80s.

See e.g. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/