The past was not that cute

No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact, we ought to have both. It's not like it's impossible. We just have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bladerunner".

Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.

However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more.

Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself.

And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able.

More here:

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here:

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br...

It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women

Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe. The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible

what’s truly hard for the modern mind to comprehend is that our societies are the exception to the rule of history, not the norm. as the ancients go, that type of thing (along with total scorched-earth genocide of other tribes) was basically commonplace.

An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal sized.

Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.

It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and frames reflected this.

All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.

Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap, unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff. People have distorted memories of what things used to be like. Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff is still around while everything else is in a landfill.

The funny thing is that the Rape of the Sabines was adapted into a popular musical comedy movie "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" in 1954. Audiences loved it at the time but the story seems bizarre and offensive today.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047472/

Au contraire, when my mother was growing up most ingredients were organic and free range by default and all your meals were hand made and free of synthetic additives.

There are charts which show the cratering of nutritional content of fresh produce over time so maybe not all goods and services of the past were total crap.

Life for the very richest people hundreds of years ago might have been almost as comfortable as the average person today but for the vast majority of people it was truly miserable.

> There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other.

Deeper connectedness? Yeah, conform to the small town or gossip ruins your life. "Harper Valley PTA" ain't that long ago. Shared public spaces ruled by the biggest jerks--hope you're willing to take on a sociopath on the hill. My father had an entire garage of junk to repair those "quality goods" (cars, in particular were terrible). The only reason why "services" were good is that you could get a bad reputation and then you were doomed as nobody would buy from you--of course the flip side is that you could be shaken down, too. Ritual? Hey, girl, you're 18--why aren't you married and pregnant already like your sisters were?

At this point, most of the people on HN have never lived in the world where being smart was a HUGE negative stigma ("Revenge of the Nerds" was an exaggeration--but not by as much as you'd think). If we wound the clock back to the 1960s or 1970s, 95% of the smart people on HN would be profoundly unhappy--just like all the rest of the functionally alcoholic men working in the mills, mines, or factories.

You chose "Bladerunner" as the maximal negative while my grandfathers would have viewed it as a step up.

Would this exceptional modern society of ours you speak of just happen to be the one founded on the genocide of Native American tribes?

Deeper connectedness is Karenism. There are still countries and societies today that are "deeper connected" and you can see the cost of it.

> However, in general, most of the past really was terrible.

How are you and everybody else here so sure about that? Maybe you are forgetting parts of the population with different lifestyles and conditions? And I don't mean only the rich.

When people are though, they don't suffer from a though life as much as somebody who is soft. You can notice that with yourself if you do uncomfortable things, like going on outdoor adventures or staying in a more primitive cottage.

Old people have a tendency to only talk about the hard times, and paint themselves as hard working martyrs. And of course it is in their interest to convince the younger generations that the system the olds are in control of is a vanguard against endless suffering, starvation and disease. Hmm, now it starts to sound familiar. Don't we need to sacrifice an oxen or a virgin to keep away that suffering from the past? Don't we need the young generations to obey and pay us juicy, juicy monetary tributes so that we keep the blight from the past away from them? The horror we have had to tell them about, because they weren't alive to verify if it was lies or truth.

Deeper connectedness = Karenism

They can go right now to Karen societies like the middle east and asia but they don't, its clear why.

Whenever possible I'd always prefer a societal construction that requires minimal interdependence really, its not even a question.

> most of the past really was terrible

I used to think this way, but if you actually start reading first hand accounts, stories from long ago, etc you start to question this narrative. And then I contrast that with my current situation:

I wake up, spend 30 minutes with my child before sending him off to daycare so I can work, and then I get about an hour with him in the evening before he goes to bed. I’d give up a lot if it meant more time with my family. Especially if we were working together to provide for our family directly, as opposed to making some billionaire richer.

Modern society is deeply inhuman compared to the past, and I think the whole “the past is terrible” narrative - that I grew up believing - is pushed by the wealthy today to continue the absurd wealth inequality. If they can point to the past and say “that was awful, you should appreciate what you have today” people are much less likely to get angry about the wealth gap and general parasitism of elites today.

> Deeper connectedness is Karenism.

I am utterly confused by this statement. Karen as in... "let me speak with your manager" meme Karen? What are you trying to say here?

that’s not who we are any more

200 years ago might as well be 20,000 to the modern mind

What people mean when they say farming in the past was “organic” is that crops would be grown in actual, non-metaphorical crap. You would collect a big pile of it, let it sit there stinking up the area, and then when it dried and decomposed enough you would spread an even layer of crap across your fields.

That’s not the kind of evidence I’m basing my opinions on. I’m reading historians who tell us what it’s like because they have looked at the evidence. What there is of it. For ancient times, this is pretty sparse.

For example, read the series on peasants that I linked to an acoup.blog. It’s largely a demographic model because peasants don’t write to us and the elites were not very interested in them. But it’s based on things like child mortality rates and I don’t think there is anyone claiming that there were any societies with modern child mortality rates in ancient times?

Also, exploitation by the elites is part of the model.

Are you trying to imply this is bad? This is what I romanticize modern organic farming to be?

Keeping the good parts of the traditional way of life in modern context is very difficult. Living a simple, frugal life without sacrificing hygiene and mental integrity, controlling consuming needs and enjoying the bare minimum presupposes deep philosophical insight, knowledge of self and of basic and advanced human needs, a maturity that only a few obtain in young age.

It is easier to approach the "mental singularity" of a free spirit if you are at the edge of survival that in the convenient, warm western style.

I am. I think that organic farming is based around the same kind of fake nostalgia discussed upthread, and there's really no coherent reason to avoid chemical fertilizer. Manure contributes nothing better other than a pile of contaminants and pathogens. (I'm more sympathetic to people who want to avoid herbicides, even if the best evidence is that they're safe.)

Even if you like modern organic farming, it's carefully regulated to control the risks and environmental costs of using crap. The US National Organic Program (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/5006.pdf), for example, requires 90-120 days between the application of raw manure and harvest; only properly pasteurized manure can be used in the months before harvest.

So when I was a chemist at university I saw one of those silly chain mail claims that cigarettes have polonium 210 in them. I thought "that's dumb" let me fact check that; it turns out that phosphates enrich the soil with radionuclides and radon in the soil enters plants and decays to Po210.

So actually yes I am generally in favour of archaic methods for making food because our biochemistry and the environment has had a lot longer to find equilibrium with non-synthetic solutions.

That isn't to say that we should throw away science and give up 200 years of progress on hygiene, but I also don't believe that packing chickens into their own feces then pumping them with antibiotics and washing them in chlorine is all that great either.

Maybe this solves for food scarcity and I'm all for that being available to other people but I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium on alternatives methods that eschew the use of synthetic products in my food chain.

Karen as in excessive nosiness and controlling behaviour

Again, I’m sympathetic to some arguments against unnecessary synthetic products in the food chain. I’m just not sure how you get to the intuition that packing chickens into feces is bad but packing plants into feces is perfectly OK.

Because they're not equivalent, in one system there are inbuilt mechanisms to recycle and incorporate feces into nutrients. In the other there is no such system and instead the build up of urea(?) gets so severe it ends up burning off the feet of the chickens who have no means of vacating from their filth.