Just picturing an alien archaeologist “so, as they stopped being crippled by polio or losing their lives building railroads, they complained about having to wash the dishes?”
Op, are you familiar with the hedonic treadmill? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
I think it’s a matter of the difference between the quality of life one COULD have vs what they do have. A couple hundred years ago, even royalty died from diseases that are curable today. Society need 90% of people to be farm labor just to be able to provide for 9% military and 1% aristocracy. Today, we know we COULD have access to things that would substantially improve our quality of life, and could have those things without needing much human labor, but these things are being kept from us.
Maybe numbers to help me explain:
Hundreds of years ago you might have lived at a 1, but the best anyone could hope for was like a 3. Today, you might live at a 3, but everyone could be living at a 9. So it’s the difference between how we DO live, and how we COULD live that people complain about.
This is a great point that has changed how I view this. Thanks
Excellent shower thought. Even the most powerful kings and queens of the past would be thrilled to live in today’s times even if religated to what we would consider poverty level living
Any alien archaeologist worth their preferred home planet’s seasoning ingredient would treat the development of a motorized sanitation device to clean large amounts of food prep and eating tools as a major labor saving milestone of technological development.
Thus complaining about having to the dishes is probably considered a reliable indicator of saturation of these devices.
This is why complaining about having to do the dishes is actually a selfless act of historical preservation for future alien archaeologists.
I love all of this, thank you.
Though, there is now a part of me that wants to mass produce etched stone tablets bitching about the dishes just to give some future alien archeolgist an interesting PhD subject.
Source? Vibes bro.
I think it’s more that as qol improved so too did the ability of common people to record their frustrations
Thomas Paine posited that if a man, unencumbered by society, could meet his basic needs (food, shelter, etc) in x hours of work per day, then society owed that same person the same basic standards of life for working that same x hours per day. Where I’m from, the Native Americans had to work about 2 hours a day to meet their needs, and so became really great artisans with their “free” time.
Closer to present, my parents were able to buy a comfortable suburban home while working relatively low paying government jobs. That includes my mom taking off approx 6 years to take care of my sister and I until we started elementary school.
When Europeans first came to America, there were schools of cod off the coast that you could literally dangle an empty hook into the water and catch fish. Passenger Pigeons darkend the sky for days on end with their migrations, and the thundering of huge buffalo herds could be heard and seen throughout a good portion of the continent.
[Life expectancy] fell to 77 in 2020 and dropped further, to just over 76, in 2021. That’s the largest decrease over a two-year span since the 1920s. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835
Sure it’s not all bad. But it’s far, far from all good as well. Sometimes bitching is just the sign of an unhappy person, but often there are some real truths behind the complaints.
Those Native Americans were working within a society.
To be unencumbered by society also means to work without its aids. Even with advances in tech, you should read about how much crazy work was involved in setting up your own homestead or kind of anything. (I strongly recommend Crusoe of Lonesome Lake.)
It’s a good book. I would argue that although he had a hard go of it, and long days, his life was much more fulfilling than 99% of the lives that people live these days; probably more fulfilling than the lives of the people that lived during his time as well. There’s a reason people love escapism.
Oh the fulfilling bit, hard to argue one way or the other. Might be a grass is greener sort of scenario. Like, as a dev who works from home, spending a few days doing hard, long hours of manual labour on my buddy’s cabin was fun but holy damn, not sure I could dig that every day for years. Especially without physiotherapy and modern medicine (I play soccer a few times a week and without physio, I’d be a broken husk of a man.)
I imagine the protagonist might have looked at us sitting in the warm with all the free time, multimedia beyond his comprehension, literally every book written at our fingertips and he would’ve been fair to wonder something like “in such luxury, how could anyone not find their own meaning? With the freedom to learn almost anything imaginable, with food and a warm bed being all but guaranteed, what person could blame the world instead of themselves for not finding purpose or passion?”
I mean, by 1400 the world population was comparable to the modern US. It merely broke the billion people mark by the early 1800s, it took merely another century to double that, and it since did more than 4x straight to 8.2 billion people, so even if the proportion of whiners stayed the same, there’d be so many more of them. Now, to that, consider we now have access to the internet.
Oh yeah, it’s a pure function of tech and numbers. I just find it incredibly ironic.
Most people who have had a thing don’t like losing it and it’s slipping.
Not to mention, that “quality” is really subjective based on location.
Oh absolutely. It’s just compared to thr vast majority of humans who have ever lived, our complaints are sort of like when billionaires nowadays complain about being taxed.
Our lives are almost unimaginably better, somehow doubly so if you are a woman or minority, than most of the entirety of human history. So I find it ironic that there’ll be such a more a significant record about the most relatively pampered people in human history complaining.
thats ignoring the shorter term trend lines backwards for such folks.
Yup! Because even on short term trend lines, most of us in the first world are doing fine relative to the world, which I find incredibly short sighted. Would you trade places with the children who make your clothes?
Yeah, but as the quality of life has improved, we have also improved our knowledge and technology to the point where everyone can live a comfortable, generally healthy life, without want for any necessities. But that isn’t happening because of human greed and indifference. And everyone is completely justified complaining about that.
As cameras have taken over, so too has people being caught betraying their trusted positions of power.
Nowadays we have first world problems, but I wonder if something comparable existed 500 years ago. Maybe city problems?
Oh no, they didn’t have salmon at the fish market, so I had to buy perch instead.
Ahaha, definitely had “royal court” and OG bourgeoisie problems.
“Oh no, my servant lost her leg to an infected toenail and now I hear her peg clomping everytime she walks near!”
That’s comparable to today’s millionaire problems.
Oh no, my Bugatti isn’t blue enough for this event, so I had to drive one of my Lamborghinis instead.
Jesus, I hope that didn’t happen to you!
Fortunately, there was a simple solution: Buy a new Bugatti on the way to the party.
what fucking quality of life is it if I have a phone that sucks ass, and no house to call my own?
EDIT : phones in general suck ass, I’m not saying my phone is worse than someone elses. That’s part of the problem that they’re all “pictures under glass” unwieldy, fiddly pieces of shit
Have you been recruited to go die in a trench? Or seriously worry about starving to death? Or watched a child die of measles, smallpox or whooping cough? Been a literal slave who could be whipped?
Hell, would you even trade places with the children who made your shirt?
Amazing reference, I love smbc.
But, here’s how I imagine our complaints sound to oh, most of the world today:
