JemmyModern earth is candy land compared to the planet we had 500+ years ago m’dude
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grumpy_cat
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8mnvk4r48o
The 1950s-1980s are a unique time in human history where things generally got insanely better for many people, particularly in the west, and basically created the modern concept of the middle class.
At the end of the 80s Thatcher and Reagan had set the time bomb, public wealth was burned to give the illusion of even more prosperity, except now the prosperity was going, year on year, predominantly to the elite again, as it was in the Victorian era.
Now we’re here, the bomb is going off, things are getting worse for everyone except the ultra wealthy, denying it just makes it easier for them to ensure you can’t resist when the penny drops.
They want us back in our places, with Victorian era inequality
The UK may be stagnating and with a grimmer future ahead of it than previous times but huge advances have been made in South & East Asia where nearly a couple billion people were previously enduring some of the most intense poverty in the world. Progress is not uniform, some places are backsliding including very prominent countries, but many people globally are also seeing improvements in their lives too.
Today’s 20 somethings in western countries***
IMO “worse” is a completely meaningless term here. The breadth of what that could include is incomprehensible.
This is important. It’s not like we had Ibuprofen for thousands of years, right? Modern medicine is insanely useful but that got nothing to do with anything that’s getting worse right now. That medieval slander is completely uncalled for. They had many technological breakthroughs just like we do and there were a lot of times and places in history that were much worse than these 1000 years in Europe have been on average.
Meh, they had willows to chew on back then too.
The depiction of a sweaty man is a reference to out-of-control global warming
I didn’t do research on this but I remember reading that serfs worked less than we do today, is that true?
People worked a lot less before the industrial revolution in general. The general population in Medieval times was also far more self-determined than people during absolutism later in the modern age. When people look at the Louvre today they don’t realize a grand place like that was only for the Epstein class of another time and built on theft and corpses, hence people brought out the guillotines.
They also ate 3x less than you today
That explains all the rising depression and anxiety.
After all, the things that make life worth living are the new iPhone.
Why point out the middle ages? Those 1000 years were not worse than any other historic period, be it in antiquity or the early modern era.
Most inventions that make today’s candy land are from the last 50-150 years.
Also, this is a very wealthy perspective. Easy access to fresh water, clean plumbing, access to modern medicin, central heating with thermostats, all that good stuff does not exist for large parts of humanity.
Completely agree, I’m personally sick of the Medieval times being viewed as “the Dark Ages” where everything was objectively worse. Not only is it from a modern, first-world perspective as you’ve pointed out, but it’s also extremely Euro- and Christian-centric and ignores that most of the rest of the world experienced at least a couple ‘Golden Ages’ during the same time. Hell, even IN Europe, the Islamic states were often (though not always) better off than a lot of their Catholic counterparts. I think a large part of the modern view of the Medieval times being ‘backward’ come from two main sources: 1-propoganda that came during/immediately after the various Crusades/Iberian Reconquista (not to mention the subsequent discovery of the Americas); 2-the Bubonic Plague which, without a doubt, WAS awful for everyone involved, but for whatever reason we tend to forget that it was only a relatively short amount of time (roughly one decade towards the start of the time period during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, and another decade roughly 800 years later) within the much larger time frame of a whole millennium
Close, but not quite there. The modern image of the Middle Ages mostly does com from propaganda of the Enlightenment period when intellectuals, artists, the upper classes etc wanted to distinguish themselves from what was before, and then some from later periods pushing some things back in time (witch burnings were not a medieval thing and the peak of plate armour was in the 16th century).
I know a german youtuber working on improving our image of the Middle Ages to a more realistic one, if you deal well with automatic subtitles I can recommend Geschichtsfenster.
Good points! Also thanks, I’ll definitely have to check that guy out
And yet even those parts of humanity live better than 100 years ago.
If you are literally starving or dying from a preventable disease without access to healthcare, it doesn’t really matter if it is happening now or 1000 years ago, the result is exactly the same.
Claiming that every human on Earth lives better than 100 years ago is not only objectively wrong, but rings of the “even our homeless here in the US lives better than the richest person in Africa” ignorant nonsense some people likes to spew.
Do you measure better only by healthcare? A progress was made in almost every facet of life. Even in places where access to modern healthcare is limited or nonexistent.
I would not agree to that generalization.
Feel free.
… and don’t get me started about the Devonian Period…
IIRC the probability of a given person dying by violence from another person has monotonically gone down for like 700 years
The middle ages were arguably better than a lot of years following it until recently. People generally lived in relative peace and prosperity over those 1000 years. Same can’t be said about 30 year war or world wars.
Wait a while
Well this comment thread is a barrel of laughs…