alt Hacker NewsFarm work was grueling, lasted pretty much from dawn till dusk, took an enormous physical toll on the body, and you never know when a bad crop or unfavorable weather might mean you starve.
I'm descended from farm folk. I have relatives living who still are. I'm proud of that heritage, but let's not romanticize things. There's a reason the song doesn't go "How ya gonna keep 'em down in Paree after they've seen the farm?"
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The song goes that way because Paris is attractive to young men compared to the American farms. But being attractive may not mean good. Candy is attractive too, to children. And that hard work in farms doesn't necessarily mean being less happier than your modern life, as happiness is more dependent on expectations than what you have. Paris experience raised expectations for army folks.
Sometimes, I think that the modern education setup (schools and colleges) is a recruiting and training mechanism. Bright kids from all over the country side are filtered and sucked away to work in the modern factories. Same as army recruitment camps that go to rural side, conduct running competitions and take away all the strong youth from villages.
Ofcourse, they sell education as knowledge or refinement as a person. But the real goal is to create a workforce.
> took an enormous physical toll on the body
Just a nitpick, but our bodies are meant for labor. You grow ever stronger and more capable over time. Amish, for an extreme example, work exceptionally hard and eschew most modern medicine and healthcare options, yet live very long and healthy lives with substantially lower rates of cancer and various other disease than the general population. * Sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day, for decades, is what takes an enormous physical toll on the body.
* - I wanted to give a life expectancy here, but it turns out there is no particularly good life expectancy measurement for them. This [1] study is the closest I found, where it looks like the 50% survival rate for men/women who hit at least 30 years of age, is a bit higher than 80 for women, and a bit lower than 80 for men.
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3526600/