The past was not that cute

"A woman's work is never done."

In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).

Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.

We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.

There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.

Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple chores like folding clothes, driving, programming, washing and dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a single new car. They wrote checks to the government, rather than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.

When I was a child, my Father's Father was considered a black sheep of the family, thus most extended family held my Father at arms length. The exception was his first cousin, Imogene and her husband. They farmed land in northern Louisiana, and we visited them at least once a year while I was growing up. I loved going there and enjoyed their large family, which had two boys my age who taught me how to hunt, fish and ride horses.

I remember the early years when they didn't have running water or indoor plumbing, which my Mother hated, but I thought was fun. As the years went by and the price of the main crops that were grown increased, the "shack" was updated more to Mother's liking.

When I reached my tween years, I was asked if I wanted to earn a little money by working in the fields, I was thrilled. My first assignment was to work hoeing cotton, a semi-brutal job performed on endless rows in scorching heat. I was working with a black family who, I was told, worked on that particular piece of land for generations. They took care of me and, after a few days, I began to understand their accented speech. As a kid from a middle-class white family who lived in a city hundreds of miles away, it was my first time to experience a culture shock. It was a lot to process being so young, but I do have fond memories, especially of the Mother of the family. I didn't have any contact with the family except in the fields, so I can't pretend to know how they felt about their lives, I do know they worked very hard in the summer and found whatever work they could in the winter. This all took place in the seventies.

I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way.

Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?

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".

The present isn't all that cute either. But if from the view of 100 years in the future, all you saw was the idealized lives of everyone as posted on social media, you'd think it was a lost, happy time too. That's how nostalgia works. You preserve the good stuff, you let the boring and crappy stuff be forgotten. At least relatively.

I think the interest in cottagecore and similar things is less about people finding them cute and more about people looking for meaning, something we've always struggled with as technology advanced. Look at the Arts & Crafts movement in the US and Art Nouveau in Europe in the early 1900s, both were a response to the industrialization and dehumanization of work and art. Read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut from the 1950s which imagined a future where basically all work was automated and the terribleness of that path. History might only rhyme but this is one that has happened a number of times.

"We can buy a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear", sang the Beatles, and that was a thing retirees did when they sang it. Those retirees would have been born in 1890-1910, and be perfectly aware of what life was like without running water and electricity (or the old age pension which made buying a cottage in the Isle of Wight an option!), yet they still obviously saw something in the "cottagecore" life.

I'm thinking also of one set of great-great grandparents. He was from a very poor farming family, who had decided to look for work in the city instead of emigrating to the US. She was from a considerably wealthier farming family (which owned their own farm, his didn't), and also had decided to move to the city, probably more out of a desire to see the world (and the wonders of fin de siecle city life) than necessity. They did well for themselves in the city, but in their old age they moved to a rural cottage near the farm she grew up on. (I think actually she inherited the land, and considerably more, but that they sold off the rest).

I think that with money, cottage core can be a desirable life. A big part of the reason life was hard for life-on-the-prairie people was that they had debts, and need for a good deal of things they couldn't grow themselves. With a little money, like both my great-great grandparents and the stereotypical Beatles retirees had, cottage life can be fine.

> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.

Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...

Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.

Look at this astonishing graph:

https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.

Also known as "The Golden Age Fallacy". It's a very common one nowadays as we've all romanticized the past in media and our subconscious.

This hits on a pet peeve of mine: representing the past as dull and colorless, because we mostly have access to b&w or sepia photos from the time.

I’m not saying that the overall point isn’t true, just that juxtaposing photos propagates an already deeply-embedded and mistaken intuition that the past was somehow less colorful, less vibrant than the present.

To try to combat this, I had ChatGPT colorize the “actual farmer” photo: https://ibb.co/1tkcLKmY

Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman

https://theonion.com/grueling-household-tasks-of-19th-centur...

The past is not perfect and there are some things that are improved in some ways these days (and in future), but other things are being worse these days (and in future) than they were. It is not so simple.

I also think that you should not rely on (or overuse) modern technology too much, even though it can sometimes be beneficial (so it is not the reason to avoid it unconditionally, nor necessarily to avoid it generally).

Many things now are excessively artificially, including (but not limited to): light, music, communication, food, transportation, and now even also creativity. (Some of these (such as food and music) are mentioned in that article but some are they do not seem to mention it) This is not the only problem (there are many other problems too), but it is one aspect of it.

I learned this recently. I got into waxed canvas/cotton jackets for outdoors stuff, where people would oil it for waterproofing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton

The jackets look nice but they are heavy, don't breath well, and are usually expensive for quality, and they are more water resistant than waterproof.

Compared to modern ultra-light synthetic jackets (down etc) that are legitimately water/windpoof which feels much nicer and warmed doing high activity stuff in poor weather. The only downside is they aren't as rugged, like getting a scratch walking through a bush or cuts from tools/dogs.

Old stuff always lasts longer but the IRL experience doesn't always outweigh the cons.

The past was so cute, for certain people. A certain landowning leisurely class. The whole point of cottage-core is to role-play as an English aristocrat visiting their "humble" hunting lodge.

This is true and fair, yet there is another mistake which I see a lot of: thinking that because people didn't live lives as comfortable as we do, their lot was unremitting misery. Kind of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail view of pre-industrial life.

It's important to have some nuance. Different places had different living standards. The French village life depicted in Peasants into Frenchmen sounds grim; English village life around 1900 was nice enough to generate nostalgic books like Lark Rise to Candleford after the rise of the motor car. The peasants in Brueghel paintings are having a lot of rough, unsophisticated fun.

That doesn't mean we should not be grateful for (say) modern dentistry! Of course we should. But if you paint an entirely black picture of premodern life, you may subtly dehumanize the people who lived it.

I think I don't understand the point of this site anymore when this is what makes it to the front page.

A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.

Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.

Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.

I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.

>> I want you to have a life I didn’t have.

But they said it imagining some contemporary lifestyle that was not "servitude". That's not what your current life is. If they had a chance to look at your life now and compare it with their servitude life, they would probably not say that.

The reason is, modern life has lost core abilities of innate resilience and community. The comforts such as the oven-baking came at the cost of losing some other things, which you ignore. So it all depends on what you value.

My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.

My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...

The author raises valid points, to which I agree.

Something I would add is that when we look back at how _rich_ people lived, looking at the lavish parties with fancy clothes, we miss the huge amount of labour that was needed to make that happen (and thus why only the billionaires of the day could afford to ponce about in new clothes and have fine food like ice cream on demand in summer.)

However we don't have those constraints of requiring a team of 40, plus 90 hectares of land, an ice house and town of artisans to hold a house party with a four course meal, chocolate, fresh fruit, the best cuts of meat and fresh lettuce in winter.

_we_ can have that luxury, to the point where it is mundane.

look at the kitchens needed to service henry the 8th:

https://www.nakedkitchens.com/blog/henry-viiis-55-room-kitch...

and compare that to the kitchens needed to service something like an office block (for example Meta's london office serves 3 meals a day for ~2k people, fits in 100m2)

> My mother pointed out that a lot of the songs along the lines of “my own true love proved false to me” were about unplanned pregnancies.

I was this years old when I realized it.

It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in the current era, same structural problems remain.

Funny how nostalgia smooths out the parts that were actually painful. The post is a good reminder that every era only looks simple in hindsight.

"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." -- Ovid

The Coca Cola poster on the impoverished wall is eerie. Reminds me of developing countries where to this day I see the same, run down shanty towns with Coca Cola signs all over.

I do wish I were born early enough to have been a software engineer in eighties and early nineties.

I’m convinced that the fatal flaw of humanity: forgetting the lessons of the past, is a function of our lifespan. You don’t have to be empathic or educated or wise if you still have a grandparent at the dinner table who will straighten you out on how bad Polio or the Great Depression or Nazis, etc. really were.

Our social herd immunity weakens as we lose a critical mass of people who were there and experienced the horror.

I'm blind and even 50 years ago my life would be 10x more limited than now. 100 - years, outright miserable. 1000 years - beggar or a fake oracle. There is a marked difference between living with someone's help and on their mercy. Living with no modern facilities and technologies is pretty easy only when you don't encounter the reasons they are created for.

It's ironic how HN spends a whole thread gushing about how easy and nice the life of paleolithic hunter gatherers was as reaction to a article that talks about how we romanticize the past...

Nowadays we (UK) have a notion called "fuel poverty" which is formally defined (1) It is similar to the more generic notion of energy poverty. Basically, if spending out on fuel for heating takes a household below the official poverty line, then that is considered fuel poverty.

I'm old enough to remember houses without any form of central heating - mostly farms and cottages but even modernish town houses of the 70s/80s might be a bit remiss on the modern touches. I'm 55 so born 1970. My family lived in at least one house with an out-house bog (toilet) - it got a bit nippy (cold) in winter. If you had to use it then piss first to break the ice and then go in for a dump!

My mum was a Devonshire (Stoke Fleming, nr Dartmouth) farm girl and one anecdote she had was visiting another farm that even her parents considered a bit old school. The bog in the other farm was situated above a shippon - ie where cows are kept. The house adjoined the shippon and a fancy modern "indoor" bog had been built by bashing a hole through an exterior wall and an extension added over the shippon. It even had a sink to wash your hands - which was from a rain capture tank ... . The floorboards were a bit sketchy and apparently you could end up nearly eye to eye with the bull, whilst sat on the throne.

OK, back to fuel poverty and the old days not being cute. My mum's anecdote would probably be considered laughable to an Elizabethan (not QEII - QEI).

The world spins and we move on. I can remember being seriously cold in a house and basically wearing a lot more clothing and having a lot of blankets and later a hefty TOG rated duvet on my bed.

I think I prefer progress but don't think of the past as somehow regressive.

(1) https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fuel-poverty-stati...

Today will be the brutal past in the future.

This is a bit meta, but looking at the comments on this thread - Nostalgia is a hell of a powerful drug, probably the most powerful one our brains can self generate (because of the complexity of feelings generated).

While I like some bits, some tech, some ascetics from yesteryear - I know one thing for certain - the world today is better for basically everyone than it has every been, by virtually every measurable standard, even the poorest of the poor are better off in 2025 than they ever have been at any point in history.

So while I might want to go visit the past if I had a time machine, I know I would never want to live there.

Problematic. There's that code word again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...

(https://archive.ph/XKBZr)

Yes, the past definitely wasn't that cute, but outright denying that it was not very different is just as absurd.

The definition of "normal" has drastically changed, even over the last few decades. A hundred years ago much of the societal structures still revolved around farming (which it had for thousands of years before that), something which now only involves a small minority of people.

People love to look at the past, not as it existed, but superpositioned over reality as it exists now.

Everything is relative. Even the perception of effort, from the calories burned at work daily to sustain a livelihood, is subjective. What truly matters is the amount of effort required by your peers to achieve similar financial stability. We tolerate the work as long as everyone else is equally willing to do it.

For whatever reason I am reminded of this HN comment after reading this blog post:

> Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274237

Especially towards the end of it.

The past was not “cute” and neither is the present. But in spite of its edges the past afforded one a greater sense of whatever abstract phenomena is related to the word “cute” that escapes the present.

Romanticizing the past is hot again right now, and kind of comes in two political flavors: trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left (whom I consider to be left-trads).

It’s always important to repeat the PSA that this is always survivorship bias and mythologizing. The past was very often much harder and worse than the present. When it wasn’t worse, it was just different. People back then faced existential angst, fear about the future, depression, and alienation just like we do. There were wars, crazy or idiotic politicians, popular delusions, plagues, depressions, atrocities, and all the rest.

That’s not to say that all things always get better, or that they get better in a straight line or in an orderly fashion. History is a mess. I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age. That is bullshit.

I think it’s really revealing to see so many folks defending views like “hunter gathering was better” and “the past wasn’t dickensian.”

I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was a better life for humans.

It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress, because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful capitalists that rule the world.

But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what already is. We’re pretty good at anticipating and appreciating the new, but if it’s already there then, like a spoilt child living in a luxury home, we take it for granted.

I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in winter don’t use your heating or hot water. For me, it was travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful (at least for a while).

> My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past.

It's slightly surprising to me how many people think this. Like they think that boomers are selfish because that generation are more selfish people. No, people are inherently selfish.

Or old people think young people are lazier than their generation. No, pretty much everyone is and always has been lazy.

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Something I haven’t seen discussed here is the role of capitalism as the biggest lift to the quality of humans lives (in addition to things like vaccines and health departments or generally science).

The notion of Incentives in human nature to drive innovation, with efficient allocation via prices and value, plus competition, all leading to capital accumulation that just then be efficiently allocated to generate further value was amazing.

If you think about the current situation in Venezuela, China or Russia on useless missions that led to famine or to killing of millions of people, we cannot argue that capitalism wasn’t a huge influence in the impact in humans lives

I was looking at AOC’s comments about capitalism somewhere and could not believe my ears. Then Thomas Sowell gave a masterclass rebuttal to each of AOC’s ignorant points.

Everyone should listen to it: https://x.com/cubaortografia/status/1997272611269525985

We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.

In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is that supposedly some black people, while remembering their shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least related to kings.

And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.

It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!

This is what happens when you use history as a political tool. This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget what we are and where we come from so we side with the oppressors.

Who is this author and what is effective altruism and why do I feel like I’m being given a backhanded lesson in morality by someone who is insufferable? I hope I’m wrong.