alt Hacker NewsYes, 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...
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> 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.
> 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.
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.