alt Hacker News> 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.
That’s not the kind of evidence I’m basing my opinions on. I’m reading historians who tell us what it’s like because they have looked at the evidence. What there is of it. For ancient times, this is pretty sparse.
For example, read the series on peasants that I linked to an acoup.blog. It’s largely a demographic model because peasants don’t write to us and the elites were not very interested in them. But it’s based on things like child mortality rates and I don’t think there is anyone claiming that there were any societies with modern child mortality rates in ancient times?
Also, exploitation by the elites is part of the model.