Well, my Twitter/X account was finally restored to
me after I got hacked (I've never been hacked before and I'm mortified, so I've taken steps to prevent it from happening again), and now that I'm back on it's driving me as crazy as it ever did.
Someone posted today:
"The concept of working 40 hours per week for the rest of your life just to afford basic necessities is genuinely insane."
I understand why someone might speak like this, but a grownup shouldn't.
What has life been like for 99.99999 percent of all people who have ever lived? Working more than 80 hours per week and sometimes still not having basic necessities, that's what.
That's true of every time period, every country, every culture. Everywhere.
We live better than anyone ever did. As a historian I've done my
best to get people to understand this. Yes, there's a lot of work, and no, you can't have everything you want, but there isn't a single 17th-century craftsman who wouldn't trade places with you. (Imagine dental work in the 17th century, to name one out of a billion things.)
The very fact that we even think about this situation as something to be upset about shows how far we've come. Nobody protested against poverty in the 12th century.
It was a fixed condition there was nothing you could do about, so what would have been the point?
Most people in the past were subsistence farmers or laborers, 60 to 80 percent of whose income (or time) went to food. Diet was monotonous (e.g., bread, porridge, occasional meat), with frequent malnutrition and famine risk. Fresh produce in winter was rare outside the very rich.
In terms of shelter it was small, drafty homes with
dirt floors, and thatched or leaky roofs. Rooms were often shared, sometimes even with animals. Heat came from smoky and inefficient open fireplaces. There was no cooling. Winter cold and summer heat were simply endured.
There was no indoor plumbing. Instead, chamber pots or outhouses were used, and human waste could be found in streets and rivers. Drinking water was often contaminated, leading to widespread cholera and dysentery. Bathing was, shall we say,
infrequent.
Even lighting was scarce: it was daylight hours only for most work; after dark, expensive candles or oil lamps had to be used. Most people simply went to bed early.
Clothing was hand-sewn and people owned few outfits (typically one or two). Your clothes would be made of coarse fabrics, and washing them was difficult.
Transportation? That's a laugh. It was walking or, for the wealthy, a horse or horse-drawn carriage. Long trips took days, even weeks, and were hazardous.
I could go on and on here. What we today consider "just getting by" would have seemed like unimaginable comfort and luxury to practically anyone else, ever.
So while we of course
want ongoing improvements in our standard of living, we cannot be ignorant barbarians: the comforts we enjoy now came about because people abstained from consumption enough to invest in the productive capacity to make them possible.
Now what I've been saying over the past couple of weeks here is that we can in fact live better than we currently do if we understand how to apply the technology we have, which would have seemed out of science fiction just 40 years ago.
Most people aren't sure how to do that, though, and the tech winds up tethering them to work further, rather than liberating them.
After tonight, my presentation on precisely how to do this -- how to make your existing business more hands off, or even how to build one from scratch, using technology most people are using for frivolous purposes -- will no longer be
available for free viewing.
You will be very glad you learned this material.
But tonight is the last night.
Click here and watch: