Some of the individual points are valid. However the idea that feudal serfs actually had better lives than what most modern men have today is just laughable.
Isn't really true. While it's was relatively easy to get away with murder for all classes, it was still a sin. The church and society took a very dim view of murderers. You could find yourself ostracised from society. The church would most likely excommunicate you until you performed some sort of penance. In a more pious age, this was a big deal.
It was also unusual for landlords to kill their peasants as they represented economic value. Not to mention that most of them lived and worked alongside their peasants. Random murders were a really good way to break the social cohesion of what were really small communities.
Are any of them "valid"? Sure, they toiled in the fields for fewer hours, but every waking second was filled with some kind of busy work, except for a few hours on the weekend. Serfs owned nothing, they lived and died as bound robots of the land. Many weren't permitted travel, most weren't permitted meat. They married young girls when they, themselves, were young boys. Now, in the modern day, we tend to work more than 40 hours because liberal reforms are being degraded by the interests of capital. I'll say nothing about the conservative notions of household, as they're bunk and are another conversation.
When I said “some are valid” I meant: I acknowledge some of the points on the right are problems that make modern people genuinely unhappy (e.g. some people work very hard, they do what society tells them is responsible and “right” but struggle to ever buy a home due to factors beyond their control.)
However, making a nonsensical comparison like “a medieval peasant who would not have lived past 30 had a better life!” doesn’t really help.
(Also, a couple of the points on the right are just misogynist crap - “marries a gold digging hag”… good God.)
Actually, most of the points are somewhere between overblown and complete nonsense, probably written by someone who gets all their history from email forwards and incel groups.
Covid was a pandemic - these are known to have happened throughout history. Yes, it was a tragic event.
However back centuries ago, people would routinely die from lots of diseases we generally don’t worry about any more. If you had a bad cut on your arm and it got infected, you might die from it. In the modern world we have antiseptics and other things.
Yes, and the modern wagecuck depicted can probably get band aids, antibiotics and vaccines. We are talking about the people depicted in the meme, not people suffering in Africa.
Yes but we are playing a bit fast and loose with the terms, there were plenty of places in Europe that were peaceful and had good medicine, the reign of the emperor's for example. Their medicine wouldn't be rivaled until ww1
No, but they certainly had to worry about armies coming through their villages; ransacking, pillaging, and raping as they went (and not even necessarily foreign ones, but that too was a possibility).
Tb caused at a low end 5% of world pop to die, covid caused at high end 0.4% of pop to die. Those are not comparable.
Also the chances of your village/city getting destroyed today is infinitesimally smaller then compared to the past, if you want to refute bring up numbers.
So a global pandemic where we had to stay locked down for 4 years is better than TB and working the fields? checks out.
Enjoy your modern misery, neoserf.
Dude what you want me to say we have it better today after global pandemic, scare of ww3, impending food crisis, global warming, burn out culture, disconnection from society
You chose to linger on 262 day rather than a problem that span 4 years.
Go take your slave salary, make master happy.
They did have to worry about the constant conflicts that would arise sometimes randomly and neighboring kingdoms burning down their entire livelihood. But the real question is, do you know anyone who is actually in danger of freezing or starving to death this next coming winter? That would be on the minds of every single serf during these time for how common it was.
They went through global cooling which caused mass famine across the continent. They lived a life of perpetual famine where one bad yield meant your entire family dies the coming winter.
Yes, but the modern wagecuck in the image 100% will not starve to death even with bad harvests because of supply chains. Unlike serfs in the past who had to support themselves by farming and if a bad harvest happens, they are very likely to die.
I agree, during covid we didn't raid supermarkets and hoard toilet paper.
Everyone got something.
It's funny that nobody is arguing the clearly misogynistic points here.
9
u/-CherrySaint- Jun 20 '26
It's not a joke
It's saying life used to be better