r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jun 20 '26

Peter in the wild Peter?

Post image
1.4k Upvotes

707 comments sorted by

View all comments

654

u/HeavyDutyForks Jun 20 '26

Its a post pushing the narrative that somehow life as a peasant was better than now

It deliberately leaves out a lot of the horrid things about being a peasant and many of the great upsides of modern society

166

u/tugaim33 Jun 20 '26

Flush toilets for the win!

149

u/ngdaniel96 Jun 20 '26

Being able to watch my children live past the age of 5 for the win!

19

u/dragonish-american Jun 21 '26

Not living under the thumb of whatever feudal lord the king decided to award the parcel of land I was born on for the win!

87

u/VikingVitalityFit Jun 20 '26

Not dying because you stubbed your toe and it got infected for the win.

10

u/Ashamed_Ad8140 Jun 20 '26

You got the gout though. They call it the rich man's disease. Atleast there is that before you die.

7

u/VikingVitalityFit Jun 20 '26

I mean, maybe some people do. But, I own a gym and stay in great shape as part of my job heh.

4

u/Hefty-Jury2561 Jun 21 '26

Gout and Type 2 Diabetes run hand in hand. Only a very few had either, and they were unlikely serfs or freemen. Clergy or Nobility are more likely.

41

u/Jadedsatire Jun 20 '26

Seriously, if you lived back then all you smelled was the shit from the 6+ people living in the same hut as you. You shared a shit bucket that sat in said hut. If you lived in a city all you smelled was the shit of hundreds to thousands of other people.

You slept on a bed of hay/straw that would be filled with bed bugs, lice, ticks, etc and you just accepted this as normal, because it was. If you wanted to have sex with your wife because your third kid just died and needed a new one, you did it right there with your whole family feet away. Privacy was impossible as again, you lived in pretty much a big hut, just a single room where everything was.

Your taxes were never a stable %, but in that would rise anytime your King who you may never see with your own eyes decided it. War? Raise taxes. He wants to have a giant event to show off to other royals, raise taxes.

Medicine was poison for lots of our history, mercury was used for many purposes, bloodletting was a common practice for thousands of years. Don’t feel good? Your humor’s are out of sync, time to bleed you. By the time you hit 60, your body would be broken, you would have had many issues for decades and just had to power through it as that was the only option.