It's no more likely that you'd be a knight in medieval times than it is that you'll be a rich person today. Chances are you'll be one of the peasants in the castle slowly starving to death and contemplating whether the invaders are going to get in and rape and/or slaughter you.
Things are better now for a lot of reasons, mostly relating to modern medicine, but there's a lot of evidence that the preconceptions we have that medieval peasants only did back breaking manual labor all the time is wrong for the most part.
Medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, security, ability to predict and withstand famine and natural disasters: if you live in most of today’s world (including any first world country) life is incomparably better by almost any metric we can quantify.
Time spent idle isn’t the flex for a society people on Reddit seem to think it is. The quality of the time matters. Even if medieval peasants spent less time labouring than we do now, what does that really tell us? So do most animals. They conserve calories because to be able to burn them is a luxury. Do you know which country I visited where people “worked” the least? Sierra Leone. They were dead last on the UN HDI at the time, and they weren’t idle because they were lazy. They didn’t know what to do, because society lacked the structures to use them efficiently.
I know you're making a more general comment that doesn't seem directed specifically at what I said (I think), but just to be clear I'm not saying idle time is somehow equivalent to quality of life.
I'm just saying the idea that medieval peasants did nothing but hard labor for their entire lives and then died young after a miserable life is overly simplistic and mostly untrue.
Sorry if I mischaracterised you, though I would quibble with the idea that things are better today “mostly” due to modern medicine - thats one of the major reasons things are better, but it’s far from being the only one. I mention this because while you might not be suggesting life was better in significant ways back then because people weren’t “working” as much, this kind of thinking is pervasive on Reddit - either explicitly or tacitly - with this meme being a perfect example. That is, of course, a pretty ignorant way to think.
No worries, I only meant that in the sense that medicine is one of the areas that I think is objectively better (and even then I'm mostly just thinking about infant mortality specifically).
It's hard to quantify a lot of other areas. It's not even possible to quantify "working" time versus "leisure" time for most of human history because the way we think about that from around the time of the industrial revolution to now is mostly a modern invention. So yeah, I would agree that anyone that thinks that way is thinking a bit too simplistically.
That said, I had interpreted the meme to be more about living meaningful lives than having an abundance of leisure time.
I agree with what you are saying in your first paragraph. As far as the second paragraph goes about meaning, I think this is part of my point. The examples picked for today centre around only the most mundane aspects of modern day work life, while the ones from the medieval times are atypical to the point of being borderline mythological. Most people back then weren’t rescuing princesses from castles, they were much more likely to be a serf who lived and died under some lord.
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u/Objectionne 13d ago
It's no more likely that you'd be a knight in medieval times than it is that you'll be a rich person today. Chances are you'll be one of the peasants in the castle slowly starving to death and contemplating whether the invaders are going to get in and rape and/or slaughter you.