125 years ago not even the craziest person in the world could jack themselves into a literally nonstop firehose of brainworms
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it boggles my mind that someone could list a bunch of appliances and consider this a knockdown argument that people’s lives are better now than before. you really think life is about having *appliances*?
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i am apparently the resident spoiled sheltered rich kid now so lemme tell ya: my parents made sure i wanted for nothing materially growing up and i would have traded all of it for them actually listening to me instead
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we lived in a very nice house but we didn’t talk to each other at the dinner table. i didn’t care how nice the house was in the slightest *except* when i had friends over, because then it was nice to be able to entertain them with the xbox or whatever
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by far the most important pieces of technology in the house were the ones that let me talk to my friends (phones, computers with internet access), and i used those when it was less convenient than hanging out irl but hanging out irl was much much much better
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*more convenient, welp
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Replying to @s_r_constantin and @QiaochuYuan
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men", completely unironically.
The freedom to be *alone* and the freedom to *choose* your companions are two sides of the same coin, and you can only get that with "atomized" modernity.
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so def relevant here that women have historically (and today) been more responsible for the domestic labor that keeps a household running; from that pov not surprising that women (and their mothers and grandmothers) would be more keenly aware of the value of labor-saving tech
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan @sarah_cone and 2 others
appliances free up so. much. labor.
my grandmother did washing by hand when she was a kid (v poor) and I remember her telling me I should literally thank Jesus for washing machines
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Ugh I have SO MUCH TROUBLE discerning between those takes, and this:
Can a historian or anthropologist pls weigh in????
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Replying to @CXGonzalez
You know, Idk! I was raised to believe that historical lives sucked, and also every so often I come across something like this.
“Although hunter-gatherers lived in the harshest environments on earth, they spent less time working than any typical nine-to-fiver.”
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Replying to
talking about two very different kinds of societies here! hunter-gatherers did not have the same lifestyles as farmers and of course there was tremendous variation in both groups
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Ah yep, I raise a similar thing here.
Yes many tribes feel stilted and trapped in amber of their customs - and the west has spiritual illness many of them never did. Probably the sacred path lies somewhere in the middle.
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Replying to @relic_radiation and @QiaochuYuan
Notice that many comparisons in the “thank god for washing machines” vein...are to, slightly earlier western cultures.
We could be comparing against VILLAGES, indigenous cultures. Who didn’t have so much shit needed washing, & are so different from us we can barely comprehend.
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Reminder-to-self, to find my screenshots of pages from a book where
Malidoma Some
describes how his Dagara tribe would spend 2/3 of all “work” time chanting with the community, bc they understood they could only sustainably create from a place of spiritual fullness
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