[br_smartass]

Ah, surely the aristocrats of before would instantly jump at the opportunity of giving up their lifes of free-time, leisure, education, servants, 3-hour-meals, giant houses, countryside retreats, upper-class-socializing, to trade it with the shopping-mall-worker that does 60h weeks(no weekends), for he'd have a smartphone! Funny.

This argument, which I've read before, only works with a really, really narrow definition of 'rich' and 'poor', maybe what you mean is upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class?

[jessaustin]

Lots of people would choose electric lighting, refrigeration, aircon, television, automobiles, etc.?

[br_smartass]

As if there isn't a counterpart. Honestly, I've been in farms where simple people lived in with no electricity(my grandparents lived in a farm, and it took some time for electricity to arrive, and around the place there were people living even more simpler, completely isolated, which I'd visit to greet with my cousins), it's actually pretty ok. Now, seriously, using "television" as an argument is just lame, who cares about this trash?

Just because you or someone else never got used to living without these, it doesn't mean everyone else needs it, not at all. From my point of view, autonomy is the greatest thing ever, it is freedom, and dependence is weakness and slavishness, subjulgation. IMHO Only a fool would think in terms of "if I enslave myself I'll get to play with this!"(plus, isn't it a bit like the deal with the devil?), to me it's just an example of how little some people can see what is actually beautiful and good in life to raise stuff to this level. Sincerely, I think people who think like this don't have a clue of what freedom feels like(and gladly, I think I've enjoyed plenty and been introduced to it early on). My life is not made of stuff, it is made of time, living, thinking, appreciation, growing, caring.

As another personal example, my father is also deurbanizing and moving back to the farm(which is not an industrial farm as in a business, but actually a place to live, think straight, work on living things which do need upkeep but not artificially). There's no AC, the only thing he watches is F1 races. He's busy most of the time anyway, usually having a beer and working on the farm, he loves it.

[jessaustin]

Haha I'm a farmer myself. Your comments seem a bit intense, but objectively it just isn't as cut-and-dried as you have it here. Living in a big drafty house with some servants and a coal fireplace seems somewhat romantic but mostly just cold. One would have time to read, but with no internet and about twenty unique books in the county a lot of that would be re-reading. In every age, we should appreciate new and old things both.

[bandrami]

Not to mention "not dying of influenza and tuberculosis"...