We have orders of magnitude safer food, fewer mentally ill than feudal folk. And we have medicine that works. Its disingenuous and incorrect to dismiss it so glibly.
I am not dismissing medicine. But the existence of medicine now does not mean life centuries ago was a horrifying existence struggling to survive as popular culture suggests. There are still primitive people now, whose existence is far closer to that subsistence stereotype than medieval Europeans were. They are overwhelmingly happy and healthy. They eat better than we do, are healthier than we are, and work less than we do. If they had modern medicine, it is hard to argue they wouldn't be better off than us in every way.
But they don’t have modern medicine, and they don’t have the means to deal with droughts, or other natural disasters. Indigenous tribes who have contact with society are overwhelmingly unhappy with some of the highest suicide rates in the world. The ones who don’t have contact don’t have their happiness measured in any meaningful or comparable way... because they don’t have contact.
Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food, they work way more than most Americans do. Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe.
People like the indigenous Kitava have no such problems. Because they are not living as an underclass minority in another culture. They have contact with modern people, but they choose to live traditionally.
>Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food
That would be every kind of environment...
>they work way more than most Americans do.
They do not. Again, see the Kitava. They barely have a concept of work.
>Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe
Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary act. Your cultural bias makes you assume this is some universal penance that must be paid in order to extract food from the soil. It is not.
>Yes, we've covered that haven't we? In the very post you just replied to, in order to add absolutely nothing to the discussion?
I’m pointing out that it’s a massive caveat. It’s like claiming they built a plane and other than it not being able to fly, it’s just as good as the ones we have. A society without modern medicine is significantly worse off.
>That would be any kind of environment
No, you should learn about the industrial scale farming that feeds most of the planet
>They barely have a concept of work
Oh? What happens when nobody wants to hunt then? Work is what members of a society do to keep it going. If they aren’t smart enough to recognize it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
>Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary...
Let me stop you there. Hunter gatherer approaches do not scale. Growing food is entirely necessary to prevent 50 and 100 year storms/droughts from causing mass suffering and starvation.
It’s not cultural bias. It’s foresight to plan for the future and actually feed everyone rather than killing babies and old people during hard times.
No they didn't. We have books on farming that are 2000 years old, people have read them even. Just because movies show dirty peasants hoeing fields doesn't mean that was reality.
If we're talking the middle ages in Europe, then 90% of folk farmed as serfs or peasants. When they weren't dead from frequent droughts or plagues. "No they didn't" isn't an argument.