[zephyr9]

It's actually a myth that agrarian lifestyle was all that difficult. We have the enduring image of the farmer up at dawn, but the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

[ridethebike]

As a person who grew up in farmer's family (and who's parents are still farmers) I can attest that that kind of life is way tougher than being office worker in a city .

[supernovae]

How so?

[watwut]

> the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

That is not plausible. And that is not what you find where we have written texts about farmers lifestyles. And, if you look in very recent history about lifestyles in behind-the-times villages, you don't find that much slack either.

Also, pretty much all arguments about how little farmers worked I have seen ignored pretty much any work that did not involved food crops directly: making and fixing tools, beds, buildings. Making candles. Raising and spinning flax to make linen. Sewing cloth, bedsheets etc. Chopping wood. Caring about children and animals. All that had to be made at home or at least inside village. In an interview with old lady from such village, I heard her saying that making bedsheets and all that for bride took years. They started making it when girl got born.

> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

These statistics don't really exists of old farmer communities. They did not had modern diagnostic criteria, all that was created much much later. We can guess from what people wrote in literature and chronicles.

As for psychological pressures, there was serfdom, slavery, impressment, wars. "Wars" meant armies stealing food from farmers, that is how armies fed themselves. There was poverty too. But of course, a lot depends on which period and which place and which social class you talk about. Nevertheless, generally, people in the past were in fact subjects to stress.

[zephyr9]

>> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

> Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

Whoops, should be *child mortality. So yeah a lot of kids used to die, but we can't really blame them now can we. The way I've seen it measured is as life expectancy after a certain age, e.g. in preindustrial eras, once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60.

As for people measuring psychological stressors, yeah that's really only since the inception of the profession. Not too many 12th century psych majors...

[watwut]

> once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60

First not true. Looking at wikipedia, "If we do not take into account child mortality in total mortality, then the average life expectancy in the 12–19 centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then they had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years."

Also, 30 is quite a lot. It means, you survived childbirth if you are woman. First one is the most dangerous. It means, you did not got injured in accident with animal or tool in your teens and twenties - when you are at your physical prime and do heavy work the most.

> As for people measuring psychological stressors

I think that child mortality is yet another stressors they faced. But also, if your relative is bipolar or has schizophrenia and whole family lives in one room cabin, I can only imagine things to become super stressful for everyone.

[UncleOxidant]

> Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

So Capitalism has only recently taken hold of the US?

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased.

Even worse than it was during The Great Depression leading into WWII? Even worse than it was if you were black in the Jim Crow south? Things aren't great now, but let's try to keep things in perspective.