[Aurornis]

> But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do.

Medieval life was hard. Hard to an extreme that we can’t really relate to, which has opened the door to a lot of fantasizing about the past being better than the present. We like to imagine the past as a version of the present minus the complexities of modern life that we dislike, but past life was full of difficulties that are entirely foreign to us.

It’s hard to even imagine a life where you were one bad farming season away from a year of starvation, one accidental fall away from a lifetime of total disability, or one little scratch away from an infection that ends your life after a period of untreatable agony.

I also think the average modern person doesn’t really understand the level of work and toil that went into basic survival in those times. Today we see people cite trades jobs as back-breaking labor, but a modern trades job is like a vacation relative to something like subsistence farming