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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41930 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I am a digital nomad, so I guess the line between whether I'm a tourist or not is sort of blurred, but I feel like my Thai friends born and raised in Thailand are happier and more content with their lives than my American friends born and raised in America, so I don't think it's totally the tourism effect. Thai people also seem to have a greater satisfaction with their hard work, have more to show for it- my partner is Thai and he can afford a car and a motorbike, an apartment in Bangkok, trips out of town several times a month, and so on, meanwhile my friends in the midwest well into their 30s are still living with family members or barely scraping by and have much more pessimistic outlooks on things

I keep reading your references to Bangkok, but Bangkok is not really representative of all Thailand. Surely this is something you are accounting for?

Self report life satisfaction is very similar between Thailand and the US and is slightly higher in the US.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder?tab=line&country=THA~USA

I wonder with life satisfaction if the USA might be weird in terms of age cohorts, where old people are happy and young people are unhappy. A young person in another country with a more even distribution might then find that their fellow young people seem more satisfied. Total speculation on my part though.

Fair, I can’t necessarily comment on the life satisfaction. I do believe that industrialization and modernization tend to crater general happiness levels so I’m not arguing on that front.

You were making an economic argument above though!

The world after modernization moves so much faster and is far more competitive than the world before it. Makes sense why people are so mentally drained, tired and stressed out. You have to grow up with a lot of grit and be used to difficult environments to live there and be truly happy as opposed to surviving and being content at best.

If the old people I spent my childhood and youth with (them born in the 1930s) are to be trusted, and given what I could observe of their habits and expectations, then the farmers who lived off of unmechanized agriculture, above all, hustled. They hustled every day, to make ends meet and to make sure that ends would continue to meet for another year. They hustled to make sure their fields yielded as much crop as possible, to make sure they got as much as possible out of their animals, and then they side-hustled to improve their social standing, to earn some money directly, to improve their working relationships with their neighbors and field-neighbors and craftsmen who provided them with tools and services, and to keep their houses from falling in on them. Theirs were lives of constant activity and an abyss of true abject poverty and physical deprivation and social sanction yawning left and right of the straight and narrow path. Even well into their 80s, these people remained as active as their bodies would permit, constantly hustling to save a few cents here or to make some improvement to their garden there or to socialize a little more.

They're practically a different species from the moderns who complain about working 40 hours a week, retreat into their little black boxes at every chance, spend extravagantly on a dazzling variety of luxuries, and who can rely on public welfare to catch them when they can't be assed to take care of their own affairs. Yes I know, old man yelling at clouds, "früher war alles besser". I'm a modern too, I know what I'm talking about.

People nowadays are mentallly drained, tired and stressed out? Maybe. Blame it on alienation, atomization, and in no small part on their brains being fried by a constant excess of sugar, screens and dopamine by any means. But it's not because they actually need to do more than peasants.

I also think working with your hands can be a lot more satisfying it's what we designed to do after all. Sure a lot of farming is backbreaking especially during harvest season. But crafting, sewing, woodworking, fishing? These are all things people do voluntarily in their free time.

The hobby version of these activities removes both the pressure and most of the worst parts of them.

People also farm in their free time. They call it gardening.

I agree with you, mind. Humans are bodies as well as minds. Just using one and not the other isn't just a waste; it's an impoverished form of existence.

This wildly underestimates the amount of labor and stress involved in subsistence agriculture.

Did you know that the a bunch of historical measurement units were traditionally defined in terms of ploughing speed? One furlong for an eight-ox team to plough until they needed a break. Use that time to set up for the next furrow. Repeat for an entire day and you have an acre. Repeat for an entire ploughing season and you have your effective limits on land.

Do this twice a year if you don’t want to starve. Spend the rest planting, weeding, foraging, harvesting, haymaking, shearing, milking, breeding, slaughtering, repairing, digging, building, etc., or you’ll still starve. Have your crops pillaged by a passing army and starve anyway.

And God forbid you’re a woman. You avoid some of those backbreaking tasks, but get your own set instead. Not to mention the joys of giving birth in the era before anesthetics or antibiotics.

Seriously. The past was much harsher than you’re imagining.

Premodern childbirth is less dangerous than is popularly imagined(although still much more dangerous than modern hospital births). Informed people might trot out the 1-2% per birth statistic but this is almost certainly an overestimate because it's calculated based off of recorded births, which were mostly of aristocrats, who started giving birth much younger than peasant girls.

…but had better access to nutrition, sanitation and medicine. I think data is all over the place. Even 1% per birth adds up over a life with 5-8 births!

More to the point, I don’t think a woman has to die in childbirth for it to make her life much more difficult. Assuming that the past was so much easier is hopelessly naive.

In the world before modernization you got up before the sun, worked your ass off until it set, and hoped nothing bad happened that meant you didn't survive anyway.

I thought that the hard working life of peasants was a bit overblown, that they would take long breaks, day drink, and get about half the year off. Based of vague half remembered scholarship, maybe Juliet Schor?

This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/

'Medieval peasants got half the year off' is a misconception based on the religious calendar of the medieval church, which allowed agricultural labor monday-saturday, less major feasts(impossible to estimate exactly how many but 36 is a normal median estimate from religious scholars- you could probably add a few more for feasts of local importance, and of course statistically 1/7 would happen on a Sunday anyways). This adds up to slightly more working days per year than the modern M-F minus a half dozen holidays workweek. Those days were, of course, much longer.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

And repairing your plough, your harrow, your cart and so on.

Tolstoy had the following to say about the peak of the peasant work year.

The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.

yeschad.jpg

Although I have no idea what they are doing at night that would so disrupt their sleep, light is expensive.

Edit - I guess threshing, shouldn't skim so much.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

If you mean people didn’t have modern concepts of leisure and recreation that’s true. The world they also had to concern themselves with was a lot smaller.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

Inaccurately.

And debt collectors would beg to differ.

Based.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Still had to take care of the animals. Keep the fires going. Make any necessary repairs. Do all the household tasks.

Yeah I've moved from Australia to Malaysia with admittedly a decent amount of accumulated savings and it's crazy how I can carve out essentially the same existence here for a third of what it'd cost in Australia to get anything barring tech items. Plus the upper-middle class cohort of high school/university friends I had in Australia is very decidedly not buying property or reproducing whilst my wife's about-equivalent cohort has a bunch of property and children at the same age.

I’m curious, how do you make a living over there?

I hit a pretty solid exit from a tech company a couple years ago so day to day expenses are well within passive income. Also some occasional remote consulting if opportunities pop up since my ex-field is still very much in the 'sell pickaxes to hopeful VCs' space.

Genuinely it doesn't take much to exist in Malaysia, though. I don't really track spending religiously but I'm living a very nice upper-middle class life for maybe 1.5k USD a month inclusive of a bunch of regional travel.

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