I read the article and ..
... I’ll take it.
The author misunderstands just about every topic they speak of, and only arrange it in a self-centric cloud of bullshittery.
Skype ? Who gives a flying ****.
Travel times ? Being late for appointments ? If you were living in the east, and had an appointment in the west, and the trip took 96 hours you wouldn’t leave 97 hours before you were due. Letters and messengers would be exchanged and you would get to town a day or two before the appointment.
They traveled without stress and without pressure to be anywhere. Their lives were not measured in billable hours. In fact, before the unions came along “working hours” didn’t really exist and the truly successful found ways to make a big impact in the least amount of time possible.
Trust me, dingbat, it was better.
Disease ? Of course there was less treatment back then, and people died from things easily. But if 10% of the population carried simple disease, today it’s about 80% (and feels like 100% in the winter) that carry diseases that are treatable. And still about the same percentage carrying untreatable disease.
Some people have no business proselytizing about statistics. Like I have no business correcting people’s grammar.
I watched a show called “1900 house” a few years ago and one tidbit I got out of it was that back around 1900, most people in London cleaned their clothes using a big pot of boiling water, and every year about 10,000 kids were killed from various forms of contact with it.
So yeah, life may have been more risky in a lot of ways, and medicine is a lot better today, but that is only a tiny piece of the picture. Huck Fin (and kids he was actually based on) seemed to do just fine. And some didn’t.
What I kept thinking about, though, as I read the article, was about my moving from Seattle to Kentucky six years ago. I tell people how much I love it here, but if there was no such thing as air conditioning, there is no way I’d have moved here.
Hawaii is nice without air conditioning.
And there was no such thing as retirement for most. And let’s not forget the ‘poor house’.
My great Grandparents (father's side) had 8 kids.Two lived to see their 20th birthday...my Grandfather (who died at age 53,having battled TB his whole life) and another son who died at age 22.
All four of my Dad's kids are at least 60 and are in good health.
People without any real grasp of history or the past times have no idea.
I blame this on librarians.
Librarians now weed collections assiduously.
Nothing that hasn’t been checked out in a few years stays. Except what they deem important.
So no more browsing and finding books and series from other times and other days. Now you have to know about it and search the web.
I will give you two examples of two series I happened upon.
One when I was very young. the Travis McGee detective series. A series about characters in South Florida prior to the boom. Wonderful descriptions of what life was life then and entertaining stories to boot.
One series about by Lawrence Sanders called The XX Deadly Sin. XX= different numbers 1 thru 7. Fascinating series with a protagonist who was a NYC police captain in the 70s-80s. An incredible description of what life was like then, detailed about clothing, values, and the zeitgeist of the times.
Books, even pulpy ones, give us information to fill out our understanding of our history and our values.
I only skimmed the article, but my thoughts are similar to yours. Rockefeller had four houses that I know of—and likely owned a few more. He had thousands of acres of real estate all over the place. His private mansion had 40 rooms, and crawled with servants. Iirc, the ‘family estate,’ was even bigger. The FL mansion was right on the beach.
Rockefeller had a vallet, a butler, and enough lesser servants to attend a small army. He was the country’s first billionaire [that was in 30s money; it would be worth exponentially more now.)
I’m not materialistic enough to want that lifestyle. Otoh, I’m sane enough to know Rockefeller was richer than I am.
Are you forgetting that in 1916, there was no FR?