I disagree with the basic premise of this article. It is completely overwrought.
Are we different people today than we were in 1850? Yeah. Absolutely.
But people worked their asses off to be able to have someone work on our car...to not have to break our backs with manual labor...to have a roof over our heads, heating and flushing toilets.
We don't have entire families of eight people living in a one room 18 x 18 log cabin with packed earth for a floor and a hole in the ground to store our perishable items in.
We don't have to mourn the loss of five kids (our our entire family) to disease, our wife to childbirth, and our husbands to broken bodies due to physical labor before they die of old age at the age of 40.
We gave all that up for technology and effort saving machinery.
This guy thinks it was great to have your entire family working dawn to dusk, eating sparse meals when they could get them in hard times, and shivering at night under a threadbare blanket with the warmth of your children and wife to keep you warm.
We still have what it takes...our men in the Middle East prove that to us. We just don't need to prove it in the general population.
I didn't see any emphasis on nostalgia in the article. He didn't seem to be singing "The Way We Were", just stating how things are and an opinion as to why.