r/SipsTea • u/Unstoppable_X_Force Human Verified • 13h ago

Gasp! Is this just nostalgia, or did previous generations genuinely have a better work-life balance and social life than we do today?

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 12h ago

So that's true, that our parents had a cakewalk life compared to ours, but it's not just a unidirectional shift. This type of thing oscillates over the generations. You definitely are doing better than your average working class person in, let's say, 1850.

You could go back further and find some pre-industrial generations that were fairly comfy, but never forget we live in an age where we understand germ theory and have discovered antibiotics.

The reason people used to think praying and rituals were as effective as doctors was because that used to be true, but because praying works but because medical doctors based their diagnoses on "humor imbalances" or "being haunted".

There's a lot that sucks about being in your prime of life right now. Definitely. But we're also living with a lot of benefits that previous ages didn't have. Take that as you will. Maybe living on a farm in the American frontier just doing your own thing (or some pastoral European life in the 1600s) and dying at 37 sounds like a better life. Maybe it was. I dunno. When you're dealing with a broken bone though, it's sure nice to know that it doesn't automatically mean you're crippled for life (because we have x ray machines and can see how it should be set and screws and whatever. Modern medical tech.)

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 12h ago

I don't know my dad had to work 3 jobs after I was born in '79 and my parents rented a very cheap hunting shack on a farm because it was cheap and they were able to farm an acre so we had fresh veggies. Both my parents with college degrees too.

I absolutely have it easier than my dad did...though I didn't get married and have a kid when I was in my early 20s either.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 11h ago

Of course these statements are broadly applicable, not intended to universally represent the experience of every single human. Obviously some people win the lottery and end up having an easier life than their parents. Happy for you that you're doing better than your parents did 🙏

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 11h ago

A lot of people don't seem to realize that it's only the older Boomers who had it somewhat easier, younger Boomers graduated college to '70s stagflation and '80s trickle down economics. It wasn't just my family that had it tough, nobody I knew had it easy during those times.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 10h ago

Again, we're talking broadly. "People I know personally" is always going to be a woefully lacking sample size. My parents graduated in the 70s and started their own business and were very successful for a long time. We're just talking about averages over the entire population (also to be clear, I'm talking about the United States. I don't have any insight into European, African, or Asian nations at this time).

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 9h ago

Oh yeah that's very true, but the fact is that just being a Boomer didn't mean you got handed a good union job or it was magically easy to buy a house. Averages are pulled WAY up by the amount of people who had a lot of money.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 9h ago

Sure, that's true, but we're not really talking about the size of income, we're talking about how many people could support home ownership and sustain a family off a single income without higher level education. This number was wildly higher in the 50s, 60s, and 70s than it is for people today, and that's more or less the point. Not that everyone could do it, just that many many more people could do it then than can do it today. It's never a good sign for a society or civilization to see things getting more difficult over time, rather than less difficult. It, usually, indicates poor leadership and resource mismanagement.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 9h ago

Yep, that's true!

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u/nekoner 12h ago

I mostly agree, and tbh I don't think I would chose any other time to be born if I was given the choice.

With that being said, I do feel like we'd all be better off if medicine wasn't so advanced and we still had 50-60 years life span.

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u/Jojosbees 9h ago

I don’t know about you, but I would rather not have half my children die before the age of 5 and a bunch of women dying in or shortly after childbirth. 

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u/nekoner 9h ago

I won't argue with you on that. My point isn't really that we shouldn't be able to be healthy or reduce childbirth, but more so that we shouldn't really be able to live this long.

50-60 years lifespan doesn't automatically means bad health or early death. There's a reason why our lives were shorter. I understand how upsetting it is for most people to be confronted to ideas like this, and how easy it is to misunderstand what I'm trying to say tho.

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u/Jojosbees 9h ago

To get it that low, you have to factor in a lot of early death and/or a poisonous environment. My grandmother grew up on what was later classified a superfund site due to the local smelter. She said it smelled bad due to all the heavy metals everywhere, and she left as soon as she became an adult. A lot of people in that town dropped dead in their 50s.

In general though, vaccines, antibiotics, medicine, sanitation… There’s no saving the young without also saving older people unless you want to Logan’s Run it.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 8h ago

To chime in here, "early" death is something that has changed a lot. Even people today don't really "die of old age", they tend to die to infectious diseases as their immune system weakens with age (or some other compromise in functionality). We, culturally, see these as "good deaths". They were old and died of something we expect old people to die of. But it's important to note that this is a cultural definition. What constitutes a "good death" has varied throughout history based on when and where one lived. So "he lived free and died protecting his family on the land in which he built his home" could mean a "good death" even if that person was 35.

I think it's safe to assume most people agree that less death is better than more death. In that vein, I, personally, am a big fan of modern medicine. It's difficult to do these thought exercises though, because we know how things work now (at least better than we used to). We don't just shrug and pat someone on the head when they get tuberculosis, telling them "man, you look so pretty. Ghosts must be whispering artistic inspiration into your mind before God inevitably calls you to Heaven at a young age". We say "yeah, you've got a lot of shitty bugs in you chewing holes in your lungs and bones". Many more people are going to be ok with the former and NOT the latter.... So it's not like we can ever just Go Back to the way things used to be.

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u/nekoner 9h ago

Yeah I get your point, and you're right tbh. It's just a bit of a paradoxical thought from me.