• Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Multiple things can be true simultaneously,

    You can hate all the shit you’ve got to deal with while acknowledging it’s some of the least bad shit people have had to deal with in human history. Arguably the shit we deal with now could be considered the last great hurdle left to us by generations of getting rid of worse shit.

    We’ve made a disease that was basically our natural predator go extinct in the wild, we’ve touched other worlds and reached the top and bottom of our own, we’ve gotten so efficient at work that we’ve started making strange collections of rocks do the mundane and mathematically tedious work for us.

    What’s left to us is taking our free time back, switching over to a cheaper power source than what we were using, pegging the bottom wrung wage floor to an automatically adjusting living standard ratio, and other fine tuned adjustments on big ideas others have already done the fighting and dying to set the foundations with.

    We’re not slaying dragons, we’re banishing the last ghosts of bitter lords and merchants.

    • Tar_Alcaran
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. Remember that time when the harvest failed, and you had to eat your pet dogs and your baby brother starved to death? Remember that time when your neighbour got a scratch in the woods and died from infection? Or how you all avoided old wife Johnson for two years because her husband got pneumonia the coughs and died gasping for air? Or that time two of your aunts died in childbirth? Remember how the most exciting thing to happen in your life was a traveler staying in your village and they told stories of huge wooden ships sailing on the seas? Remember how three townsfolk were mauled by a bear last year? Oh crap, you said it’s name, better hope nobody heard you, or you’ll get blamed for the next one!

      How about just your regular day? Spending 8 hours a day housekeeping, cleaning your dirt floors, fetching water from the mostly-clean well or the slow-flowing bit of creek outside the village, baking bread in your castiron pot after gathering firewood, preserving food for winter and knowing you’ll be eating old flour and salted meat/fish before christmas anyway, churning butter again because the batch you made last mondy is rancid already, etc etc etc.

      Life sucks, but it sucked WAY harder in the past. I can heartely recommend doing a week of early-medieval reenactment, because nothing makes you apreciate modern life more than spending 6 hours of your day, every day, making a stew and some bread.