No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact, we ought to have both. It's not like it's impossible. We just have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bladerunner".

Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap, unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff. People have distorted memories of what things used to be like. Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff is still around while everything else is in a landfill.

Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.

However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more.

Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself.

And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able.

More here:

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here:

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br...

Life for the very richest people hundreds of years ago might have been almost as comfortable as the average person today but for the vast majority of people it was truly miserable.

It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women

Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe. The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible

> There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other.

Deeper connectedness? Yeah, conform to the small town or gossip ruins your life. "Harper Valley PTA" ain't that long ago. Shared public spaces ruled by the biggest jerks--hope you're willing to take on a sociopath on the hill. My father had an entire garage of junk to repair those "quality goods" (cars, in particular were terrible). The only reason why "services" were good is that you could get a bad reputation and then you were doomed as nobody would buy from you--of course the flip side is that you could be shaken down, too. Ritual? Hey, girl, you're 18--why aren't you married and pregnant already like your sisters were?

At this point, most of the people on HN have never lived in the world where being smart was a HUGE negative stigma ("Revenge of the Nerds" was an exaggeration--but not by as much as you'd think). If we wound the clock back to the 1960s or 1970s, 95% of the smart people on HN would be profoundly unhappy--just like all the rest of the functionally alcoholic men working in the mills, mines, or factories.

You chose "Bladerunner" as the maximal negative while my grandfathers would have viewed it as a step up.