Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."

Which ones?

I don't need to "understand". I come from such a place, which was mostly like that until I was 10 or so well into the late 20th century. That's where my parents grew up too.

Being poor in monetary terms in such rural places means little (it's not the same as an equivalent poor in New York, which would be not having anything to it, no house, no shelter, and so on). Most of the living wasn't about paying for things with money.

>Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times

Women worked fine, not just in rural places, but also in the cities, in all kinds of jobs, all the way to antiquity. The conceptions you have are all about richer families, not the average person. Of course in argiculture it was absolutely the norm that women worked. Women also worked in all kinds of jobs, from selling and serving in the agora in ancient Greece ("women at home" was for the richer families) to keeping shops and tarverns in the medieval times.

>this was not the case for most of the year.*

It wasn't "most of the year" for men, either. That's part of TFA's point to begin with.

>Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.

Comparable to what? To the tasks you might know in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or wherever you grew up?

All these tasks (like gardening) and the for the most part "non-existent market economy" extended all the way into my childhood, and all earlier generation, in the parts I'm from, and many similar parts. They're still a big majority of what people do, though for the last 30-40 years they also have electricity.

Yes, people in my village (not any extraordinary example, most of Europe was alike) didn't have electricity (including fridges, microwaves, washing machines), money was small part of their life, and had gardens they ate from a lot of stuff (from olives and grapes, to potatoes and watermelon), including having farm animals. Well into the second half of the 20th century.

And they still had ample free time. Due to lack of modern entertainment, in a sense, boredom, and associated e.g. drinking, gossip, petty squables, etc. to pass the time, was more of an issue than lack of free time was.

>Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.

Seriously, do some research yourself. Start from TFA, there are plenty of other sources on antiquity, middle ages, and the pre-industrial society.

To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.

Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.

One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.