Human history in the very long run (2021)

I think the angle you have is one of assuming I am advocating that "things used to be better!". I am not, I am saying it is possible to pick parts of the past that worked, figure out a way past the unintended issues of today and combine them into something better. This is essentially the entire idea of the Solar Punk movement.

Also I wasn't talking about the work hours 200 years ago, more like 1,000 years ago. Typical work days were about 4 hours a day in most societies. There are stories from France about 500 years ago about just how much spare time people used to have, it was kind of wild. Boring yes, but it was also because you can only grow so much food. The issue is that that kind of economy that is outside of the monetary system cannot be charted and graded accurately. There are lot so people in southern India that on paper are incredibly poor but in reality are very self reliant.

And yes I have read large parts of various IPCC reports. No, we are not going extinct. I didn't say anything about extinction. But a sizable fall is still a big wallop to industrial civilization even if it isn't a fatal blow. While folks may not be directly planning 7 generations, things were more stable from an environmental sense that many could assume things like food supply (on average) would be fine. The big issues then were much more political.

There's a crisis of singleness that hasn't been present in much, although not all, of human history.

Home ownership is way down. At various points throughout human history it was common for people to own their own homes.

Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.

I spent about a year raising two hogs, babying them when compared to how almost anyone raises pigs. They loved their lives, I know exactly what they ate, and I know exactly what their last moments were. I just started curing another round of bacon a couple days ago, and when I get to enjoy it I know exactly how much work and love went into it.

I don't think this process made anyone as miserable as possible, and it makes me much happier than when I didn't k ow where my food came from, how it was raised, or how it was processed.

When I was spending my vacations with my grandparents as a child, they had a huge garden with an astonishing number of different kinds of fruits. They were planned in such a way that most of the year, from early spring until the beginning of the winter there was at least one kind of fruit that became ready for harvest every week.

Those fruits had flavors that cannot be matched in any way by those that can be bought from a supermarket, which are selected to look beautiful and to have a long shelf life. Not even at the local markets where farmers sell their products can I find anything as good as the fruit cultivars of my grandparents.

Similarly for meat. The meat of the truly free-range chicken or of the suckling pigs that I could eat at my grandparents was unbelievably more tasty than of the industrially-grown animals.

The vast majority of the people living today, who live in cities and eat only what can be bought there, have never tasted anything so good and they cannot imagine such tastes. Even when I have traveled through rural zones, I have never seen again any garden remotely similar to what my grandparents had a half of century ago or any similar fruit varieties.

I would certainly be happier if I could ever eat again such food. Except for food, I agree that everything else is much more comfortable today and I prefer it over what was available a half of century earlier.

Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy, even when they have to live under the power imbalance. For Marx to be right, you have to argue that these people are deluded somehow, which isn't particularly convincing.