The past was not that cute

I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way.

Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?

Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple chores like folding clothes, driving, washing and dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a single new car. They wrote checks to the government, rather than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.

My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...

A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.

The author raises valid points, to which I agree.

Something I would add is that when we look back at how _rich_ people lived, looking at the lavish parties with fancy clothes, we miss the huge amount of labour that was needed to make that happen (and thus why only the billionaires of the day could afford to ponce about in new clothes and have fine food like ice cream on demand in summer.)

However we don't have those constraints of requiring a team of 40, plus 90 hectares of land, an ice house and town of artisans to hold a house party with a four course meal, chocolate, fresh fruit, the best cuts of meat and fresh lettuce in winter.

_we_ can have that luxury, to the point where it is mundane.

look at the kitchens needed to service henry the 8th:

https://www.nakedkitchens.com/blog/henry-viiis-55-room-kitch...

and compare that to the kitchens needed to service something like an office block (for example Meta's london office serves 3 meals a day for ~2k people, fits in 100m2)

For whatever reason I am reminded of this HN comment after reading this blog post:

> Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274237

Especially towards the end of it.

The past was not “cute” and neither is the present. But in spite of its edges the past afforded one a greater sense of whatever abstract phenomena is related to the word “cute” that escapes the present.

Yes, the past definitely wasn't that cute, but outright denying that it was not very different is just as absurd.

The definition of "normal" has drastically changed, even over the last few decades. A hundred years ago much of the societal structures still revolved around farming (which it had for thousands of years before that), something which now only involves a small minority of people.

People love to look at the past, not as it existed, but superpositioned over reality as it exists now.

Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.

Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.

I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

Problematic. There's that code word again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-wi...

(https://archive.ph/XKBZr)

We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.

In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is that supposedly some black people, while remembering their shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least related to kings.

And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.

It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!

This is what happens when you use history as a political tool. This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget what we are and where we come from so we side with the oppressors.

> My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past.

It's slightly surprising to me how many people think this. Like they think that boomers are selfish because that generation are more selfish people. No, people are inherently selfish.

Or old people think young people are lazier than their generation. No, pretty much everyone is and always has been lazy.

Romanticizing the past is hot again right now, and kind of comes in two political flavors: trads and neo-monarchists on the right, and greens and anarcho-primitivists on the left (whom I consider to be left-trads).

It’s always important to repeat the PSA that this is always survivorship bias and mythologizing. The past was very often much harder and worse than the present. When it wasn’t worse, it was just different. People back then faced existential angst, fear about the future, depression, and alienation just like we do. There were wars, crazy or idiotic politicians, popular delusions, plagues, depressions, atrocities, and all the rest.

That’s not to say that all things always get better, or that they get better in a straight line or in an orderly fashion. History is a mess. I’m talking about romanticizing the past to the point of imagining a lost golden age. That is bullshit.