Depends where and when exactly as well as who you were, I guess.

I've been to two LWL open air museums near my region. They gather original buildings in their respective area (not a particularly rich one) from the ~15th to ~18th century, as well as tools, legal documents or weapons and while that doesn't represent an entire village community, I wouldn't want to live in any of them.

Nideggen Castle also didn't look very comfortable, to put it mildly, but apparently it was luxury accommodations for the aristocrats.

Hygiene, food security, personal safety, the justice system all pretty much sucked back then. Not saying everything was bad all the time, but many more things were bad much more often. Let's never go back.

P.S.: Highly recommend these open air museums!

Although a westerner transplated back 1000 years would be utterly shocked by the level of disease, childhood death, and complete lack of modern medical care or basic germ theory.

> The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools...

Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview.

In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it.

Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies.

I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es

I’ve lived in the mountains most of my life and only a couple years in a city. I’d take the mountains any day. The view doesn’t get old (at least to me). The air quality and noise alone are enough for me to not want to go back to a city.

I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem.

I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.

> Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?

Speaking as somebody who's been living with mountain views for many years now - pretty much forever. There's something intrinsic about nature that just makes you feel good and refreshed. And it seemingly never changes.

And I don't think its the slower cadence to rural life that makes it so much more pleasant, but more of the social aspects. There's this weird phenomena in the city that you might live in a square mile with thousands of other people, yet on average you probably have exactly 0 people you have a relationship beyond regular casual greetings with. By contrast in a rural area there might only be tens of people within a square mile, maybe even less, yet you probably have a very good relationship with a sizable chunk of them all.

In some way I think we can even see this online. You've been posting here for over a decade, made thousands of posts, and I've never once noticed your name. I'm sure the same is true of me for you. Why? Because there's so many friggin people and posts that we never even stop to look at names, unless there's some freak occurrence where we just keep constantly bumping into each other, and notice that.

And I think the same is true in real life. The more people there are, the less likely you are to repeatedly bump into somebody else, and notice it. And vice versa for the fewer people there are. So I think this goes some way to explaining the seemingly paradoxical fact that there are substantially lower rates of loneliness in areas where there's far fewer people. We didn't evolve living stuffed like sardines in a can, and I don't think it's an overall healthy lifestyle.

> I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth)

This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer.

Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it.

Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life.

oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards.

We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.

That was Baldrick's line though - he was definitely lower class.

> even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your median modern person has a better life

And the question I always ask when people make this claim - now would you rather be a median modern person or one of the richest kings of the medieval era? It emphasizes that there's far more unquantifiables to having a good life than there are quantifiables, yet we almost entirely socially neglect them.

There were happy with the "on-the-line" walking by the acrobats.

Thats one version of why. The other version is that it ran counter to a historical narrative about the (alleged, believed) moral superiority of antiquity and so was coined to further a somewhat political goal.

> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress

I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.

I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.

> It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles.

No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse.

Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.

"thats a fact" is a very odd thing to say about a matter of opinion. I think you are at best a Historian in training, I would suggest historians don't make that kind of assertion as fact, it's opinion.