this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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For the average person life is overwhelmingly more complex than 200 years ago. Industrialization and Globalization have created a whole host of issues that simply didn't exist before - stuff like climate change and awareness of global issues weren't a thing before, and there is a lot more pressure due to the increased complexity of our societies.
An average villager didn't have to care about things like ethical consumption or conflicts half a globe away, our family networks were a lot larger and individualism lead to a much less homogeneous society than before. Even the reach of the wealthy was a lot more limited and the messaging was a lot simpler - you had to care about the local nobility, and we weren't bombarded with the huge amount of information that technology has brought to our doorsteps. Propaganda was a lot less pervasive before the creation of mass media.
Conflicts and issues were a lot more concrete and clear-cut than they are today, because the average person was a lot more rooted in a slowly changing environment. Especially technology has created the exact opposite of what you are postulating.
Climate change is actually a great example of what I was getting at, because it has a relatively simple and known solution, and humanity has possessed the technology to implement that solution it for essentially as long as we have known about climate change itself.
To put it in context of this conversation: climate change has only increased the "complexity of our times" for working class people, because the people with power and money chose this path. They could have been building windmills, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to power our electric cars, but there was less profit in that.
The mental stress of "ethical consumption" doesn't exist in a world of ethical production.