sleeping (leaving shorter days), preparing food and eating ( 3x a day; in the olde days they had to spend a lot of time finding and growing food daily), and ‘going to the bathroom’. They also had to have a shelter to sleep in and spent a lot of time building or securing shelters from the elements.
For women, often, there were the additional challenges of childbirth, cooking, ‘spinning’ (making clothes), cleaning, etc.
Men, traditionally, were the hunters and warriors–the ones who went to work and often had to fight or kill to survive and ‘bring home the bacon’.
In short, most of people’s days, historically, were focused on survival and necessities. People had little time to think and reflect upon themselves and their lives in terms of possibilities.
[Which is why it is amazing what humans accomplished building such structures as the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the innumerable European castles and churches despite small populations and plagues.]
No question that technology (beginning with the Industrial Revolution) which started making inroads in the late 1700s-early 1800s led to more leisure time as well as new challenges.
Things speeded up considerably into the world wars and a more general consensus for global peace until recently.
People suddenly had more time to think and improve themselves (especially for women in the West). Education mattered and was viewed by many as a ticket into professions, hifalutin things, and fewer limitations from physical/’grunt’/menial work and jobs.
Today the technology has basically taken over and is widely viewed as flawless while Nature and the planet fall apart from neglect and abuse. There is no longer a sense of reverence for the planet backed by significant political action.
Whatever ‘thinking’ that goes on tends to be shallow, frivolous, and irrational leading to a gridlocked world of limited agendas that people want to impose on others and what’s left of all the freedoms of old.
Individual license has become more important than real individual freedom and autonomy.
There is, generally, a turning of backs on history and past culture: Western civilization and its many benefits hard-earned in twentieth century. That and on progress and many positive values and virtues including objective truth and facts, justice, and beauty.
The latter has been replaced with an uncouth crassness and coarseness bottom-lined by commercialism and advertising. Everything, including education, health care, and politics cater/crater to the lowest common denominator. We no longer have respected authorities or well-working institutions.
What we are witnessing via events in the U.S. and conservative agendas is a shift to dictatorships, massive shortages, social chaos, and irrational unrealities that suppress possibilities for freedom, sanity, fairness, and creativity.
A profound shift, indeed, in values, beliefs, literacy, and social and political order.
In short, we are living in a serious decline of Western civilization and all the fruits and benefits of it that the 20th century had achieved. It is an age of suppression and idiot leaders. An age with few helping hands and exploited peoples everywhere globally.
Amelioration will begin at the individual level with people surviving Screwball Central, developing their various coping and growth mechanisms, building positive relationships and connections, and preserving the best of past Western civilization and cultures.
It all starts from within, first, as it did so long ago with the Homers, Platos, Shakespeares, Michelangelos, Newtons, Einsteins, Gandhis, MLKs, Terry Foxes, et al–the motivated geniuses who evolved from the chaotic ‘woodwork’, who moved the world forward by their examples; who gave us higher ideals and visions of the world we’d rather live in.
As Browning said ” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”
