Would you rather live the life of an average person in the current era, or live as an absolute monarch 500 years ago? Why?
This question is common throughout the internet, but I'd like to see Lemmy's response.
The country you end up in would be random, you don't get to pick.
As a woman, I'll stay right here, thanks.
I‘d actally choose the monarch 500yrs ago.
Not because it is a better life. Probably I‘d de better off as the average person I am now. But it is absolutely exiting to get to explore and get to know the world. Everything is in a flow, the world is both changing and stable at the same time.
And i wouldn‘t see our world and climate die, i would see it blossom, awaken.
I was just listening to Behind the Bastards on King Louie XIV and his building of Versailles and how he forced all the aristrocrats to live there 24/7. You might not be able to reach your goal of exploring and knowing the world depending on where you end up.
Having a bad/infected tooth and no modern dentistry tech is already a dealbreaker for me. Then there’s all the wars, disease, and lack of sanitation. So no thanks, I’d rather live as a normal person in the modern era.
I do not want to go where there is no anaesthetic
Now for sure. I want as much life as I can get so modern medicine is a must. I'm taking 2 different medications without which I would die sooner rather than later, so that's just a non-starter. I at least have a chance of being born in a country with good healthcare today, but that's just not an option 500 years ago.
Can I take my chances and live like a peasant 500 years in the future?
I figure either the world won't exist and I dodge all the existential crap that is fretting death, or I get to fly in spaceships like one flies coach today and maybe conditions will have improved for the bottom 10%.
Wish granted, you live in a bunker somewhere deep underground and is witnessing mutated lovecraftian creatures that can't even be explained using today's words.
Yeah but are they, like, available?
So not much different than now except cooler, hell yeah!
Man. Some guys have ALL the luck. 😠
It's cute you think humans will be alive in 500 years.
Can I try the King thing for a week or so, and come back when I get bored?
Live average today for sure. If I was a monarch I'd probably be responsible for the deaths of lots of people both intentionally and unintentionally. There's a big chance I'd have to go to war too and that's like not really my vibe.
If there's one thing I've learned from history, it's that the monarchs who didn't constantly plot and scheme were at risk to being overthrown by their noble subjects. I hate politics; I hate incessant meetings, and being a monarch always sounds like just constant meetings, all day, every day. Everyone wants to talk to you, get something from you, scheme with you; and it they aren't scheming with you, you really have to worry, because they're off scheming against you.
It sounds tedious and horrible.
You could just invent bureaucracy lol, or do we get brain wiped in this hypothetical?
Breaucracy is worse.
I see everyone worried about hygiene in European countries. So I would ho with a monarch in an Islamic region because of higher standard in hygiene. Muslims clean themselves Fromm 1 to 5 times a day. Take full baths after having sex. They also avoid eating dirty foods or animals that could cause disease like pigs. They also had a somewhat better medicine and medical practice.
At the time some of the monarch had a good time, and some of them lived in a constant state of unrest.
So if I had to respawn my same territory it would be great. I would have some occasional attempted assaniation or coup but its just a but more than what we see today. But having my own guard and stuff would make me feel less worried. Even if I endup getting assassinated I would have lived a better life than today maybe.
For sure we have many technologically induced freedoms like travel and telecommunications but I don't have the means to travel. But as a monarch, while it would take me longer than today, I would still manage to travel as I want. In fact Arabs are known to be biggest travelers.
I would not mind being a Mughal emperor.
No Toilets and ac is a deal breaker
AC wasn't really necessary. It was cooler and walls were thicker. I used to live in an old stone farmhouse and when it was 40C outside it was 20C inside.
What about other way around. Wouldn't it get too cold? They always show ot drafty and fireplaces in every room on tv.
🎼 Shit on the floor 🎶
Get schwifty
Poop deck lol
Definitely now considering I wouldn't have even made it to 10 years old before dying if it wasn't for modern surgery. Would have probably died for unknown reasons to them and I probably would have been marked as having been possessed by some sort of evil spirit or demon if for whatever reason they cut me open and found the weird growth attached to my heart.
Well I'm already doing the former, so I might as well try out the latter.
I’d rather live today. Why? Toilet paper and antibiotics. That’s why.
Bidets even!
The bidet was invented in the late 17th century, so no. And anabiotic are still incredibly important.
Not to mention the fact that, until the invention of the automobile, everywhere smelled like shit all the time because the primary mode of transportation was the voluminous-shit-producing animals: horses. And people also didn’t often bathe every day because not everyone had indoor plumbing until around the 1940s. Also, the concept of a “shower” didn’t really become modernized until the late 1940s and early 1950s. So unless you took a bath, you didn’t bathe.. So everywhere stank like horse shit and BO all the time. I don’t wanna live in that era, which happened to be pretty much all the time before the early 20th century.
So yeah. The earliest time I would want to live is probably in the 1950s. Although, now that I think about it, since I’m gay, probably the 1960s.
Don’t even get me started on toilet paper and the widespread adaptation of using it. Bidets were expensive and weird, so they were not widely adopted.
And painkillers!
100% now, I'm an average person and so many average people I know live a far better life than most kings 500 years ago.
they can travel around the globe at whim, enjoy different cultures, learn just about any subject without restriction and don't have any responsibilities they don't choose to carry.
Monarchs 500 years ago could also travel at whim, enjoy different cultures, and learn about any subject available to them without restriction. And the great thing about a divine mandate is that monarchs didn't have to do a single damn thing they didn't want to and could still keep their power.
monarchs were limited by duties, responsibilities and mandates to such an extent they could not travel at whim.
those that did travel had to trade months of their life prone in a gilded cage of a carriage or ship to travel a distance i, an averageman, can reach in hours at an insignificant fraction of the cost and risk.
monarchs similarly could not learn about most subjects and cultures because the knowledge and expertise was simply unavailable. information traveled at the pace of "we can learn about that when we can gather resources to launch a 5-year expedition and perhaps return with the answer eventually but maybe not".
now, all available human knowledge is floating in the aether, constantly updating and instantly available at our fingertips.
divine mandates come with an unrelenting burden of responsibilities.
historically, those who shirked their responsibilities were likely to be dethroned or decapitated.
also, new reason: bidets.
life now is miraculous compared to the dreams of an aged king.
For context in 1525:
King of England: Henry VIII (with all the wives)
King of France: Francis I (with all the fighting the Holy Roman Empire and Pope)
King of Spain: Charles V (with all the being Holy Roman Emperor and inbreeding)
Emperor of China: Jiajing (with all the torturing and murdering dissenters)
Edit: I chose these 4 because between them they were monarchs of the 4 most powerful countries in the world at the time, especially Charles of Spain and Jiajing of China but France and England were soon poised to eclipse the others.
Henry VIII suffered from numerous painful ailments that killed him eventually.
What about African countries and other Asian regions? Maybe America?
Kongo - Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga - first Catholic monarch of Kongo
Songhai - Askia the Great - zenith of Songhai's power
Adal - Abū Bakr ibn Muhammad - founded city of Harar
I'd like to believe that I have it in me to be a benevolent monarch, but I know myself well enough to tell that I am entirely too human for that.
I'd rather not see how rotten I could get with power unbound, and my current conscience wouldn't let me impose that on whoever I'd be ruling over, so modern-day-meh life it is.
Yeah, bang 16 years olds until someone stabs you in the throat because you forgot to do the same to them last week. Nah :/
Current era. No question.
Before antibiotics, the most common cause of death was infectious disease.
Modern era. Living 5 centuries in the past would suck. No germ theory of disease so everyone is ignorant regarding the importance of washing hands and basic cleanliness. Anything wrong with you? Better get the leeches to balance your humors. Uh oh, stubbed my toe. Guess I'll just die.
The only caveat is if you get to know what you do now and can transform society because of it. As King I'd either bring about the Renaissance within a decade instead of centuries unless I was branded a heretic by the Church and beheaded for flapping my mouth.
https://www.history.com/articles/royal-palace-life-hygiene-henry-viii
The Western European belief that baths were unhealthy did not help matters, either. Although neat freak Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily, he was a royal rarity. Louis XIV is rumored to have bathed twice in his life, as did Queen Isabella of Castile, Herman says. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month. The 17th century British King James I was said to never bathe, causing the rooms he frequented to be filled with lice.
It was the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, whose choice to no longer travel from court to court would lead to a particularly putrid living situation. In 1682, in an effort to seal his authority and subjugate his nobles, Louis XIV moved his court permanently to the gilded mega-palace of Versailles. At times over 10,000 royals, aristocrats, government officials, servants and military officers lived in Versailles and its surrounding lodgings.
Despite its reputation for magnificence, life at Versailles, for both royals and servants, was no cleaner than the slum-like conditions in many European cities at the time. Women pulled up their skirts up to pee where they stood, while some men urinated off the balustrade in the middle of the royal chapel. According to historian Tony Spawforth, author of Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, Marie-Antoinette was once hit by human waste being thrown out the window as she walked through an interior courtyard.
The heavily trafficked latrines often leaked into the bedrooms below them, while blockages and corrosion in the palace’s iron and lead pipes were known to occasionally “poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen. “Not even the rooms of the royal children were safe,” writes Spawforth. An occasional court exodus could have reduced the wear and tear on Versailles, perhaps leading to fewer unpleasant structural failures.
This unsanitary way of living no doubt led to countless deaths throughout royal European households. It was not until the 19th century that standards of cleanliness and technological developments improved life for many people, including members of royal courts. Today, many European royals still move from residence to residence—but for pleasure, not to try and outrun squalor.
Louis XIV also hated people going to the bathroom, so you had to piss on the floor because you needed to do it quick before he noticed you were gone.
TIL my mother lives like a Queen.
(She does not wash her hands 🤮, and she calls me an "OCD germaphobic")
Can we live as neither and poof from existence?
I would roll the dice on "unethical" (/underground?) brain preservation testing in hopes that maybe in 200+ years things (if it doesn't fully melt down) would suck less. Which honestly would likely be the same as what you've said.
If not? I could probably live in VR if it weren't about digital real-estate. Ideally, flexible living with some purpose, more organics for life support (symbiotic+robust microbiomes) even though I definitely would be mistaken for a robot especially as I could see myself doing rather robotic-seeming things (like tapping into a mycorrhizal network to trade nutrients with trees to get pollutants like nickel).
Can we love as neither
Speaking for myself, outlook not so good. (typo, I know)
I'll pick the today option. My reasons have already been stated by many: political instability as a monarch, medicine, modern day commodities, etc.
But also, think about entertainment. Today we have a nearly infinite stream of entertainment at our disposal. Movies, songs, videogames, books. 500 years ago none of that existed. So there's yet another reason.
My answer is current era regardless, but do we keep our memories and go back, or is it as if we were born in that era? If you went back 500 years with the knowledge that the Super Nintendo and the Internet exist (the two inventions we have that they didn't have in the 1500s), that would be unpleasant. But if you didn't know that and were accustomed to getting your entertainment from court jesters and public hangings, I guess that would be slightly less awful.
Like everybody else has said, there's a lot of things we have now (by which I mean two) that are better than anything there was 500 years ago, even for monarchs. Regardless of whether I knew about those things in monarch form, the version of me that's making the decision knows, so ... nah.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3jb3j6/revision/2
Heresy
increased in early modern England because of the introduction of the Protestant Church during the reign of Henry VIII. As the official religion in England changed from Catholic to Protestant, and back again, the decades following Henry VIII’s reign saw an increase in heresy-related crime. Those people who committed heresy were known as heretics and were often burned at the stake.
Those who refused to accept the new Protestant Church during the reign of Henry VIII were executed. Mary I (a Catholic) ordered the execution of nearly 300 Protestants during her reign, and Elizabeth I (a Protestant) had nearly 250 Catholics executed.
Not much by way of religious war today.
Vagabondage
During this period, the population increased, wages fell, food prices rose and people moved around the country searching for work. As a result, people became concerned about vagabonds, or vagrants,
who committed crimes such as theft, assault and murder. People in early modern England wanted to help poor people who lived in their community and were known to them. However, they viewed vagrants as suspicious, sinful and potential criminals because they were unfamiliar to the community.
There was an increase in vagrants during times of poor harvests and economic hardships. For example, the poor harvest in 1597 caused widespread poverty and suffering.
Famines are pretty much gone in the modern world. We kind of take for granted that it would be extremely unlikely for us to see large-scale starvation. Even if you probably wouldn't starve as a monarch, not the nicest environment to be in.
The Vagrancy Acts
New laws were passed to deal with the perceived threat of vagrants. In 1547 a harsh Vagrancy Act was passed by the government. An able-bodied vagrant - man or woman - who had been out of work for more than three days was branded with the letter ‘V’ and sentenced to two years of slavery if this was their first offence. For their second offence, they were sentenced to slavery for life or execution.
In 1550 this act was repealed because it was deemed too harsh. The government instead used corporal punishment, such as whipping. After being whipped, offenders were returned to their birthplace or place of residence.
A further Vagrancy Act was passed in 1597. It stated that vagrants who did not change their ways could have an ear burned using a hot iron and be sent into exile or executed.
Even North Korea, which is about as authoritarian as it gets today, probably won't go that far.
By modern standards, the world 500 years back was not a very pleasant place in an awful lot of respects. You can maybe try to avoid running into a lot of that as a monarch. But it's gonna surround you.
I'd rather live as a dirt poor person in a modern western country than as someone whose filthy rich in the middle ages. Our lives nowdays are better on pretty much every measureable metric.
The parasitic hell everyone lived through back then I'll gladly take today.