Would you want to live in the past?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was browsing the new posts, and saw this one about time traveling back to 1915, because it was so cheap to live then.

But then I got to thinking, so what? Even if I could somehow take back cheap aluminum, or bet on sports events, and wind up in the top 1% of income for 1915, would I do it?

Hell, no! I might live in a much bigger house, but it wouldn’t have internet, it wouldn’t have satellite TV, it wouldn’t have computer games, it wouldn’t have microwave ovens, it wouldn’t have movies on disc or DVR. About the only pro sports would be baseball and boxing (and I guess the PGA was just getting started), and you would have to travel to the event site, probably by ship or train, if you wanted to watch it. In short, it wouldn’t have almost anything I spend most of my time on. Plus, I’d probably die in agony if I stepped on a nail or something, let alone got a treatable cancer.

And the farther back in time you go, the richer you might be relative to the time, but the less comfort you would have. If you were the King of England in the 14th century, you would have only a smoky fireplace for heat, and no plumbing. Could you have cinnamon, or pineapple, or chocolate, at any price? Could you even have a glass of water without something dangerous in it?

So seriously, is there any time prior to, say, WWII, that you would rather live in than now, even if you were fabulously rich in that time?

Note that I’m talking about a one-way trip, and permanent residence, not a visit.

2

I think I might go back to the 1960s or 1970s.

3

Nope nope nope. I might like a few things about some previous eras - the design aesthetic of the Roaring Twenties, or the potential for social mobility in the eras when America was being settled, or the architecture of Tudor England - but I love modern conveniences. I love the internet, and modern medicine, and the relative ease with which I can feed and house and clothe and educate my family. Even at my relatively young age (45,) I can easily recall a time when my family didn’t have central A/C, when shopping for anything except the very basic necessities meant a long trip to the city, when information was accessed with a card catalog at the local library, which may have had fewer books in inventory than I have on my current e-reader. I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of people who long for the Good Old Days never had to tend a garden and livestock as anything other than a hobby - not to feed their family. They never had to chop wood to cook and heat the home, just for a picturesque fire. They never drew water from a shallow well, or dealt with a dead animal in said well. They’ve forgotten waiting until after 9 pm on a Sunday night to make a 10-minute long distance phone call, watching each minute carefully because it was so damned expensive, or listening for that “click” that meant that your nosy neighbor had picked up the phone to eavesdrop on your call on the party line.

I love modern life. I love near-instantaneous access to information. I love communicating with people easily, via text or cell phone or message board or social media. I love knowing that my kids won’t have scars from chicken pox, that medicine isn’t perfect, but is so much better than even a few decades ago. I love the fact that my gay friends can be gay, that my pagan friends can be pagan, that interracial relationships don’t generally create huge obstacles. I love the fact that even a crappy car today is more reliable than the vast majority of those built in the eighties and before. I love that, while I firmly believe more could and should be done, we’re recognizing the ways that humans are screwing up the environment and trying to mitigate those effects. (No more leaded gasoline, for example.) And I passionately hope that things will continue to improve. My children may or may not be more financially successful than my generation, but I hope that they live in a better world - more peaceful, more tolerant, cleaner, etc.

4

No, I’m staying here.

5

I’m Black with a white wife.

So no.

6

As an unabashed railroad fan, I could be interested in going back to the heyday of the steam locomotive, but the tradeoff would be living in a period alternating wbetween ar and economic depression, not to mention horrendous pollution and primitive medical practices, so, uh, no. I’ll just live with reading about it.

7

Hell no. What would I do if I wanted to look something up in an instant? I would die without Google and pubmed.

I already feel I live better than kings in previous centuries in all measures I care about.

8

Well, this seems to be less controversial than I thought. Unless I missed one, so far nobody has said they want to live in the halcyon days of the past.

So let me sweeten the deal a little. You can not only go back to any era and be very rich, you can literally BE anyone (who actually lived) from the past you want to be, with one proviso — you lose your knowledge of history and technology. That restriction is to prevent people from going back to be, say, Pontius Pilate — not because they want to live in that era, but because they want to know the truth about Jesus (and of course, you can’t be Jesus himself, just as you can’t be Thor, because legendary people aren’t allowed, even if you believe the legend. Besides, you’d probably screw it up). And it prevents someone from sacrificing his own comfort in order to prevent an atrocity by being, say, on the admissions committee of the art school that rejected Hitler, and admitting him. Very noble, but not what I’m asking about.

So you can go back and be, say, Kublai Khan, and live in unimagined splendor and luxury, with unimagined political and military power, but still subject to the medical and technological backwardness of his time. And you can’t commission people to invent modern comforts for you, because you won’t know about them.

Any takers now? I confess, the Kublai Khan thing, especially the harem (or whatever they call it in China), is tempting.

9

I’m a female of fertile age, so hell no if only because Mr. Tampax, Mr. Evax et al have some great inventions. That’s without even getting into such considerations as “no rights” or “I would have died of tonsillitis”.

10

Yeah. I wish I had been born a few decades earlier in the good old days
The Internet literally ruined my life. I’ve wasted all my free time on the internet. Back then there was nothing to do, no internet, not as many tv channels, so people had nothing to do but be productive.
If I didn’t have the internet I would have a job now and a girlfriend

11

I think I would have a grand time, given my peculiar set of skills and “interests”.

12

I was about to say - if you could go into the immediate past (10 years ago) with the knowledge you have now, you could trivially become rich dozens of different ways. And, 2005 technology is almost as good, and you’d be smugly standing in line with your shiny new iphone and ipad the day they come out while haters say it’s just a fad. (and you’d have picked up a bunch of Apple and Google stock, etc)

Oh, and you’d know to sell short mortgage backed securities. I recall reading this Wired article in 2004. These crazy traders were banking on a “black swan” event causing a stock market crash. They were running a trading firm where during a Bull market they were bleeding a little money every day, and I guess the other traders looked at them smugly.

Well, in 2008, they pulled in mad cash, as you’d expect.

13

I wouldn’t mind the 60s or 70s. Much of what we have now technology-wise is unnecessary and should be fairly easy to adjust to being without. It would be kind of nice knowing that we weren’t going to be vaporized by the Russians.

In 1975 you could still go on road trips in a car that was relatively modern, using road atlases and such to find your way. The office would be a recognizable place, and high tech was still high tech: geeks of today would be working on amazing stuff even back then. Imagine the technology of the Apollo missions, for example.
I probably would end up being an electronics geek, messing with radios and stuff.

I suppose there would be quite a bit of “crap… this stuff is slow. I want the Internet.” but that would fade. Much of life would seem so quaint in the beginning: “It’s a long distance call from California… the event of the week that needs my full undivided attention”

Most importantly, antibiotics were already going strong at that point.

ETA: Forgot that I would be gagging on cigarette smoke everywhere. Ugh.

Now, it would be depressing to see active condoned segregation and racism. Somehow I imagine that it would be both far worse than modern issues, such as Ferguson, and woefully under reported.

Don’t be so sure about the last one…
A close Russian friend in her late forties gleefully tells of her childhood tonsil removal:
She was five, and growing up in Moscow. They had two burly nurses hold her down while the doctor ripped her tonsils out with pliers. She says that that’s the way it was done back then.

Sounds like a process that could have been followed hundreds of years ago :slight_smile:

14

No way. Last year I had a cardiac catheterization and stent placement, a totally pain free procedure that only became available recently (The first balloon angioplasty was done in 1977. Stents came later, and the drug effusions stent I recieved was a 2012 thing).

15

No. I wouldn’t mind living today with a retro aesthetic permeating my home, but I’d still want modern food, medicine, and entertainments.

16

But if you go back before the mid 60s the majority of programming was black and white anyway.

17

No, I would want to change history and probably end up making things worse.

18

Going back a few decades (say, no earlier than the 70s or 60s) wouldn’t be a huge deal for me. I spent a good part of my life without tablets and internet and DVDs and all that before; I’m sure I could manage again if it meant some wealthy lifestyle.

If you could promise me a theoretically infinite sum of money (enough that I never had to check my bank balance) to travel back to the 20’s or 30’s, I’d probably take you up on it. What did rich people do back then? Have parties, travel, screw, acquire luxuries, get buildings named after them, etc. I’m sure I could deal with that. It’s not as though most people currently dream “Man, I wish I could be rich so I could go on Wikipedia all day”. If anything, not having those things might make me more prone to go out and experience stuff.

Now, in real life, I wouldn’t be interested since I have a wife and kids in the here and now but I’m speaking in the abstract.

I’d probably be a lot less interested to live earlier than that. I think that earlier than the 20th century, society would be so different as to be less enjoyable for me and it would be harder to enjoy the luxuries if I had to travel by carriage or live prior to mass printing or electricity.

19

No way. Modern medication enables me to live a normal life. Fluoridation, modern dentistry, and braces have given me fabulous teeth whereas both my parents had terrible teeth. Accutane cured the cystic acne that would otherwise have rendered me pock-scarred and hideous. Hysterectomy eliminated the horrible pain and misery caused by endometriosis.

And that’s just the little stuff. The biggest, most important thing is that, as a woman, I have equal freedom and rights. Although it seems that a lot of current culture is devoted to dehumanizing, degrading, and dismissing women, which worries me, altogether the present beats the shit out of the past.

20

Two years ago I had open heart surgery to fix a valve. 50 years ago the problem would have killed me. Why would I want to live in 1915?