The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days”

Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene—it was filthy, violent, and short.

Chelsea Follett — Mar 6, 2026

Summary: Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral—some people claim that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. This article addresses seven supposed negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is that history bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination.

When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

Blog Post | Progress Studies

Critiques of Progress, Pt. 1: The Revolt against Modernity

Some say the modern world could be better. Others say it is rotten at the core.

Steve Davies — Oct 8, 2026

Today marks the launch of a new series of essays on HumanProgress.org written by Dr. Steven Davies titled Critiques of Progress. Each of the fifteen essays in this monthly series will examine the origins, nature, and validity of recurring critiques of the modern world. This introductory essay distinguishes between two broad critiques of modernity and explains which one this series will address and why.

Today’s world is one of liberal modernity, the result of a transformative process dating back to the end of the 17^th century. This process has brought enormous benefits to everyone alive today, as well as many who lived during the three centuries leading up to today. The most obvious benefit is the dramatic rise in average incomes over that period, especially globally. This rise in real incomes (and therefore living standards and material conditions) has no precedent in human history. It also started slowly and in a limited part of the globe, but it has accelerated and spread to almost every location, not steadily, but nonetheless in a progressive fashion.

However, while liberal modernity has improved human life, rising living standards are foundational but not the most important. More significant are the second-order consequences of economic growth and rising living standards, which are related but distinct. Second-order effects include a dramatic increase in the range of life options and ways of life available to ordinary people, a decline in crime and violence, a transformative change in the status and life experience of women, and improved health outcomes for people of all ranks and positions. Independent but related benefits include the enormous increase in our knowledge about, and understanding of, the natural world, and the increased sociability that comes from the shift from a rural society where most lived in small communities to a majority urban society where an increasing share of the global population lives in large cities or towns.

All of that is a transformation in the extent and variety of human flourishing. It is, by many ethical standards, the biggest improvement in human life in recorded history. Nevertheless, the modern world has as many critics as celebrants, in fact even more so. For every author or artist celebrating that things are better for most people than ever before, several complain and paint the contemporary world, or parts of it, in dark colors. At first glance, this chorus of criticism might seem united and singular, but a closer look reveals something more interesting.

On examination, criticisms of the modern world fall into two broad categories. The first are those we could call “Yes, but…”. In these arguments, critics accept the modern world as good, or at least better than what came before. Critics argue that, despite that, the modern world is deeply flawed: it is marked by deep inequality or injustice, harms the environment, or is plagued by persistent poverty, for example. In these arguments, the positive agenda is to say that the modern world needs to do better or radically reform in some way to realize its promise. It is better than the pre-modern world but has a foundational flaw that needs correction (private property and capitalism are the most common examples, but critics also cite the continued existence of the state and systemic advantages and disadvantages). These criticisms of modernity can be described as radical (or, in their milder versions, reformist).

The obvious example is Marxism. For the German philosopher Karl Marx, capitalist modernity was undoubtedly progressive at first and a clear improvement on feudalism, let alone slavery. He saw the modern world of his time as transitional, moving toward a truly liberated future where all human potential would be realized. The point of his criticisms of bourgeois society and modernity was that they had inherent contradictions and injustices that would be resolved through a dialectical process of historical development. That made the modern world unjust and flawed but also necessary and, in many ways, progressive. It was the contrast between the actuality of the modern world and what he saw as its potential that sparked his ire. He never had anything but the deepest contempt, forcefully expressed, for the apologists of the pre-modern world (as also for those whose objections to the modern world were founded in ethics rather than a ‘scientific’ approach like his own).

However, from the very first intimations of the modern world in the 1690s and 1700s, a second category of critiques emerged, of a very different type. These analyses and polemics argue that something about modernity is at least deeply regrettable, or (more often) profoundly bad. They argue that key aspects of modernity, including the ones listed earlier, should be morally condemned because of their harmful consequences for people and the natural world. The point is that these arguments don’t argue that the modern world is good but flawed, or potentially good but failing to realize that potential. Instead, they reject the modern world tout court and see the modernization process as a tragic wrong turn for all of humanity. That is a much more fundamental critique than the first type.

This second category is also more widespread, though you might not realize it because these critiques and the movements they inspire either attract little attention from scholars or are misrepresented as belonging to the first category. In reality, critiques, movements, and analyses of this kind appear in every society that begins to modernize and seem to be one of the most universal responses to that process. What is striking is how the same specific themes and arguments recur across contexts and societies that are otherwise wildly different. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit captured that in a remarkable little book, Occidentalism, published in 2004. They framed their work as a response to Edward Said’s Orientalism and presented the ideas and movements they analyzed as driven by a negative stereotype of “the West.” In reality, what they identified was the recurring tropes and arguments of anti-modernity (their framing came from the notion that modernization was identical to westernization – understandable but incorrect).

Buruma and Margalit captured how movements such as anti-imperialism, Japanese nationalism, 19th-century romanticism, and fascism, as well as individual intellectuals of many kinds, produced similar arguments against the world the modernization process produced and even employed similar rhetoric. This suggests that the shock of modernity triggers a similar response and analysis across traditional or pre-modern societies, regardless of how different those societies might be. These responses and arguments are not limited to political arguments and polemics. In fact, they are even more widespread in literature, historiography, and the arts. Many of the most important cultural figures of the last two centuries are associated with them; one could point to Wagner, Dostoyevsky, Ruskin, and T. S. Eliot, for example. In more popular culture we could cite authors such as Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, or any number of writers of fantasy and adventure fiction.

The point is that this second category of criticisms of modernity attacks the very idea and foundational features of the modern. What most people, including the first kind of critic, would celebrate is seen as something to regret or deplore. A common theme is that the modern world, or main and essential aspects of it, are incompatible with human nature, with what it is to be human and to live a truly human life. If the more familiar kinds of critique can be labelled “radical” then these can be described as “conservative” or “reactionary.” We should be cautious about those terms, however. Although many of the exponents did indeed see themselves as conservatives or reactionaries, many did not. They are not often seen as radical opponents of the status quo – although increasingly, as time passed, that is what they were. Many also regret modernity but see it as irreversible and argue for “reactionary modernism,” in which high technology and science combine with deeply anti- or pre-modern beliefs and social structures. This kind of view is found in people as varied as fascists and Nazis, ante-bellum fire-eaters, and many nationalist movements.

What are some examples of the family of arguments we are speaking of here? To give a few: that the modern world is godless and denies the transcendent; that it degrades the nature and meaning of personal relationships, making them ephemeral and insignificant; that it destroys the concept of honor and a whole range of virtues, replacing them with base materialism; that it undermines true connection between people and true community for a deracinated individualism; that it destroys excellence in the name of bland equality and uniformity; that it separates humans from the natural world; that it destroys true masculinity and femininity and the proper relations between men and women; and that it cuts the connection between people and places, rendering all of us rootless.

Over the next fourteen essays, we will explore the second kind of critique of progress and other arguments, examining what lies behind them, the forms they take, and why they are sometimes factually incorrect and usually grounded in false moral principles. We are familiar with the first kind of critique, but increasingly we need to address these more foundational and fundamental ones.

Blog Post | Communications

What If Smartphones Aren’t Killing Romance, but Saving It?

Smartphones did not start the decline in dating and fertility, but they may help reverse it.

Chelsea Follett — Sep 25, 2026

Summary: Smartphones are often accused of weakening romance and contributing to falling birth rates, even though many of these trends began before smartphones became widespread. Most new couples now meet online, and digitally formed relationships can be just as stable and satisfying as those formed offline. As AI improves matchmaking, smartphones may become even more effective at bringing compatible partners together.

My husband and I met in the same academic building where my parents first met decades earlier as students.

When we recently returned to that spot around our 10th wedding anniversary, we joked with our children that if they attended the same college, perhaps they’d meet their future spouses in that very building, too. Part of me hopes they do. It would make for a cute family story across generations.

But statistically, I know they’re far more likely to one day find love with the help of an online matchmaker. That doesn’t make me sad. I think of the couples I know who met online. They were brought together by an algorithm, yet their marriages are no less happy, and their children are no less loved because of it.

Some, however, lament this new mode of family formation. Others contend, more despairingly, that humanity is about to “scroll its way out of existence,” believing that smartphones are a drag on fertility. Are these devices replacing in-person interaction, romantic relationships, and children?

Most Couples Meet Online

The available research suggests smartphones have become the most common way couples meet, which makes them one of the most powerful matchmaking technologies ever built.

According to research from Stanford University, in 2021 more than 50% of new U.S. couples met online, a category that includes meeting through digital forums, social media and dating apps.

That may actually understate the role of technology as an effective matchmaker. The Stanford data also appear to show a post-2010 rise in couples first meeting in “bars and restaurants,” but according to the researchers, that “is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant.”

A 2024 survey of nearly 8,000 newly engaged couples similarly found dating apps were the single most common way they met, ahead of every offline route. That survey, from The Knot, an online wedding services platform, found couples first connected through a variety of different dating apps including Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Match, Plenty of Fish and eHarmony.

Technology has long been blamed for inadvertently hindering family formation. Recent research from Northwestern University suggests the typewriter may have lowered birth rates by bringing more women into the workforce. Yet the same research also suggests the typewriter led to many “office romance” marriages — and, presumably, many children.

Today, technology continues to bring couples together. Smartphones are increasingly accused of fueling the global decline in fertility, but the evidence that smartphones reduce fertility is weaker than many think. For example, some economists point out that most of Italy’s fertility decline preceded smartphone adoption.

Studies on average marital satisfaction between couples who met online and offline show mixed results, but some research suggests slightly higher marital satisfaction among the former as well as slightly less separation and divorce. Digital introductions can lead to lasting partnerships, and divorce rates are at their lowest point in half a century. That trend is driven by highly committed married millennials, many of whom met their spouse online.

Although dating apps and other online mechanisms are the leading way couples first connect, there is still significant room for improvement. Rates of couple formation (and, consequently, fertility) declined across many countries, even though most single young adults say they are aspiring toward marriage.

Some would blame the phones. Yet, some data shows a decline in teen dating that predates smartphones, starting in the early 1990s. And research suggests the widespread adoption of online dating between 2008 and 2021 had remarkably little effect on individuals’ romantic preferences or selectivity — that is, their pickiness — to the researchers’ surprise. Nonetheless, many singles still struggle to meet the right person.

Traditional matchmakers are expensive, but AI holds the promise of dramatically lowering the cost and democratizing access to high-quality, personalized matchmaking as well as enhancing matchmaking through higher success rates.

The race is already on to harness AI to improve digital courtship. For example, the company Keeper AI bills itself as “AI-assisted matchmaking for serious, long-term relationships” and claims that with their app, “1 in 10 first dates lead to marriage.” Other new AI-powered dating platforms include Known and Overtone.

Older dating apps also aim to improve their effectiveness with AI. Earlier this year, Bumble introduced an AI-powered profile guidance feature providing users with feedback on their bios, and plans to entirely replace swiping with AI-based matchmaking later this year in select markets. Meta similarly says its AI assistant for Facebook Dating helps users optimize their profiles and highlight their best qualities to appeal to potential matches.

Smartphones and dating apps are frequently criticized for undermining traditional courtship and contributing to declining fertility. Yet if they were to suddenly disappear, couple formation would likely suffer, given that most couples now first meet online. Smartphones, perhaps paradoxically, act as vital family-formation infrastructure in the modern world.

This article appeared on Deseret News on August 23, 2026.

Blog Post | Human Development

From Stone Tablets to Solid-State Drives

Civilization has advanced by learning to preserve more knowledge with less matter.

J.K. Lundblad — Sep 8, 2026

Summary: Human progress depends not only on discovering knowledge but also on preserving and transmitting it. From stone tablets to printed books and solid-state drives, storage media have become vastly lighter, denser, and faster. Over five thousand years, humanity has increased data density by trillions, making accumulated knowledge cheaper and more accessible than ever.

The astonishing conveniences and prosperity of modern civilization rest on two pillars: our mastery of energy and our relentless discovery of knowledge. Yet, discovering new knowledge alone was not enough for civilizational progress. To accumulate and build on discoveries across generations, humanity needed a way to encode knowledge onto a medium outside of our collective nervous system. From etching hieroglyphs into stone to digitally controlling electrons in modern solid-state drives (SSDs), humanity’s advancement in creating affordable, lightweight, and reliable data storage is astonishing.

Before the invention of written language, people usually transmitted knowledge orally. Fables and other knowledge had to be memorized and accurately recited to pass from one generation to the next. Transmitting knowledge this way, where data is stored only in the human mind, risks significant data loss. When Joe Huntergatherer, the only member of the tribe who had memorized the story of the Great Elder, was killed by an arrow, that story was forever lost. The fragility of oral transmission is why almost all human history, spanning hundreds of thousands of years, is lost to the erosive sands of time.

The invention of writing, the ability to etch, carve, or paint characters onto clay tablets, stone, and cave walls, allowed humans, for the first time, to store information outside the brain. The first clay inscriptions with readable script date from ~3,400 B.C. So long as another person was trained to interpret the inscribed hieroglyphs, characters, or letters, that knowledge was no longer subject to fallible human memory. However, stone inscriptions had relatively low information density.

To create a formula to measure the data density of storage media over time, I convert characters (letters and punctuation) into bits of information, then divide by the number of grams of matter needed to encode that information. A bit is a single binary digit, a zero or one, and roughly eight bits make up a single character. (View these calculations not as precise figures, but as order-of-magnitude approximations, since data density varies considerably from stone to book to drive.)

*Courtesy of Hans Hillewaert* *CC BY-SA 4.0*

Let’s begin with stone engravings, using the famous Rosetta Stone as an example. The Rosetta Stone weighs roughly 750kg and contains the same text in three languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on top, Egyptian Demotic script in the middle, and Ancient Greek on the bottom. To estimate the data density, I focused on the Greek portion of the stone, which accounts for roughly 1/3 of the stone’s total weight (about 250kg).

No source I could find provided a reliable count of the surviving Greek characters, so I calculated it twice independently. First, I compared a 19th-century publication’s line-by-line count with a high-resolution photo of the stone, which puts the original, undamaged text at about ~7,290 characters. Adjusting that figure for the approximately 20 percent of the stone that’s damaged or missing gives an estimated ~5,832 surviving characters. Second, I ran an AI optical character count directly off the damaged stone, which returned ~5,800. The two methods are close, so I use ~5,800 characters going forward.

Since a single character of text equates to about 8 bits of information, the surviving 5,800 characters store 46,400 bits of data. Divided by the 250kg weight of the Greek portion, we arrive at a data density for the Rosetta Stone of ~0.19 bits/g.

With the discovery of agriculture and the rise of agrarian civilizations, the demands for knowledge storage and transmission media grew. The human population expanded, and a small but notable fraction began to congregate in small towns. As social and economic complexity grew, so did administration, trade, tax, and legal systems. Humans needed an easy way to perform and store the outputs of mathematical calculations, record taxes, and codify rules and regulations for personal and business conduct. Agrarian civilization, in short, demanded a storage medium with higher information density and faster read/write speeds (throughput). Enter papyrus, parchment, and paper.

Early forms of “paper” included papyrus and animal-skin materials like parchment and vellum. Papyrus was made from the papyrus plant, which grew in the Nile Delta in ancient Egypt. To make papyrus, strips of the plant were cut, laid into overlapping layers, and then pressed and dried into sheets. Papyrus was first used for writing as early as 2,500 B.C. and was one of the primary writing materials for thousands of years. Compared with stone, papyrus was far more data-dense; we could fit more characters on a given surface area, the substrate was lighter, and it could be folded or rolled into a scroll.

Parchment, made from cleaned and stretched animal skin, was developed long after papyrus and, thanks to its superior durability, quickly became the medium of choice for important documents. The Magna Carta, made from parchment, contains about 3,500 words or ~25,000 characters, which equates to about 200,000 bits of information. Medieval parchment weighs about 100–180 g/m², meaning the Magna Carta weighs roughly 50 grams. Using our formula, the Magna Carta’s data density comes out to around 4,000 bits/g.

Even the Magna Carta pales in comparison to modern paper with printed text. “Paper”, the flexible plant-fiber sheets we know of today, was invented in China as far back as the 2nd century B.C .. It took centuries for it to spread outside China. Paper could be made thinner and lighter than parchment or papyrus, and the printing press made it possible to fit more words on a sheet. The King James Bible, for instance, contains around 789,000 words. That’s roughly 4.3 million characters, or 34,400,000 bits of data. A standard hardcover Bible weighs about 1 kg. Even if we conservatively include the weight of the binding, the information density comes to ~34,400 bits/g, about 8.6 times the density of the Magna Carta.

Our eyesight is limited, and text can only be so small before we can no longer resolve it. The next revolution in data storage came in the form of more exotic “machine-readable” media. Examples include magnetic storage such as hard drives and magnetic tape. Here, data is encoded on magnetized material directly as bits of information – ones and zeros – by carefully controlling the polarity of magnetic domains. This technology was a wondrous breakthrough, and it’s still improving. Today, for a few hundred dollars, you can purchase a hard drive that can store tens of terabytes of data! A commercially available 10TB HDD that weighs ~1500 g can store ~80 trillion bits of data, a data density of ~53 billion bits/g, 1.54 million times higher than the King James Bible.

Yet today, hard disk drives already feel antiquated. Instead, most phones, desktops, tablets, and external drives use solid-state storage (SSDs). It’s easy to see why SSDs have become so dominant in recent years; they are ideal for mobile devices. They have no moving parts, are more durable, use less energy, and still have higher data density. Solid-state media store data by trapping electrons in a grid of floating-gate transistors to represent bits of information. A commercially available 4TB (~32 trillion bits) SSD weighs 32 grams; a data density of 1 trillion bits/g, about 19 times higher than a comparable hard drive, or about 5.3 trillion times the data density of the Rosetta Stone!

Commensurate with improvements in data density came higher read/write speeds, or “throughput.” People read about 4 words a second and with an average word length of around 5 characters; that’s about 160 bits per second. A professional stone carver might be able to write up to 20 letters an hour, or about 0.044 bits per second. Paper and paper-like media dramatically increased writing speed. A human writes about 1.1 characters per second, or roughly 8.8 bits per second – 200 times faster than carving into stone, though still slower than reading. Printing machines, of course, could print text far faster than any human could write by hand.

But none of this compares to magnetic storage, such as modern hard drives, where read/write speeds (which are similar) are currently about 4.4 billion bits per second. SSDs are faster still, reaching read/write speeds up to 112 billion bits per second. That’s about 700 million times faster than reading, and nearly 13 billion times faster than writing by hand, roughly 2.5 trillion times faster than carving into stone!

In roughly five thousand years, we’ve pushed the density of our storage media up by a factor of trillions, and the leaps keep coming faster. It took five millennia to get from stone to the printed page, representing a 180,000-fold gain in data density. In the seventy years since the invention of the hard drive, and with SSDs, humanity has multiplied that density by another 29 million times. For perspective, the text of the King James Bible carved in stone would weigh around 185 tons, nearly as much as a Boeing 747 (without fuel). On an SSD, it weighs less than a grain of sand.

Blog Post | Happiness & Satisfaction

First-World Problems Were Once an Emperor’s Problems

Stoicism is even more relevant now that abundance has become commonplace.

Adam Omary — Aug 28, 2026

Summary: Marcus Aurelius faced temptations that feel surprisingly modern: comfort, excess, distraction, and uncertainty about how to use freedom well. His reflections offer one way to think about the psychological challenges of abundance, including the difficulty of balancing pleasure, purpose, and responsibility. As prosperity makes scarcity less central to everyday life, people must find new sources of meaning in work, relationships, service, and self-directed goals.

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly,” Marcus Aurelius instructed himself, remember that “I am rising to the work of a human being.”

The most powerful man in the world did not want to get out of bed.

Book Five of Meditations begins with the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher arguing with himself under the covers. Staying warm is more pleasant, he admits. Rest is necessary too. But nature has placed limits on rest, just as it has on eating and drinking. The problem, Marcus observes, is that he exceeds those limits when pleasure is involved and “stoppest short” when there is work to do.

Strip away the second-century diction, and this could be a transcript of someone bargaining with an alarm clock before a morning workout. Marcus tells himself to get up, stop overeating, do his job, and quit pretending that comfort is the purpose of life. Two thousand years later, we buy books and download podcasts that tell us the same things.

That helps explain Stoicism’s extraordinary revival. Annual sales of Meditations reportedly rose from around 12,000 copies in 2012 to 100,000 in 2019. Modern Stoic writer Ryan Holiday has sold millions of books to an audience spanning professional athletes, politicians, technology executives, and ordinary people trying to exercise before work. An ancient philosophy of self-command has found a mass market because the problems of self-command have found a mass market.

Marcus did not live an easy life. He ruled during frontier wars and the Antonine Plague. Several of his children died young. Much of Meditations was written to and for himself, apparently while on military campaign. But he also experienced a class of surprisingly recognizable “first-world problems” back when they were much rarer: too much food, too little movement, diffuse anxiety, irritation with other people, uncertain purpose, and the temptation to let comfort consume a life.

First-world problems were once emperor-world problems.

Marcus practiced a form of what psychologists today call cognitive reappraisal: changing an emotional response by changing how one thinks about something. When confronted with an elaborate meal, he reminded himself it is just a dead animal. Falernian wine, among the most prized luxuries in Rome, is “only a little grape juice.” Imperial purple, Rome’s finest clothing material, is just sheep’s wool stained with shellfish blood. The exercise, he explained in Book Six, was to strip away the prestige surrounding an object and see it clearly.

Marcus needed the Stoic operation because he inhabited an unusual ecology of evolutionary mismatch, much like that found in the developed world today.

For nearly all human history, calories were costly, physical exertion was unavoidable, and rest conserved energy that might be needed later. Today, the time prices of food are so low that many can afford a day’s worth of calories in under an hour of labor, all while working sitting down in an indoor climate-controlled environment. Many of us pay for gyms and manufacture strenuous movements that resemble pointless labor because ordinary survival no longer supplies enough activity.

The same principle extends beyond food and exercise. Humans evolved to monitor threats in a local environment. For most of history, only emperors and a small governing elite received a steady stream of dispatches from distant lands. Couriers and envoys brought Marcus news of wars, revolts, epidemics, and political intrigue from across the known world. Now a phone or TV news channel supplies every catastrophe on Earth in real time. And in economic life, we apply evolved intuitions built for small-group scarcity and zero-sum rivalry that fail to scale to modern global markets.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes foresaw these problems of prosperity. Writing during the Great Depression, he predicted that technological improvement and compound growth could raise living standards to such a degree that we would be free from material scarcity. Once the absolute needs were met, humanity would confront what he called its “real, permanent problem”: how to use freedom from pressing economic cares “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Brink Lindsey borrows Keynes’s phrase for his recent book, The Permanent Problem. Lindsey argues that wealthy liberal democracies now occupy an awkward territory between mass plenty and mass flourishing. Food, shelter, safety, education, and medicine are more available than ever, but people still need status, purpose, belonging, and the sense that their efforts matter.

Imperial wealth solved the economic problem for one man nearly eighteen centuries before markets and technology began solving it for whole populations. Once freed from many ordinary constraints, Marcus encountered the permanent problem early. What should he do with comfort? How much pleasure was enough? Why work when others could work for him? How could he remain useful when status had removed the need to prove himself useful?

Critics sometimes find it amusing that a philosophy of indifference to wealth attracts wealthy executives. But Stoicism’s new popularity is less paradoxical than it seems. Stoicism developed among people living close to power and abundance because power and abundance exposed problems that scarcity had concealed. The philosophy of an emperor becomes more relevant when ordinary people begin living, in important respects, like emperors.

Poverty has not disappeared. But the characteristic problems of affluent societies increasingly concern regulating access rather than enduring absence: eating less of the food surrounding us, moving more despite labor-saving technology, limiting entertainment, directing attention, choosing among options, and finding commitments strong enough to organize freedom.

Stoicism offers a useful set of psychological tools for the task of finding meaning and navigating abundance. Its distinction between what is and is not under our control redirects threat monitoring toward action. Its practice of stripping luxuries down to their physical components weakens the stories that amplify craving. Voluntary discomfort teaches the nervous system that cold, hunger, exertion, and inconvenience are tolerable. Gratitude resets the comparison point against which abundance otherwise becomes invisible. Remembering death makes us appreciate life’s finitude.

But Stoicism was never only a collection of tricks for feeling calmer or becoming more productive. Marcus did not drag himself from bed merely to clear his imperial inbox. He was rising to fulfill a human purpose, which for a Stoic meant acting rationally, socially, and for the common good. Meaning came from duty voluntarily embraced and service to something beyond appetite.

That fits the evolutionary account. Humans are not built only to consume calories and conserve energy. We also evolved to cooperate, master difficult skills, earn esteem, care for kin, reciprocate favors, contribute to groups, and navigate moral concerns that sometimes pull in different directions. The pragmatic response is to choose ecologies that activate the better angels of our nature: difficult work with visible progress, physical exertion, face-to-face relationships, responsibility for others, and problems whose solutions improve a community. Realistic progress works with evolved psychology instead of pretending human beings are blank slates.

Historically, only a tiny elite had enough food to struggle with gluttony, enough leisure to struggle with lethargy, and enough freedom to struggle with what freedom was for. Marcus repeatedly reminded himself that pleasure, technology, wealth, or leisure were not vices themselves. The problem was surrendering judgment to them. He could enjoy the palace without becoming its slave. Likewise, we can enjoy the supermarket, smartphone, washing machine, and weekend, while recognizing the new, preferable challenges that abundance creates.

Emperor-world problems are still problems, but it is a triumph that they are increasingly part of ordinary life.