The last 150 years have absolutely seen huge increases in leisure time. Notice that in the Bible, there is only one day of Sabbath, the rest of the week is work. A 6.5 day work week was standard for millennia. This idea of a relaxed bucolic existence like a Monet painting was always a myth.
"Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestors did at that time though.
Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now.
The same myth is that serfdom is/was worse than 9-7 office work.. when in fact you could work 1 day for someone else and 6 days for yourself. Now you work 5 days for someone else and 2 days for yourself.
Serfdom is much more then just "paying taxes in work time". It was basically totalitarian dictatorships and also quite ineffective economically. Abolition increased agricultural productivity and peasants' nutrition.
When we are discussing in the context of “how much work i have to put in for someone else vs how much for myself” - my point still stands. Peasents had to work for their feudal lord a lot less than I for example have to work for company shareholders.
TBH with pretty absurd ratio right now.
You get paid for your work. You can change company you work for. If you don't want to work for company, you can try running self-sufficient farm - which is how peasant gained food.
Except that peasant did not owned the land. Could not make his farm larger nor smaller. If lord decided you will produce more grains instead of vegetables, peasant had to oblige regardless of own preferences. And peasants had to give part of produce to lord. And had to use Lords mills and what not instead of choosing them in free market.
Nor could peasant change occupation or marry without Lords permission.
There is a lot of shallow talking in what you said because things are not black/white. And yes I can change the company I work for also reducing workdays amount but that will directly make my life unsustainable and I dont have an option to buy 50 morgs of field to start a farm (this costs around few million dollars where I live) and thats the area lords were giving to their peasents..
So yea your argument is:
- “just go and die if you dont like working 3 times as much as your ancestors”
Resorting to insults when you dont have arguments is kind of weak technique.
The problem with underperforming agriculture and lack of nutrition was persistent in that system. You seem to assume that peasants under serfdom had easy low work access to food and everything. That is not the case. The land does not produce food for whole year without you working it a lot.
Peasants in serfdom had hard time to produce enough food for themselves.
Peasant did not tended to few million dollars worth of land. Lords were not giving land to peasants. Rather, peasants were sold along with land and belonged to the land. That is massive difference - serfdom was one step above slavery.
You still completely missed the point again, which convinces me this discussion has no sense. We were not discussing the live conditions back then and now but how much you had to work for your land lord vs for yourself. Disparity is huge... and its just stupid to deny that...
"Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestors did at that time though.