Life was peak in the Middle Ages

We had also a moment of poverty and famine, a moment that diseases were easily spreaded, people that would have a longer life expectative due being borned in rich families. About the badass sword knight depends of the person, one swing would be enough to lose a battle or even be decapitated.

Honest jobs indeed still exist and let's remember there were thieves and other kind of evil people living at this moment, then robbery and invasion to others' properties is not something to not consider. People got married because that was a tradition followed by them, not necessarily because they loved it and prostitution is one of the oldest jobs in earth.

You would lift as long as it was necessary to do, 6 days a week is a not necessarily the pattern to be followed. There were people living in the capital and others living in the "country" zone, and those would need to work everyday taking care of the farms, doing the harvester, taking care of the animals that would be eaten, etc.

 

And you couldn't just decide to become one, you would need to be born under very good circumstance, akin to the 5% in modern society or do extreme act of valor (and be witnessed) as a conscript in a battlefield wielding a spear and what little armor you could get, knights had to provide their own equipment and if they lost their horse they were done for.

 

Ahh yes the middle ages...

I would have LOVED to live in it. Be an old man by the time I was 35. Die when I'm 16 cause frost destroyed my entire crops and I starve. Watch 75% of my siblings succumb to a horrible disease that would have been prevented with something as simple as hand soap. Contract syphilis from my first sexual experience. Be engaged in a brutal decade long war because King Fartsalot lost a card game to Lord Coomqaud the 2nd.

Eat nothing but boiled cabbage and meats and drink nothing but fermented water (beer) with the weekend pleasure of mead (which would be pretty cool tbh)

Work an "honest" job that I would see no reward from and only gain life debilitating injuries.

But at least I wouldn't be a goona

 

I'm not afraid of death, my friend. I am afraid of dying a horrible death. Starving is not pretty, freezing is not pretty, burning is not pretty, getting disembowed and laying in a nameless field is not pretty.

War isn't cool and it is not a test of manhood. Swords, bows, pikes, boiling oil is only cool on TV. You get stabbed you are going to get an infection and die. You have oil poured on you will experience agony which english doesn’t have a word for.

You're right you probably would be a peasant. Thus you wouldn't know the cause or be easily manipulated to throw your life away to a meat grinder.

War doesn't create men, it creates gravestones and holes. There is not a person has went to war and has came back a better person.

I'm fortunate to not have experienced a war, but I have been around the block and it isn't pretty. I don't feel like a man because of it, I only feel like a survivor.

All this media manipulation, virus design, and immigration string pulling have been a tool used by the elite since biblical times. Only now is it on a mass scale. The population always needs to be controlled.

I think all of us would tbh. Once a goona always a goona. *goomba emoji*

 

Life expectancy can be a misleading statistic because it only gives you the mean age of death, it doesn't say anything more about the distribution which has changed a lot over time.

Before modern medicine, half of children didn't make it to age 10. But those who did could expect to reach old age. Plato and Buddha both died aged 80.

 

Deaths by starvation and freezing are relatively nice. You get tired, fall asleep and don't wake up. Infinitely preferable to hanging or drowning.

 

Why then men who went through bloody battles point to those experiences as the peaks of their lives? Ernst Jünger fought WW1 from the beginning to the end including the Somme and he absolutely loved it.

 

Braveheart is a cool movie but as far as historical accuracy goes you might as well be watching 300. I don’t remember all the plot of the movie but badass or no the character they based him on was born into nobility, most likely the son of a knight, you look at his friends or officers they all shared that background.

As a lowborn your best bet was attaching your service to a lord and rise through the rank of men-at-arm or survive as a sellsword long enough to be able to afford good armor and a horse.

Knights didn’t really fight with swords, swords were mainly symbolic, a knight armor was impenetrable so they used weapons that could cause blunt damage instead like axe/poleaxe(or a knife for small gaps) on foot or a lance on horseback. Due to their armor they didn’t think much of bowmen and at least in antiquity the latter was seen as cowardly, there is some similarities to this with how sniper were viewed in ww2.

 

You watch too many movies, uncritically. Every single innovation we have, from vaccines & antibiotics down to microwaves, nitrogen based fertilizers, even Internet, was to solve a serious problem. It’s true we caused different problems with our solutions, but in virtually every instance, what we have now is better. We just need to learn how to use the tools we have.

And I’m a veteran: there is nothing glorious or valorizing about combat. The only good thing about it is to protect innocents from monsters in human form, and even then innocents die. At its most ideal, war is the least heinous option in a list of terrible, unjust options. There is nothing great about dying from a pike in your bowels, lingering on while your body rots. Nothing wonderful about a barbed arrow buried in your flesh. Nothing magical about dying from boiling oil poured on your head, rather than mustard gas or agent orange. Go to the VA. See the amputees, see the blown out knees, the injured backs. Look at the endless march of men with depression, hyper vigilance, PTSD. Some guys are made for war, that’s fine, most of the guys I know who peaked during war was because combat robbed them of development. They can’t move past it to better things.

These are the good old days. Today. Now. We got hooked on porn, that’s unfortunate. So we work through it, we learn how to get off of porn rather than get off to it, but that’s attainable. We can achieve that. Nothing you can do about bubonic plague in 1322.

Stop using movies as your basis of education on history.

 

I agree.

However I think fighting in general is a healthy test for ones manhood, but war is too destructive.

Men are born to create and destroy and without we are nothing.

 

Are you a combat veteran?

 

I'm not.

I don't believe in war and I don't agree with it.

I'm referring to martial arts, my friend.

 

Martial arts isn’t fighting. Tae Kwon Do, Akido, Muay Thai, Judo, boxing, I do BJJ myself, these are sports, contests. They have rules. These are not fighting. And I agree, they are exhilarating. They awaken something visceral and competitive in us, but it’s like big horn sheep knocking heads, or lions sparring. Fighting is ugly.

 

I do BJJ also but at its very core it is fighting. Albiet stage fighting.