To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.
And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.
Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.
Hygiene theory has gone a long way to alleviate some of the more problematic disease issues. I have said that if we went full Mad Max (I don't think we are), hygiene theory would survive because of how useful it is.
Starvation is one of those issues of the odd cycles of nature. Many I have spoken with that do back to the land farming have said, on a 5 year average calories aren't an issue. The problem is it usually means 3 bumper years followed by two starvation years. Thru modern agriculture we have both made systems of storage and fertilizers that flatten over these issues.
As for the governance of strongman. There was the flip side of, they couldn't strong arm people TOO much because if enough people figured it was worth over throwing them, the boss would be overthrown with violence or death. It was risky being at the top, there was a reason why the kings thrown was backed up to a wall. Stops the assassin coming from behind.
The problem is that in leaving much of undesirable things behind, we've also left many of the desirable things behind and it's not entirely clear if we can ever reclaim them in society as it is. One paragraph stuck out quite clearly to me in your link:
---
"Of course our farmers don’t care about maximum efficiency (because that means for maximum efficiency of people who aren’t the farmers eating the surplus). They care about marrying, having families, raising children, keeping friends, staying close to loved ones and so on. Farmers, after all, are people, not mere tools of agricultural production (we will talk about non-free farmers next time) and so they do not serve their farmers, their farms serve the needs of their families."
---
And "friends", as the article also describes, meant something very different. It was not infrequent that friends could be entire households where relationships would last for generations. Modern life has really done away with most of these things.
I'd also say that many things people look on as negative, like difficult labor, are not necessarily so. I spent a fair amount of time when I was young working in construction and it was some of the most rewarding paid work I have ever done, by a wide margin. If it paid as well as the path I ended up taking, I would have absolutely stayed in construction for as long as my body held out. That last part might sound grim, but it's the exact same in fields like software development. Over time your mind will slow, as will your motivation to keep up with the latest API, language, and just general trends. At that point you're going to be headed for 'early retirement', quite likely even earlier than a guy working construction - with construction workers having a median age of around 40!
Here's the post about what's needed to feed society with bread (there are many others) https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.
And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.
Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.