Yeah, I’m sure that working physical labor 15 hours a day and not being able to find prayers, devotions, prayer groups, Mass schedules, Catholic Answers discussions, etc. online would have made me so much more spiritual. Not. It just would have made me more tired and less informed.
One thing I might point out is that access to information also means access to information about faith - and much of the progress makes it a lot easier to make those choices.
People worked less hours per day (on average) 100 years ago than they do now. There was no massive “consumer goods” market for which the products had to be produced, and there was no massive “service industry” for which millions had to spend 40+ hours a week in the office. Go back farther in time and people worked even less. Small-scale agriculture is hard work for about 3-4 months a year. It’s leaves you mostly free for the other 8-9 months.
Why would it have been hard to find them 100 years ago? They were available in churches, as they still are. Sure, you couldn’t find as many prayers in your local church as you can online now, but is more (in the sense of more different options) better where it comes to prayer, or devotions, etc.?
That’s true, and I won’t deny that I have made great use of this easy access to information about religion myself. But at the same time I realize that the state of confusion I was in (while feeling self-confident), was the result of having grown up in the modern environment to begin with (including overwhelming information and endless options to choose from). So as I see it, the ubiquitous availability of information is mostly bad, but the problem does offer its own solution.
100 years ago, my ancestors in USA (they were all in USA at that point) were not working “small scale agriculture”. They were working construction, driving trains, working in factories. And they most certainly were not able to sit around for 8 or 9 months of the year. They were working loooooooooooong hours year round.
This is interesting. It’s a few years off, but not by much. I doubt life changed dramatically in three years.
www.bls.gov
I said “people on average” and by that I meant people the world over. You all comment by giving examples from the USA 100 years ago. Yes, the industrial revolution happened early in the USA, and it made life tough. But the population of the USA constitutes only 4% of the world population. (Yes, really. 300 million out of 7.6 billion. Do the math.)
My grandparents were born in the same era. I agree with the innocence they had, but the life they lived was not easy. One of my grandma’s siblings died in the influenza epidemic.
just out of curiousity, where are you from?
It’s an American based website populated by mostly Americans. What do you expect? When we search for stats (I searched for “occupations in 1918”) guess what comes up because the search engine is - OH MY - searching servers in the US?
@alice24, it may be that you ask in earnest, but there is far too much animosity on this site for me to discuss my background, roots, and life history here. Thanks.
Your comment about “ultra-American” wasn’t exactly friendly.
Who said anything about this? Why even say that?
What on earth does that have to do with 1918?
I´m not on to fool around here, nor was I in any way uncharitable in this thread, as far as I can remember. My ancestors came from four different nations from persia to france, and I was just curious as no one of my female ancestors from asia to europe would have made it easy 100 years ago.
Yes. Unfriendliness to a culture works both ways.