This question is common throughout the internet, but I’d like to see Lemmy’s response.
The country you end up in would be random, you don’t get to pick.
It would be interesting to experience life 500 years ago just for the difference in perspective. It would be a lot of pressure, though.
The concept of absolute monarchies wasn’t really that well established 500 years ago. It was just really in it’s earliest phases. What’s usually called the age of absolutism doesn’t start till the early 17th century.
Average person today
With all the power of Rome elegabulus couldn’t purchase bottom surgery. Yet even as a middle class American I did.
Can we love as neither and poof from existence?
I would roll the dice on “unethical” (/underground?) brain preservation testing in hopes that maybe in 200+ years things (if it doesn’t fully melt down) would suck less. Which honestly would likely be the same as what you’ve said.
If not? I could probably live in VR if it weren’t about digital real-estate. Ideally, flexible living with some purpose, more organics for life support (symbiotic+robust microbiomes) even though I definitely would be mistaken for a robot especially as I could see myself doing rather robotic-seeming things (like tapping into a mycorrhizal network to trade nutrients with trees to get pollutants like nickel).
Can we love as neither
Speaking for myself, outlook not so good. (typo, I know)
I’d like to believe that I have it in me to be a benevolent monarch, but I know myself well enough to tell that I am entirely too human for that.
I’d rather not see how rotten I could get with power unbound, and my current conscience wouldn’t let me impose that on whoever I’d be ruling over, so modern-day-meh life it is.
Yeah, bang 16 years olds until someone stabs you in the throat because you forgot to do the same to them last week. Nah :/
Definitely now considering I wouldn’t have even made it to 10 years old before dying if it wasn’t for modern surgery. Would have probably died for unknown reasons to them and I probably would have been marked as having been possessed by some sort of evil spirit or demon if for whatever reason they cut me open and found the weird growth attached to my heart.
Modern era. Living 5 centuries in the past would suck. No germ theory of disease so everyone is ignorant regarding the importance of washing hands and basic cleanliness. Anything wrong with you? Better get the leeches to balance your humors. Uh oh, stubbed my toe. Guess I’ll just die.
The only caveat is if you get to know what you do now and can transform society because of it. As King I’d either bring about the Renaissance within a decade instead of centuries unless I was branded a heretic by the Church and beheaded for flapping my mouth.
No Toilets and ac is a deal breaker
🎼 Shit on the floor 🎶
Poop deck lol
Get schwifty
AC wasn’t really necessary. It was cooler and walls were thicker. I used to live in an old stone farmhouse and when it was 40C outside it was 20C inside.
What about other way around. Wouldn’t it get too cold? They always show ot drafty and fireplaces in every room on tv.
Fireplaces create a wonderful soft warmth. Unless you live in some huge castle or it’s completely blowing through your house, warming the house with fireplaces is great. Even when there are some small drafts here and there in the house. Just wear warm socks as the floors are usually quite cool despite the room being toasty from the heat.
Then you tend the fire for some time, long enough for the fire to properly warm all the stone around it. (Even in wooden houses, the central chimney would be rather thick at the bottom where the fireplaces are, so the stones store heat during the night.)
You stoke the coals and then when it’s just red coals and no more burning, you can shut down the chimney, so the rest of the heat stays in.
It slowly dissipates through the night. (But you won’t get carbon monoxide poisoning, which is why it’s important to have the chimney open while there’s actual fire.) It might get a bit cool around the morning hours, but sleeping in the cool is actually pretty decent.
Waking up in the cold is a bitch though.
We had uhm… two chimneys and six fireplaces in the house I (mostly) grew up in. Was built in the 30’s.
good to hear from all the first hand experiences
as king you wouldn’t deal with the leg work so i guess temperatures is less of a big deal than I think.
It’s not even that much work, to be honest.
I wouldn’t run 6 fireplaces at once, maybe two or three at most, and aside from chopping and carrying the wood inside, there’s not that much work in it. Just set a few pieces nicely with a piece of paper (think jenga style more than a cartoon bonfire), se it alight. Let it breathe for a while, get a good flame, then fill 'er up once it’s going nicely. I mean, depending on how hot you want the room. I’d never actually shove them full, about halfway at most maybe. Then let it burn. Then fill it up a second and maybe third time in the winter, then just let it cool while stoking the coals.
It really doesn’t feel like work.
And now I’m nostalgic.
But yeah temperature would be the least of your worries as king imo. Perhaps not the least, but a small one anyway.
People don’t even need AC on the latitude I live in.
It’s basically two winters and August.
Literally for most of the year I wear the same amount of outdoor clothing, which is a lot.
Yeah but you’d live in a castle and they stay very cool.
I dk if you are bias or subject expert.
I’ve been to plenty of castles, they’re always very cool due to the massive thick stone walls.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from history, it’s that the monarchs who didn’t constantly plot and scheme were at risk to being overthrown by their noble subjects. I hate politics; I hate incessant meetings, and being a monarch always sounds like just constant meetings, all day, every day. Everyone wants to talk to you, get something from you, scheme with you; and it they aren’t scheming with you, you really have to worry, because they’re off scheming against you.
It sounds tedious and horrible.
You could just invent bureaucracy lol, or do we get brain wiped in this hypothetical?
If you’re the emperor, don’t let them ruin your groove.
https://www.history.com/articles/royal-palace-life-hygiene-henry-viii
The Western European belief that baths were unhealthy did not help matters, either. Although neat freak Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily, he was a royal rarity. Louis XIV is rumored to have bathed twice in his life, as did Queen Isabella of Castile, Herman says. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month. The 17th century British King James I was said to never bathe, causing the rooms he frequented to be filled with lice.
It was the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, whose choice to no longer travel from court to court would lead to a particularly putrid living situation. In 1682, in an effort to seal his authority and subjugate his nobles, Louis XIV moved his court permanently to the gilded mega-palace of Versailles. At times over 10,000 royals, aristocrats, government officials, servants and military officers lived in Versailles and its surrounding lodgings.
Despite its reputation for magnificence, life at Versailles, for both royals and servants, was no cleaner than the slum-like conditions in many European cities at the time. Women pulled up their skirts up to pee where they stood, while some men urinated off the balustrade in the middle of the royal chapel. According to historian Tony Spawforth, author of Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, Marie-Antoinette was once hit by human waste being thrown out the window as she walked through an interior courtyard.
The heavily trafficked latrines often leaked into the bedrooms below them, while blockages and corrosion in the palace’s iron and lead pipes were known to occasionally “poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen. “Not even the rooms of the royal children were safe,” writes Spawforth. An occasional court exodus could have reduced the wear and tear on Versailles, perhaps leading to fewer unpleasant structural failures.
This unsanitary way of living no doubt led to countless deaths throughout royal European households. It was not until the 19th century that standards of cleanliness and technological developments improved life for many people, including members of royal courts. Today, many European royals still move from residence to residence—but for pleasure, not to try and outrun squalor.
TIL my mother lives like a Queen.
(She does not wash her hands 🤮, and she calls me an “OCD germaphobic”)
Toilet paper.
OK, but this could still go either way. Please elaborate.
I apologize for not being more clear. I don’t think I could live without toilet paper. Looked up how royalty cleaned themselves back then. No thank you.
I understand 100%
I, too, do not know how to use three seashells.
For context in 1525:
King of England: Henry VIII (with all the wives)
King of France: Francis I (with all the fighting the Holy Roman Empire and Pope)
King of Spain: Charles V (with all the being Holy Roman Emperor and inbreeding)
Emperor of China: Jiajing (with all the torturing and murdering dissenters)
Henry VIII suffered from numerous painful ailments that killed him eventually.
What about African countries and other Asian regions? Maybe America?
Kongo - Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga - first Catholic monarch of Kongo
Songhai - Askia the Great - zenith of Songhai’s power
Adal - Abū Bakr ibn Muhammad - founded city of Harar
Current era. No question.
Before antibiotics, the most common cause of death was infectious disease.
Well I’m already doing the former, so I might as well try out the latter.
I’d rather live today. Why? Toilet paper and antibiotics. That’s why.
And painkillers!
Bidets even!
