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Tradelusion: you don’t aspire to be traditional, you aspire to be rich
Who is going to pay for this five bedroom farm and six kids?
Have you heard about those folks who think they had past lives? Interestingly, they never identify as the spirit of Jock McSludge, manure shoveller and freelance privy emptier in the 1800s. They never wax lyrical on their experiences sleeping in a damp tenement in Glasgow with fourteen other unremarkable dirty labourers. Oh no, they were a brave warrior. A sensual nobleman. A dashing airman. A pious knight. No one, it seems, want to imagine themselves for what they statistically are: illiterate peasants doing backbreaking, boring jobs and living in crowded, fetid conditions. Sorry, guys: most you wouldn’t be buying your wife French silks after returning from sea to your estate, you’d be travelling from farm to farm looking for seasonal labour and sleeping in barns. My own family were grubby, shady East End newsagents in the 1890s. No shame in it.
And the same is true about calls to return to a ‘trad’ lifestyle. I laughed out loud to see someone post an AI generated image of a handsome 30-something year old man outside a country mansion with with caption “why would you choose to work when you could choose tradition?” Unless you’re inheriting a 400 acre farm I don’t know about, or earning $500,000 a…
