Further Thoughts on Hearkening

July 4, 2025

The way you are living right now is very different from the way people lived in the past, and also very different from the way people live in different countries. This is true no matter who you are and where you live.

You often hear talk of “traditional living,” and about how we have shifted away from the ways of our ancestors. This is a subspecies of what I call Hearkening, which I have written about briefly in the past. The beautiful and infuriating thing about “traditional living” is that the time period you deem “traditional” is entirely arbitrary: it could be 1950s USA; it could be 19th-century England; it could be medieval Europe; it could be Babylonian times; or, if you have absolutely no imagination at all, it could be the 1990s, also known as the decade in which this author, a thirty year-old man, was born.

This is a thought so obvious that it would be best if no one felt obligated to put it into words, but unfortunately I feel such an obligation: People in the past were not living a traditional lifestyle. They were, instead, living whatever lifestyle made sense to them at the time. Often, this was predicated on material conditions and societal norms, each of which constantly push each other back and forth forever.

But even if we restrict our definition to a particular time period, we run into further issues of specification. Do we mean the lifestyle of the nobility, or the peasants? Do we mean the lifestyle of a travelling merchant, or a farmer attached to the land? Do you mean the lifestyle of the drunkard who wanders around the streets, or the upstanding young daughter of the town’s largest landowner? Is it more traditional to be nomadic or sedentary? Is it more traditional to share with one’s neighbours, or to take all one can get?

I live in Canada, but I’m the son of English parents. Traditional living in Canada is one thing, and traditional living in England is another thing. One can’t realistically live a traditional English lifestyle in the Canadian Prairies (putting aside the question of whether anyone can live a traditional lifestyle anywhere.) I also can’t live a traditional indigenous lifestyle, because I don’t know how, for one, and because different nations lived in this area at different times, with a wide variety of traditions. The area itself has also changed, in a geological sense, because the Earth is a living entity. And aside from it being a living entity, we built roads on top of it.

So how, I would like to know, is one supposed to live a traditional lifestyle? (I know there are approximately nineteen million Instagram accounts that would like to show me how.) And furthermore, why, if I may ask, is living a traditional lifestyle a good thing? Am I supposed to believe that people in the past had better lives? How am I supposed to believe this, when it goes against everything they ever wrote down? The only times they extolled the virtues of traditional lifestyles were when they were hearkening back to the traditional lifestyles of preceding generations, lamenting what they had lost. But all those people wrote were lamentations about what they’d lost from the generations before them! So really, it’s hearkening all the way down!

Traditions are evolving, growing, and changing things. When we talk about a “literary tradition,” we talk about a developing conversation between authors and their forebearers, as they transfigure the forms they grew up on into something new. A traditional lifestyle is exactly whatever lifestyle we live right at this moment, because no matter how much we try or don’t try, we are attached to the past. Our lifestyle may appear vastly different — and it may even be vastly different! — but we can’t escape the fact that it grew out of what came before. As it grows, it evolves, and gets better in some ways and worse in other ways.

I am a traditional man! Even though I spend a lot of time on my computer, or on my phone, and even though I play video games, a pastime that didn’t really exist when my dad was my age. Is it childish for a thirty year old to play games? I don’t know — is poker childish? Is soccer childish? Is whist childish? You know how much time full-grown adults used to spend playing whist, of all things? My parents have their friends over and play bridge, whereas I might get my friends in a voice chat and play Halo. Let’s be real for a second: Halo is a better game than bridge. Also, I know people don’t even play Halo anymore, but I’m a bit out of touch. You get the idea.

Look — let’s just stop using standards of judgment that don’t apply to what we are judging. It’s neither the 1950s nor the 1990s nor any other time period. Also, you live wherever you live. I know Americans love to write articles about how they moved to Europe after they retired and the lifestyle there is just so much more traditional and great and all that, but those people are retired, and therefore inherently not to be trusted. Of course Europe seems great — you don’t have a job! Everything is great when you don’t have a job! That is, if you also happen to have money!

We’ve got to work with what we have. If you have the wherewithal to live like it’s the 1950s, and that makes you the happiest person in the whole wide world, then all I can say is “Wahoo!” If you live like it’s 2036 and your life is a never-ending barrel of laughs, then that’s great too. I don’t revel in all aspects of our modern world, but I do download a million books onto my e-reader every year, and I do type on a keyboard and post my thoughts on the internet, and truly, what more can you ask for?