Grandpa & Grandma Cupp
June 11, 2025–Maybe the solution to all our so-called modern problems is this:
Live like your great grandparents lived. Not literally, but metaphorically.
Recently our power went off and it got me to thinking again about how our ancestors coped. Let’s just go back 150 years or so. Here is what a typically day might look like.
-You don’t need clocks.
Let alone chronometers, Apple watches, or smart phone apps. Do we really need to know what time it is? Sun goes down, you stop and go to bed. Sun comes up, you get up and start doing chores. See you at breakfast.
-You eat what you harvest.
Fresh milk from your cow. Vegetables from your garden. Meat from your herd or your hunting. No chemicals, genetic tinkering, or hormones.
I recently endured a talk show child development expert drone on about how to get your child to eat healthy and sleep better. Can you imagine your grandmother urging her kids to eat their peas? I can’t. Because I grew up hating peas. It was, here’s supper, eat it or don’t, see you at breakfast. You quickly learned to not complain about the mushiness of the peas, but to grab it and growl.
-Bedtime?
It’s time for bed. I’m not sleepy. Fine, go to bed anyway. See you at breakfast.
Folks just didn’t have time to coddle every child’s whim and weakness. They were too busy shelling corn, castrating pigs, and pouring used motor oil to keep the weeds down in the fenceline on the back 40. The result? You got over it. It wasn’t always pleasant or fun or fuzzy. But it worked and we moved on.
-You don’t use refrigerators or washers or word processors.
What was the purpose of all those labor-saving devices, anyway? To free us up from the daily drudgery in order to give us more time to be creative and productive? Has that happened? No. Can you say the past, oh, 40 years, have produced any groundbreaking movies, art, music, or writing superior to earlier periods in human history?
Imagine, Shakespeare churned out libraries full of plays, sonnets, and odes using a quill pen and parchment, illuminated by a tallow candle. With no prescription reading glasses. If Bill had had social media, he might have gathered thousands of followers, but he would not have completed Henry the VI, Parts 1, 2, or 3.
Mozart and Bach composed entire catalogs of genius level masterworks. Seward, Morse, Einstein, Edison, and Tesla invented time-warping inventions and theories without benefit of wi-fi, AI, or gluten-free bread.
I’m not a Pollyanna.
I’m not pining for some non-existent good old days.
We’re never going backwards. You’ll never pry my laptop from my old, dried hands.
But I cannot imagine some of our fellow travelers being plopped down on a farm in 1870 and anyone caring about their opinion on the Franco-Prussian war. It would be, “Fix that fence, eat yer peas, then git to bed.”
See you at breakfast.