Why do I romanticize 18th-century chores?

Was churning butter a beautiful way to spend the day or a chore to be automated away?

Sometimes I watch Outlander and wish I lived in the 1700s. The book and series follow a time-traveling woman from the 20th century into the 18th, where she finds a rich life beekeeping and homesteading. When the sheep have been shorn, she gathers with friends to dye the yarn and knit it into blankets and clothing. Washing clothes is an afternoon spent by the river, raking cloth over washboards with friends.

How beautiful her existence is, I think. Perhaps I even crave it.

In the 18th century, we had to do these things to survive. Now we don’t. I purchase honey and vegetables from the store. My clothes are made by a machine, and cleaned by a machine. There is nothing I have to do with my day apart from sit in front of a computer for part of it, and assemble a few meals throughout it. At least in the developed world, leisure is abundant compared to any other time in history. What do we use it for? Social media and television, hours each day on screens.

Some have eschewed the modern world, trying to get some of the old one back.

Martijn Doolaard, for one, purchased an abandoned hamlet in the Italian Alps, and now my husband and I watch him build it back on YouTube. He wears suspenders and a wool hat as he mortars stone walls and slates his roof. His girlfriend bakes bread and tends to the chickens, wearing traditional wool skirts preserved by the old ladies who still wander through the Alps to chapel each Sunday. They walk to the neighbor’s house for dinner—he’s a Catholic priest living in a hermitage. At night, she tends to the fire, and he paints by the firelight.

As we watch, I feel jealous of their life. But it’s the same misplaced kind I feel watching Outlander—a romanticism for chores I don’t actually want to do. Because I could very well spend my day baking bread. I could tend to chickens or bees in my backyard if I wanted to. I could paint with my evenings, and even build my own house if I wanted to. I do some of these things—I knit sweaters and bake pies, and renovate my own house—but I don’t have to do them to survive so I often don’t. Some weeks I can barely motivate myself to weed my lawn, and I’ve abandoned every gardening attempt to the bugs. Unless I have friends to cook for on a Saturday night, cooking feels like ceaseless toil.

Instead I watch Martijn do it, and imagine that I would want to live that way if I had to.

Sometimes when I’m baking a quiche, I’ll go so far as to fantasize that I would enjoy it more if I were wearing a wool dress and baking in a rustic cabin. If only I had to pull eggs from the henhouse for the pie and bake it over a wood stove, I think. If only it were a 10-mile walk to the mercantile for flour instead of a quick drive to Trader Joe’s followed by an hour at pilates to make up for my lack of movement. If only I had to wash my floured skirts by hand, I would spend Thursdays by the river with friends and a washboard instead of putting it all in a machine and watching YouTube.

Modern convenience feels as if it’s robbed me of a pastoral existence, and yet I also can’t convince myself to take up a pastoral existence when I have the chance. I both wish I spent my day on more manual activities, and then don’t do it because there’s an easier option.

I’m being romantic about things—the past wasn’t better.

In 2001, PBS invited three families to live on the Montana frontier exactly as it was in 1883. They were given a one-week historical bootcamp to learn how to build log cabins, milk their own cows, and slaughter their own chickens; then they were on their own for five months, documented as part of a limited series called Frontier House.

My family watched the series when I was in high school. But rewatching it as an adult, I wanted to know whether they enjoyed that life when they were forced to live it. Did churning butter become a beautiful way to spend the day, or was it a stressful fact of survival? Was a day spent scrubbing clothes by the river preferable to an evening in front of the television? Would the things I’ve romanticized about the past be worth the considerable comforts the families would have to forgo to live it?