Living in comfortable apartments with central heating, clean water, and high-speed internet, we start longing for those “quaint” cottages of the past — conveniently forgetting that they came without plumbing or electricity, but with cholera, famine, and the plague.

This article is not a defense of capitalism, nor a debate with those nostalgic for the past. It’s an attempt to restore the connection between history and our perception of it—to understand why distrust of the very systems that gave us safety and comfort has become almost fashionable. To make sense of it, we’ll need to look back—not with nostalgia, but with attention to facts. Let’s do that together.

The irony is that these “warm,” artisanal forms of labor people love to romanticize today once meant exhausting physical work, no social protections, and lifelong poverty. Humanism was a privilege, not a right. 

Now craftsmanship is back in vogue — handmade goods, “unique” items, artisanal production. But this trend reflects not sound economics, but cultural fatigue from uniformity and mass consumption. People seek “soul” in objects — but not at the price of returning to an era when making a pair of shoes took a month and cost a month’s salary.

Remember Gogol’s The Overcoat: the poor clerk who spent years saving for a new coat, sacrificing even basic necessities. That was the real price of handmade “authenticity.”

The miracle of mass production was humanity’s way out of hunger and poverty. Early industrial technologies made goods cheap and accessible to everyone. Factories not only provided work to hundreds of people — they powered economies and allowed workers to buy affordable goods, living free from the threat of starvation.

Even if you distrust history textbooks, you can see the truth by simply comparing living standards in developed nations and those still deprived of industrial infrastructure.

We rarely think about it when walking past supermarket aisles. Bananas shipped from another continent cost the same — or even less — than apples grown nearby. And it’s not luck — it’s technology. Genetically modified crops (GMO), often demonized, have increased yields ten- to fifteenfold in the past century. Yet people forget that, too. The stories of how science lifted humanity out of hunger have been replaced by myths of “evil corporations” and “mutant food.”

But the fight shouldn’t be against anti-globalists or anti-vaxxers — they are symptoms, not the disease. The real problem is the loss of historical awareness. Human life is too short to rely on personal memory for understanding civilization. Wisdom once passed through books, and now through digital archives and Wikipedia — but humans aren’t good at absorbing dry facts.

Modern education focuses on rote memorization of trivial details — dates, names, battles — missing the forest for the trees. As a result, we fail to feel the fears and hopes of those who came before us. So how can we restore that emotional link?

Continuing this thought — there are many ways to use technology to revive history. 

Even textbooks can become portals to the past. Interactive materials can animate a battle scene, visualize troop movements, or make a historical portrait deliver a monologue directly to the student.

Cities could display “parallel history” AR overlays, showing how a familiar street would look without industrialization: no supermarkets, just muddy markets and famine. A haunting glimpse of a world without mass production  —  that lone omission has rewritten reality.  A kind of reverse cyberpunk — a vision you won't soon forget.