I sometimes wonder how it would have been to live two hundred years ago. People lived their lives in a much slower pace, quite isolated from the rest of the world. Today, there are so many things to take in  and deal with in our daily life. Televison, telephones, computers, newspapers, traffic etc... The brain can never rest from all the impressions to take in all the time.

If you lived in the 19th century, you could possibly go all the day without meeting anyone outside your family. If you lived and worked on a farm, you would be out in the nature all day (working hard of course). You would be in your own world, without having to deal with anything outside it, as you did not know anything about it. Now, the mind is occupied most of the time with issues of all kinds.

I sometimes envie people living in that time! I am sure life was not that easy two hundred years ago, and a woman my age would probably be considered a very old person if she even lived that long. But did the word "stress" occur? Did people "walk into the wall" (Swedish expression?), as is so common today?

I would not really want to be back in the 19th century, but I wish we could all live our lives in a slower pace like they did then, being able to enjoy life in another way where money and material interests did not play the leading part. Maybe go back a few steps from this evolution road and learn to deal with real life again, and let the brain have some rest now and then!  :)

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By the way, why do you say "19th century" when talking about something that happened in 1850, for example? It is very confusing as we would say "18th century" here!  That is the only example I can think of, where "18" gets translated to "19" in a dictionary!  :))