The output of historic geniuses is just insane. The sheer amount of work and discovery and creation they did seems too much for one lifetime. I just don’t understand how they managed all they did.
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I’m not going to repeat the answer everyone gave, but want to add – just imagine the human output that will explode if we get to a true leisure society.
Ignore the guys who had a sponsor, that meant they got paid no matter what, and employed servants to do household chores. You should be looking at the people who did all the good stuff, whilst holding down a proper job and had a family too. Those should be the people you should be admiring. Ask them how they found the time, it’s probably late nights and full weekends, no TV , or parties, or anything else in their way just belief in themselves and determination.
According to what we know, most where loners. Most are suspected to be Aspergers and didn’t had great social life. These peoples chose a topic of interest and work on it all their life without slowing down and without interference from anything else. The topic could be birds, trains, planes, chess, music, physic, etc…
To add, many of the artists had patrons, basically rich people/nobles who paid them to produce art of various types
There’s two big effects here.
1. The scientists and philosophers were noblemen who had other people keeping them alive. Michael Faraday is particularly notable for being for being a notable scientist from that era who wasn’t an aristocrat. As for the artists, it was their full time job. The nobleman feeds you and houses you in exchange for you providing music and art for him whenever he wants. This is also why if you really dig into music from that era, it’s very formulaic. It had to be in order to keep up the kind of output expected.
2. The work was just way easier back then. I can’t remember the exact number, but an absolutely absurd percentage of the number of scientists+engineers who have ever lived are alive today (something like 80%). Take Newton for instance. Newtonian mechanics is simply what follows when you assume that motion is continuous. The math to describe that idea didn’t actually exist at the time, but the idea is not hard and the math is easy enough that you learn it in ~second year university (the parts of calculus you learn earlier aren’t sufficient).
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