>>41285647
True, it's not impossible you'd be born a patrician, but they only made up ~10% of society (which is more than I thought honestly) so it's still far more likely you'd be born a plebeian. Not all plebs were poor, though, and in rare cases it was possible for a rich and influential plebeian family to become patricians, like the Octavii family, but social mobility was still pretty limited.

I don't really judge anyone for imagining themselves as Roman emperor or consul or some other high political office and thinking about how they might do things differently though, because I think this is a pretty common thing for anyone interested in ancient civilisations, and it's weird to fantasise about being a labourer who gets 5 hours of sleep a night, gets permanently disabled from a back injury at the age of 32 and dies at 40 but a lot of people fantasise about being rich, powerful and well-connected, or some subset of those three.

It's still funny to think of modern society as "hard times", though, because as much as Western civilisation might have declined in the last few decades we still have a long way to fall until we reach "hard times" for the general public. With how relatively advanced modern technology is and how much we (most of us, anyway) depend on it all working correctly more than ever, if the system ever does totally collapse somehow we're going to fall a long way. The fall from Roman standards and quality of life to the Middle Ages was much smaller than a fall from the modern Western world to the same living standards. If you're still able to post a "hard times make strong men" image on 4chan and we haven't reached the point of pic related yet (replace Rome with London or DC and the Vandals with the hostile foreign power of your choice, and no, random foreigners/tourists don't count), then we probably haven't hit "hard times" yet.