Was Life Simpler in the 19th Century?

I am always saying the 19th century is my favorite century. I'm always saying I wish I lived in the 19th century. But I now realize I have formed a fantasy of what it was like to live in the 19th century. It might be partly accurate, but the truth is I only based it on old movies like "Little Women" or "The Christmas Carol," where they always show people sitting around a piano or playing charades instead of watching TV or playing video games, people riding horses or driving a horse and buggy, or women being teachers or wives and mothers, but not both. I am going to play a little game with myself right now. I actually skipped a day of watching TV the day before yesterday, I think it was. All I watch are my alternate news talk programs day and night and sometimes sneak over to the true crime channel. So, that was fine, and last night I had to watch a little true crime. But what would it be like not to ever watch TV or entertain myself on social media for hours on end while feeling guilty about not reading or painting or practicing music? I am going to pick the decade of the 1860s to focus on, and I'll just remain in Kansas because that's where I would have probably been because many of my ancestors moved out to the plains during the 1860s. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought a lot of settlers to Kansas which entered the union as a free state in 1861. My hometown, Topeka, was founded in 1854. The Homestead Act of 1862 also brought a lot of people to Kansas. People could purchase up to 160 acres of land to live on and improve for five years. I'm thinking it is likely I would have been a teacher, only because I have been in education for so long and also because I think I used to play teacher as a child. But I might have worked in a cotton mill, or I might have been born and raised on a farm. One set of my cousins grew up on a farm in Kansas. The set from Denver, their dad drove a bus, and the other set, their dad worked for Boeing, then moved to Northern California. There was no telephone until the 1870s, but they had the Pony Express from April 1860 to October 1861. Before the Pony Express there was a Post Office Department that contracted with stagecoach operators to deliver mail, and in 1863 with the Transcontinental Railroad, mail traveled by rail! I probably would have been born in a farmhouse, and might have gone to a one-room schoolhouse when I was old enough to go to school. I would have gone to church every Sunday with my family in a little wagon pulled by one horse. Our family would have had a well to go and pump water, and we would have had an outhouse to use during the day and chamber pots in our rooms for the night. We would have to use candles to read by and a fireplace for light indoors after the sun set. That may have been a nice time to live if it weren't for the trouble between the abolitionists and the free-staters. Various Native American tribes lived in the area around that time, especially the Kanza or Kaw (People of the South Wind) and the Potawatomi who still have a reservation and a casino in nearby Jackson County a little to the North. I think what I'm looking for is simplicity, but the more I think about it, the more I think perhaps living in the 19th century would not have been the place to find that. You would have to go pump the water, probably had an assortment of farm chores, milk a cow, gather eggs, start up the gas stove, bake your own bread, make jam or jelly, apple butter, etc. Oh, yes, and you probably made your own butter and cottage cheese. I even remember the day when my grandmother made elderberry jelly regularly and her version of cottage cheese. And she was always canning fruit and vegetables and making pies and cakes. She was actually born in 1888, hardly out of the 19th century herself, married in 1910. Our life is probably a whole lot simpler now than it would have been in the 1860s, and I think I'm going to have to do a whole lot more research if I'm going to understand about rural life on the prairie in the 1860s. I'll probably at least have to read that first book I got in the "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. "Little House in the Big Woods," is that it? Yes, got to get to reading. What we have now are all the modern conveniences we take for granted. Lights go on with a switch, the same for the heat and air. There's a grocery store in every neighborhood to run and get whatever you need, refrigerators and freezers to keep everything fresh. Just in my lifetime, they've made freezers to defrost themselves. All these inventions that we take for granted were not even imagined, probably, in the 1860s. I'm going to have to try to do some reading. I talk about reading a lot, and I want to do a lot off reading, but the truth is, I have about a 10 minute attention span. I read books like other people change TV channels. I'm reading three books at a time right now, going back and forth, and haven't settled down with one yet. I think "Blue Shoe" by Anne Lamott is about as engaging as a book can get for me, and I'm going to try to get back to that. I did complete 27 pages yesterday. Going to take my leave of you now. Adieu.