Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline.

I'm a bit shocked that some people think of medieval life as something like Elbonia in Dilbert comics. Heck, I even find the middle ages a pretty boring time in human history, but I know enough to understand that it wasn't as simple as "everyone lived in the mud and ate mud".

These are very important things and most of them take place on longer or much longer timescales than a few months. Early humans weren't monkeys, and after they had left the tropics, they couldn't survive without planning because getting food is difficult in winter.

At best, what the article is trying to say is "This is a GUI application, so we need to handle user input and paint request events etc in the main loop. Here is how to set up such a main loop in Win32:"

Win32 messages are higher-level than what you get out of select() and such, but that only serves to make it easier to customize things at the appropriate level of abstraction and with sufficient high-level information.

    while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) {
        TranslateMessage(&msg);
        DispatchMessage(&msg);
    }