this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Meh, it's a practice in gratitude. We have it better than 99.99% of humans that ever lived. Is that an excuse to stop improving for future generations? No. It does make our shitty life seem a little less shitty tho. Things can always get worse, if it can't your dead and won't be phased anyways.
Do we really? I often see this talking point thrown around and when asked for elaboration, usually wealth is pointed at.
I poop in cleaner water than people used to drink. I still have teeth because a dentist filled my cavities. I'm typing this comment on a device that can show me nearly anything I want.
We've got it really, really good. It could also be better and more just.
There's a ton more that people always forget. How often do you worry about random brigands attacking your town and burning everything? No, I don't care if are actually still afraid of that (you scaredy cat). It doesn't happen now, but it used to happen all the time.
How many of your 10 children have died of preventable illness? It used to be like 30%. Even royal families had problems with disease. Look at this shit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great
How afraid are you of having enough food to eat to last the winter? That was an annual worry, and is the reason why harvest festivals exist. Unless you are from the third world, your family has not worried about this for 100 years.
Eh it's all subjective and honestly a bullshit statistic to get people to shut up about how bad they have it, à la "well kids are starving in Africa."
Don't get me wrong. Way less child death, way less time spent processing your own food for the winter, access to advanced medicine if you can afford it but otherwise it really doesn't mean anything. It's a clever statement to try to push back against people wanting it to be better and pretend they are enlightened to how bad it is.
Life expectancy is still basically the same. It's not like people didn't live well into their 90s even Before Common Era. Less physical labor is nice but also new health issues are arising anyways. And actually average lifespan is going down for those with less wealth.
It's essentially a litmus test for seeing if you can be an optimist in the face systemic issues that are currently occuring and an easy hand wave of "well im sure people were more upset in the past"
I think the only true metric we should be comparing people to is the present. The majority will always be in the past but the people alive today are more important than ghosts.
No? life expecancy has gone from ~28 years to ~75 years
Yes, but this has gone from being the exception to being relatively frequent
The maximum life span a human can achieve has not changed, but life expectancy absolutely has. (last 2 paragraphs)
I think it's still not obvious that it just means a higher percentage are making it to older ages. If you made it into your 30s your likelihood of living to old age was pretty good.
I think my argument does make light of how much the average person was dying really young though.
It may have been 'pretty good', but its still markedly worse than what it is now.
Studies show that people still living in tribes are happier than people living in cities. I assume when most people were hunter-gatherers, people were happier (even though they were much worse-off in many ways). Large hierarchies and wealth and power disparities cause a lot of unhappiness, IMO.