The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that
In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.
There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.
Basically nothing. Gimme back the 90s when the world wasn’t collapsing on itself.
Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It’s all about perspective.
You get to exist and understand that you do. That’s pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.
That’s an interesting comment. History and science have proven that we have evolved in a way that everything becomes easier. Arguably the end goal is that everything is easy (can be debated in many ways, even philosophcally), but there’s no denial that humanity has done everything in its power to make things easier. That’s the whole point of the creation and use of tools
Pizza
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.
The vast amount of good quality video games out there to play, the amount of good quality animated shows ranging from cartoons to anime to even Chinese Donghua (not you I’m Joybo) like the Legend of Hei movie or All Saints Street, the amount of amazing music being made today by hard working individuals (if you are into what I call the vocalsynth genre (vocaloid, utau, deepvocal, enunu, diffsinger, etcetera)), the ever growing amount of good yiff on E621, and more.
The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I’m in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.
I know it isn’t perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food … but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.
I’m Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren’t starving or anything.
However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children … in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn’t find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)
In my grandparents time … starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.
It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years … food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.
In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems … it is all hinging on a very delicate balance … because as Will Durant put it …
“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”
Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.
I’m sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I’m currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn’t move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.
The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.
Yeah, all great, now ask people how was life in the 80s and 90s and ask them if they prefer now or them.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
Kinda terrible examples tho…
Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
Pretty sure Japan wouldn’t agree with that last point…
No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn’t yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn’t use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.
the south lost the American civil war,
They’ve been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.
the common cold
the WHAT?
THE COMMON COLD
(well… just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)
The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.
Too big. An alteration of the timeline where that’s not the case would basically be one that didn’t involve humanity at all. Not sure you fully understood the question, it’s not asking what’s great about living in this point in time, but rather, of the different paths humanity could have taken, what makes this one good.
Did you ever stop and consider things could be different in other time zone completely unrelated to humanity. Consider our non is smaller or farther and we never get solar eclipses. Small detail, humanity still here (with smaller waves).
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
ive said to my kids "you have the sum total of all human knowledge available at your fingertips 24/7 and youre bored? "
Wait so now I’m in trouble for not being on my phone? Make up your mind! /s
There’s a big difference between doom scrolling and education.
Give them welbutrin and there mind will be on overload. Worked wonders for me. no sarcasm.
Do you feel this “overload” all the time or in bursts?
It was all the time because couldn’t get my mind to connect to all the things I was thinking about. Now I can and it just comes out. For example I never wake up in the morning hungover or anything my eyes just go bing and I am wide awake. I then rune 3 miles then read about an hour of wiki for whatever my mind comes up with. Then I got to my job for 48 hours.
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing they’re smart — all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole it’s made life better in a lot of different ways.
I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower?
Ha! Joke’s on you. I don’t have a shower curtain!
Well then you’re not protected from the bathroom skunks!
I like you. Never change.
Hi! How’s it goin?
Hi!
I’m OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That’s kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
