11–20 of 100 posts
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era
I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.
The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.
(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).
The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment.
However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time.
When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism.
But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.
The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.
So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted.
Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too.
We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged.
The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era
I think this: "این نیز بگذرد" Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass". - https://archive.org…