[cfontes]

Consider the big picture.

Life is suffering with sparse sprinkles of happiness here and there. If you feel bad take a page from Budism, it's the best religion for your mind, and I am an avid agnostic. It's the "No bullshit" religion, basically it's your problem, fix it or learn to live with it.

It teaches you to embrace suffering as part of living, everything is for you to endure, consider how to solve (or not) and grow. By solve I mean reflect on the outcomes and choose to do something, just accept it or just ignore it. The best thing you can do is learn to be your own support, by analysing the issues that throuble you and choose a path.

Besides that We live in the best era human kind has ever had by a long mile.

  * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
  
  * Big world changing wars have not happened in almost 100 years.
  
  * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.

  * No cold war, no dooms day clock

  * Democracy, information is basically free.

  * Freedom to do whatever you want ( and face the consequences too)

  * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)

Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID.

Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better.

[ludocode]

To play devil's advocate here: things are of course better today than they have been for most of human history. But for those of us in prosperous Western countries, they aren't necessarily better than they were, say, 50 years ago. In fact I would argue that we're in much worse shape. Part of the problem is that things have gotten worse on a rather short timescale. Millenials know very well the feeling of being judged by the older generations for not owning a house and two cars, not having a wife and children, not having a high-paying job to go with our university degrees.

Some of your points are true, but I would argue about these in particular:

> * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.

> * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.

> * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)

Many more Americans are food insecure than they were 50 years ago. The USDA estimates that 11 million children are food insecure in the US. Poverty in the US has in fact been increasing for decades, but government statistics don't reflect it because they measure poverty based on a 1950s spending model.

The West has endured decades of trickle down economics when the reality is that wealth trickles up. Of course total wealth is increasing, but the lower and middle classes have captured none of it. The vast majority of humans on Earth cannot afford to travel or even take vacations, and those in prosperous Western countries have had continually decreasing disposable income for decades.

> * No cold war, no dooms day clock

> * Democracy, information is basically free.

You have this so backwards that it's baffling. The doomsday clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been since its inception in 1947. It currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight. World leaders have become increasingly reckless, unstable and authoritarian. The last US president said, "We have all these nukes, why aren't we using them?"

Whether we lack a cold war is debatable. There has not been a significant drop in proxy wars or in militarization of world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US still spends an ever increasing share of its budget on military, and it actually uses it to kill. The US has been in a continuous state of war for the longest period in its entire history. There are people voting today that were not yet born when the war with Afghanistan started.

> Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID. Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better

This is not as true as you think, and I don't believe it will be true for long. For most of human history there were very few humans. There were probably about 100 billion humans that have ever lived, and about 8 billion are alive today. So if you were to pick a random human from history, there's a non-negligible chance that your pick would be alive today.

I've argued above that we in the West are experiencing decreasing quality of life. I worry it will start to fall much more rapidly over the coming decades due to climate change, wealth inequality and potential nuclear war. Considering the big picture is probably not a good idea; we may be better off living in ignorant bliss.

[cfontes]

I would say your view is very much biased towards your own country. I not showboating or anything but have lived in 4 countries and travelled to 30 or more most during the 90’s and more recently, the change is palpable.

I also live in a 3rd world country and it’s a sharp upwards change on the last 50 years.

Population has increased 5x but there is less people starving to death, getting killed by curable diseases and so on.

The only thing that has increased is crime because of drug gangs related issues here.

Most, middle eastern, eastern European, Asian, Central and South american countries enjoy a far more democratic governments than 50 years ago. Number of crazy dictators has decreased greatly in those 50 years.

Maybe the american situation is getting worst but I would argue that the vast majority of the planet is now being able to enjoy a bit of that “american life” that was only the privilege of a few.

[minikites]

>Democracy is booming

It absolutely is not, there are many threats to democracy right here in the USA. Many Republican states are passing massive voter suppression bills.

[cfontes]

I am not an american.

I mean in the world, yours might be worst but check the other countries, in the last 50 years a lot of military governments and dictatorships ended.

[jcims]

Two comments stood out to me in browsing as needlessly rude and angsty, and it turns out they were both yours. Are you commenting for effect or just to vent?

[wwtrv]

Well it’s still better than it has ever been in the history of humanity:

- While famines are still a thing, the number of deaths due to hunger has fallen considerably since the start of the 20th century.

- The real median household income in the US has been consistently increasing in the past several decades. While growing inequality is a huge problem most people in the world still have a much higher QOL than their predecessors.

- While there was a spike in homicides in 2020, the homicide rate in the US is lower than it has ever been since the early 60’s (obviously it’s still huge compared to all other developed countries).

- Climate change obviously is going to have a huge effect, however claiming that it’s going is destroy all life on earth is delusional.. In any case most natural ecosystems have already been destroyed or permanently altered by humans, in the past few thousands of years anyway, so there isn’t that much left for climate change to “kill” besides humans (whom I’m sure will manage to adapt to a couple percent rise in avg. temperature, even though it’s likely it will cost several millions of lives).

- There is zero incentive for either US or China to start a nuclear war over Taiwan (or anything else for that matter) so I’d say the threat of a nuclear war is pretty low.

- Life expentancy has been increasing prior to 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it won’t rebound to the previous level soon and continue growing in the future. Healthcare related costs are likely to continue increasing due to ageing societies and higher R&D costs (as technologies become more complex). I don’t see this as huge problem, though, as long as it’s outweotghted by increasing productivity in other sectors. Ensuring universal access to high quality healthcare is a political problem that needs to be solved but even a market based system will likely result in better outcomes for the majority of the population.

[samatman]

Your first sentence contains the kind of abusive language which has no place on this platform. Don't do that here.

[_0w8t]

The famine in Yemen and Sudan is a result of logistic breakdown when the war etc. makes it very expensive to transport food.

US produces enough food to feed like 2-3 billions people. It is just the vast majority of it goes to feed animals to get cheap meat. So even with agricultural output drop like 50% the will be no famine in US. The meat will be much more expensive, but no calories shortage.

[AJ007]

You should read more history books.

We could also resolve every problem you listed and then get nailed by a meteor and have a total extinction of all life of earth. 100% possible.