Is this the worst period in human history to be alive?

Is this the worst period in human history to be alive?

90% people from the past would kill for a life we have today

>oh no I have ennui >:^(

imagine being a starving disease riddled peasant
imagine being gassed to death in a trench
imagine all the horrors of history you've read about, which humans inflicted (and still inflict) so regularly on each other

and now be happy that at least at this point in history fewer people than ever are being brutalized and murdered, even if there are still so many who are. It has been worse before, and it can get worse again if we don't work to preserve the gains of history.

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In the United States less than one person dies from malnutrition for every 100,000 people. Modern life in a western country is probably the highest quality of life anybody has had throughout all of history.

No, you're just a loser.

90% people from the past would kill for shits and giggles
it was there way of shitposting

>We have materialistic goods that are unlike anything kings ever had
>Yet kill ourselves or die lonely and empty after living more years than our forefathers
Your question essentially narrows down to : we have tons of neat shit to fill the proverbial "god shaped hole within the heart of men" yet still feel empty and nihilistic in an age where "God is dead". There is a reason why now everything is "heuheuh so ironic I wear x ironically I say x ironically" it is because we have been stuck in a philosophical slump of relativism for like 300 years progressively inching us closer to a mirror image of thelemic butt worship and hedonistic anti-intellectualism.

>OP is referring to dysthymia or whatever is the hip new self-diagnosed millennial woe
>the fact that people aren't dying of dysentery left and right undermines any negative implications of society at large whatsoever

All in all this thread already seems triggered by such a simple and banal question. Do people sincerely believe that people in the past lived the entire duration of their life under the microscope of impending doom? Don't we as well in some contexts?

>tfw youll never born during age of exploration

SHUT UP! THINGS THE ARE BEST THEYVE BEEN AND WE ARE ALL LIVING LIKE KANGZ AND SHIET DON'T QUESTION IT

COMPLETE ATOMIZATION OF SOCIETY? LOL WHO GIVES A FUCK NETFLIX HAS A NEW SHOW DEBUTING TONIGHT

>Do people sincerely believe that people in the past lived the entire duration of their life under the microscope of impending doom?
This. People act like Death was holding the people of the past at gunpoint 24/7. Give me a fucking break.

>this
People think material wealth = happy which is the direct consequence of the destruction of any complex identity construct such as religion, ancestry, or folk culture.

1346–1353

It's LITERALLY the opposite.

reals > feels

If you live in a developed nation chances are you are literally living a better life than most fucking kings lived. Even if you live in a developing nation odds are you have a pretty decent life compared to your ancestors, barring extreme examples. For the average person this the best time to be a human in history, and for the average person in the developed world you live in what your ancestors would probably have considered to be a fantastic paradise of wonder and prosperity.

...

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but at what cost? that's the question you have to ask yourself

>human development index
what

nvm just googled it
still seems pretty arbitrary

Yeah we're exploiting the planet too much and need to become more efficient at using natural resources, but that's reasonably doable.

Leave this board.

90% of people are stupid plebs.

>highest literacy there has ever been in the history of mankind
>least deaths of malnutrition there have ever been in the history of mankind
>more diseases curable than ever before in the history of mankind
>highest life expectancy in the history of mankind
>least armed conflicts there there have ever been in the history of mankind (excluding Cold War, because people literally felt like nuclear armageddon was quite possible)
>literally 70 years of peace in the EU, which has never happened before in that region
I think you're just being a little bitch.

>woo instead of dying in dignity at the age of 70 you may now die a drooling cancer ridden ridden retard at the age of 85

If you are a drooling retard at 85 then kill yourself or something, not like anybody can really stop you unless you pussy out.

There are many people holding up just fine up to 90ties by just still doing mental and physical exercise in reasonable doses.

Fucking this. My grandfather can't hold a fucking fork. He's completely unable to hold a conversation, he can't read, he can't follow television. All he can do is lie in his bed and mull over the one thing he can think of clearly: the fact that his wife died a few months ago.

Yippee, I'm so glad he lived an extra three years and we can give him weed pills for the pain.

>but at what cost? that's the question you have to ask yourself
No. The question one has to ask is: What's the ratio between benefits and costs.

The benefits CLEARLY outweight the costs, unless you're giving arbitrarily extreme weight to your special snowflake costs.

And once that all crashes under its own weight we most definitely WILL be living in the worst period of history.

the EU didn't exist strictly speaking for most of that period

Nah, we'll just go back to square one and start over. It might be for the best, like a clean reboot of humanity without the weight of ages holding us down.

The same could then be said about the beginning of the industrialization, when our exploitation of the Earth started rapidly increasing, which is why the current period can't be worst, since it shares that trait with back then, but back then you haven't had the many benefits brought forth by it yet.

>The benefits CLEARLY outweight the costs
Wrong, it only seems that way because the costs are being pushed back into the future. We're using up vital resources so recklessly that our descendants will not have enough to sustain their populations. When that happens, mankind will experience some of the most miserable decades of its existence..

That would make the period those people have to live in the worst then, which would also falsify OP's implicit claim.

>We're using up vital resources so recklessly
Nope

Reduction of infant mortality and increased education causes a lowering in birth rates which is important for sustainability.

Material wealth=less war and poverty=less death

You are currently acsessing one of the largest stores of human knowldge, much of it available for free through legal, or uneforced illegal means, you live in an age where food can be stored fro months, where man has taken steps into the stars and returned, a time where the great arts are preserved and kept with care, in a world that promises more spelendour, better living conditions than any before you, skyscrapers pierce the skies of all the continents bar antartica, which is dotted with research stations with modern equipment we use to track the ever changing aspects of out planet, we own are envrionment and control it so incredibly we are the arbiters of the life of species, we keep herbivoric bears whit no sex drive propogating, we have tamed beasts that our ancient forebearers would've been mauled by.
You live in the best part of human history, you are the envy of the dead who cannot know such county, you're alive.

>Implying that avoiding death is the only virtue of life.
Dieing/commiting your being for some profound truth or cause greater than yourself is one of the greatest ways to achieve meaning in life.

I can sit on a comfortable chair, pick up a phone and order a pizza to be delivered to me in 20 minutes.
This is all happening while I am masturbating to high definition pornography in an air-conditioned building.
And when I am finished masturbating, I can shitpost on an internet forum dedicated to the discussion of chinese cartoons, which I can download almost instantaneously and begin viewing at my leisure.

Right before I go to sleep, I can make a post complaining about my quality of life in the 21st century.

>I can eat pizza alone and masturbate on a Sunday evening!
>Look how fulfilling my life is!

Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love.

this

And what about the death of a loved one? I'd agree with you about my own life, but were the mothers and wives of allied soldiers less devastated because they died for a worthy cause?

>implying working long hours of backbreaking work every day to avoid going cold and hungry is more "fulfilling" than the life of the most lonely neckbeard on Veeky Forums
The whole "religion" meme was invented to keep people going in a world that was completely shit, because unfounded hope is the true refuge of the desperate. Pessimism and nihilism are signs of health, only people who have unthinkable amounts of leisure can afford to hate life. This has happened before, skepticism and pessimism were at their widest influence at the height of the Roman and Islamic Empires.

Jurassic period.

This.

>People from the past couldn't turn out into autistic losers
>People from the past didn't kill themselves because their life just sucked

No matter how you look at it, the present is a improvement.

i wanna live in the 1910s

How fulfilling do you think your life would have been 500 years ago?

No. That was France a little before the French Revolution.

Hopefully.

No you don't.

No way to tell, but judging how much of a loser he is right now, I'd say he'd kill himself in his teens.

Just think, the universe has been around for billions of years, and we were born in time to see this cutie.

why wouldnt i wanna live in the 1910s

>When that happens, mankind will experience some of the most miserable decades of its existence..
Hey, that will give us strong men, right? That's what I always hear from you doomsday seers. When you think about it, we're doing a favor to the future by creating the hardest, toughest generation ever, so the far future is really going to kick ass. They should honestly be thanking us.

I think he's referring to the geographical area, not the actual organisation. Poor word choice, but he's largely correct.

have you ever seen someone you love literally shit themselves to death? because if you were born before 1880 everyone did.


so no, this is not the worse time to be alive.

Do you like vaccines? The internet? Television? Sound motion pictures? Star Wars? Lord of the Rings? Batman? Marvel? Any food that didn't originate in Europe? Being able to get a job that won't leave you physically destroyed by your 50s?

If you're European you will have to deal with rationing, starvation, and conscription (I assume you're a young man) on the home front. If your land gets invaded you'll have to leave as a refugee, and you'll probably loose your home and most of your possessions. No matter where you live you will have to deal with the Spanish flu from 1918-1920.

Reddit: the post

well if I lived then I wouldn't even know any of those things existed so I would be fine

Don't be a pretentious cunt and try answering the question seriously.

> these are the people you discuss history with

that's an argument for being dead.

No, there is more reason than ever to believe humans accessed technology to live eternal life, thousands of years earlier than now. We just might access these technologies while we are living.

>all the people talking about standard of living

wealth is overrated. what gives people happiness is their status relative to those around them.

It is in a way.

In the West, nobody feels connected to society anymore. Families are broken, our trust in our neighbors is broken, our cultural identity is broken. On top of that, all the major governments of the world are deeply corrupt and becoming increasingly unstable because corporate profits are pushing for it, leaving us all with an ominous feeling of catastrophe on the horizon. This is unique to this time.and our wonderful "multicultural" society where nobody gives a fuck about anybody else and our only common cultural space is empty nihilistic hedonism.

What's the point of living when there is nothing to live for? At least when people were dying in their 30s, they had a clear purpose in the world. Not so much anymore: Everyone is checking out.

A central truth that both sides of this argument are missing:
Never has the proportion of human suffering that is self-inflicted been so large.

>my life is shit therefore everybody else is too
Nihilism is perfectly healthy

what do you mean by that

>>my life is shit therefore everybody else is too
I'm speaking about society at large and what the psychometrics are reporting. Try again.

>Nihilism is perfectly healthy
Nope.

Maybe they didnt think their lives sucked? Maybe a loving wife, stable community and meaningful life made them happier than hentai and pizza makes us?

>In the West, nobody feels connected to society anymore.

I do....

Who gives a fuck about "society at large"? Most of these people would be starving peasants dying of plague and only having the dubious virtues of religion keeping them from killing themselves.

In modern society, we are allowed to be pessimistic. If you don't want to be pessimistic, you can just invent your own meaning and goals and follow those.

Humans evolved in close-knit tribes with a strong, common cultural identity. It's the height of arrogance to suggest that we don't need this connection anymore and that everyone can simply be "nihilistic" because some weirdo hermit writers said that's the best way to live. It doesn't work on a large scale.

In the grave one will be totally ignorant of the pleasures of life. If one is ignorant of some great source of joy, that does indeed remove the positive suffering that comes from unfulfilled desire, but not the negative suffering of having that thing absent from one's life. If you are stuck eating terrible food your whole life your suffering would indeed be magnified by the knowledge that other people are eating rich delicious food, but it does not follow that eating terrible food is a desirable state of affairs.

I'm speaking in generalities, not to suggest there aren't indivisible exceptions. Society is continuing to fragment and will inevitably worsen if something doesn't change.

>Who gives a fuck about "society at large"?
Ah, the fruits of nihilism.

>If you don't want to be pessimistic, you can just invent your own meaning and goals and follow those.
People did not evolve to "invent their own meaning." People don't necessarily operate the way that some hermit "intellectual" thinks they should.

Meant to quote you too.

>Technological advancement means society has no problems whatsoever

1910 to 1945. just the poverty and the war.

>I'm speaking in generalities, not to suggest there aren't indivisible exceptions. Society is continuing to fragment and will inevitably worsen if something doesn't change.

maybe where you live...civil society's pretty strong round here.

and Jazz...and good baseball.

thanks Mao

>maybe where you live...

The West, yes.

This is so fucking retarded and does not happen

The fact that these "cycles" can last 50 years or 1000 years shows that it's not useful as a rule

I live in the western part of the West, still pretty nice.

Living in a bubble must be nice I'm sure.

Everyone who agrees with OP should kys ASAP since you hate living now so much you stupid fucking edgy cockheads.

ITT: I'm an autistic lonely NEET loser and it's all society's fault because fuck taking responsibility for my fails in life so I wank to an idealistic image of the past where I'd get an even worse deal because my communication and social skills would be the same while society itself would crush me for being a weird loner.

Find 2 posts ITT which imply any of that at all, you projecting faggot.

>reject coming in at the tail-end of the thread acting all high and mighty instead of contributing shit

Lmao you mad? Go live in the woods faggot.

>Government corruption
>Societal anxiety
>Lack of trust in general
All of these things have been experienced at large countless times before, and will be experienced countless times more. This proves absolutely nothing. Anyone can write a bunch of vaguely pessimistic nonsense about how "everything sucks nowadays," but that doesn't make it true.

Shut the fuck up. You clearly have no clue how fortunate you are to be born in this generation. You're typing woes on a computer, in a clean and stable house, probably with heating and air conditioning, in a country that isn't war-torn or ruled by an oppressive despot. You don't have to worry about smallpox or pic related. You can look at any important statistic imaginable - infant mortality, life expectancy, world poverty, access to food and water, etc. - and you will immediately see that we as a species are far better off than ever before. And yes, Netflix is great.

OP didn't even do anything but pose a question, you're the one that seems perturbed by people discussing the implications of modern life. Now back to tumblr, faggot.

>contributing shit
accurate description of your precious ">that feel" hugbox thread

>people know what is best for them
>'people eat enough'
>eating is the sole reason to live
Read L'Enracinement

>">that feel" hugbox thread
Again, why are you saying things that aren't true?

A beautiful strawman you have there.

Reality doesn't exist.

When one dislikes living

Depends where you are and who you are. A commoner in Uzbekistan is pretty fucking miserable.