Re:Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)
by ForHackernews on Sunday November 03, 2019 @08:11AM
(#21433654)
> How did people in the great depression deal with those feelings? How did people in WWII deal with those feelings?
In many cases, they died.
There's a real survivorship bias among old people telling young folks to relax and everything will work out somehow because it did in the past.
Obviously, it did for the people telling us this, or else they wouldn't even be here to pat us on the head. The first time things go really really badly for the whole human species might also the be the last time.
> don't worry about that incoming asteroid; back in the 1970s they used to tell us about the overpopulation crisis
> surprised_pikachu.jpg
Re:Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)
by christophilus on Sunday November 03, 2019 @12:21PM
(#21435168)
That’s a good point. Survivorship bias is hard to overcome. I’d say the best bet any of us has is to work, live below our means, try to improve the world around us, and be as resilient and resourceful as we can be. Worrying is not a useful pastime.
In almost every age of history that we can see, if you had put yourself in that time period, you would have been able to come up with plenty of plausible reasons to ask your question. But what happened? Sometimes, things got worse. Sometimes much worse! But often, things turned out far differently than you would have supposed.
I've observed two things in my relatively brief life: people in every age tend to think their problems are unique, and people in every age tend to be really bad at predicting the future.