Life here is beautiful, the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west and overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.
Short of living in an active conflict zone, of which there are only a few in the world, thankfully, life is not "nasty, brutish, and short". Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?
a) to partake in that lifestyle
b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting outside of it
Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the United States. And yes, you can find abject generational poverty in the United States as well.
The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access).
If you have internet from a mobile phone, you are roughly in the top 50%.
Are you really looking outside your bubble of comfort?
What you might be doing I think... is making the assumption that technology, 'things' like gadgets or better cars and modern medical health is central to human life. Yes, life would objectively improve if you have those, but if I have to work 60 hours a week doing something I don't really care about, then is that really a good trade-off? I think the answer is not the same as yours for everyone.
Again, the central aspect of this topic is agency. Do people choose to live that way, where they live it? And how many would choose a different lifestyle if given the same opportunities as everybody else?
Yes, you can live a happy life as a nomad without any access to technology. That isn't the topic of this conversation.
I have by now traveled pretty much to all the continents and at this point smartphones and internet are ubiquitous. They are litterly now throwing away working second hand ones in developing nations.
Interesting: internet-access > no-internet-access
Even living in the poor part of the EU is still a lot worse then living in the good part.
>Life here is beautiful
snort
> the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west
the community is precisely why I dislike my country. I can't imagine worse torture then being force to live your life with close-minded ignorant people stuck in the past.
Go and be gay or atheist or just strange in your country then tell me how beautiful your life is.
>overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.
As long as you don't care if you starve or die of illness it's all great. So literally the basics of security.
>life is not "nasty, brutish, and short"
sure, it's just relatively nastier, more brutish and objectively shorter in years of life.
>Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?
I don't need empathy when I feel it on my own skin.
Pretty weak all in all.
Honestly, it’s so good it’s boring. Not much challenge to life if the only thing you need to do to continue existing is plant your ass in the same chair every day.
The Hobbes quote, however, does not apply. Hobbes was comparing life with/without a sufficiently strong Leviathan ('central government') to provide basic protection of property rights, or at least a semblance of such protection.
But the "long way" to which you refer, the physical comfort of modern life, is the fruit of the industrial revolution, roughly 150 years of history.
Hobbes was much earlier, he probably never saw the IR coming.
On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it.
We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who aren't born into huge advantages.
Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western society, but just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.