I suspect most of us do not wish this, and I think the primary reason is because our lives are much better now than 40 years ago.
Healthcare and housing is more expensive, yes. But healthcare is also much better. (Things that were once death sentences no longer are.) Our houses are more expensive, but also larger even though our families are smaller.
The technology we have access to is amazing. Traveling the world is more affordable and not just something the richest person you know has done.
Not to mention human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes.
Overall I think the doom and gloom of some younger folks about how terrible it is today and how great things were for previous generations is just wildly misplaced. There are lots of reasons to be thankful we're living in the present and not the past.
> healthcare is also much better
ε more QALYs for 8x the cost. Boo.
> Our houses are more expensive, but also larger
Because they only built houses for rich people, thereby spiking prices into the stratosphere and forcing more people to go without homes for longer. If you're looking for a silver lining, this ain't it.
> human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes.
That's a much better silver lining.
Usually I find myself arguing with Team Optimism, because I think all the problems we have are solvable and many people disagree. The article doesn't read like a genuine case for optimism, it reads like a PR piece for someone who is part of the problem and wants to deflect attention.
Absolutely yes.
Rare divorces, booming economy, a society able to communicate instead of cancelling people, burning cars or locking everyone at home.
Technology improves our lives up to a point.
I agree with you a lot of things improved (thanks capitalism) but our culture is a complete mess and I'd rather live on another planet.
To minimise the problem I moved to a country that many would call backwards. At least they won't teach my kids that men can menstruate.
I'm sorry for my kids, hopefully things won't get too much worse in the next couple of decades and hopefully we'll find another country to move to, once idiocracy takes control of this one as well.
Nowhere did the post claim this. Intake of fresh fruits/vegetables is associated with a meaningful decrease in mortality rate, and are increasingly seen as the best way to promote a healthy gut/microbiome (vs. taking probiotics).
If you interpret this post as "n reasons that everything is fine", then you might be right - everything is definitely not fine.
But if you interpret this post as "in a world where a lot is going wrong, and that's usually all we hear about, here are n things going right", it's a more useful read.
To me, this falls into a category similar to the book Factfulness [0], which seeks to correct misconceptions about the state of the world by examining certain areas of progress over a broader historical context.
Personally, I think an occasional break from the doom and gloom to focus on "here are some things that have improved" is necessary. That doesn't have to mean that everything is fine.
- [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness
"This is fine!"
No, it's not OK for an occasional break, the world is going to burn. It makes no difference if I can eat more blueberries now if my kids won't have any water left in the future to grow them.
Knowing the reality of climate change, I am sorry, there is no way I can be glad we are eating more blueberries. It cannot enter my mind at all. If it can enter your mind you do not know the scope of what we are facing.
Why would anyone conclude this? There are things in this world that are fine, and things that are not. To conclude that acknowledging the things that are fine is equivalent to concluding that everything is fine just doesn't track.
> No, it's not OK for an occasional break
Are you arguing that the only acceptable way to live life is to remain focused on everything that is going wrong, at all times?
If we do not examine what's going right, how are we to identify (and prioritize) the areas that require attention? How does one learn from the things that have been successful so as to apply that success elsewhere?
But more glaringly, how does one achieve any level of satisfaction in life if all they do is ignore everything good? The mental health impact of such negative focus seems far more likely to immobilize someone and lead to a nihilistic/fatalistic outlook. If the future generation is fucked, and there's literally nothing we can do, why do anything? (this is not what I'm advocating for, btw).
I'm not attempting to downplay the seriousness of climate change or the magnitude of the problems the world is currently facing, but if the only way forward is to stay mired in negativity and to ignore the good things in life, truly what is the point of living?
If my car is about to go off of a cliff I am not going to be happy about all the blueberries I just bought at the supermarket.
You are not giving the appropriate weight to these things.
> But more glaringly, how does one achieve any level of satisfaction in life if all they do is ignore everything good?
There is plenty I find good, non of which was included in that article. It was fully materialistic but for the parents spending more time with their kids which I do not see as a positive. And his "carbon release vs carbon graph" is just pure useless crap.
The satisfaction I get in life is by trying to fix big problems. It is not nihilist, it is hopeful. A nihilist eats blueberries while the world is burning.
Put another way, it is possible to enjoy blueberries while working to solve big problems.
Going a step further, intentionally avoiding blueberries (assuming you enjoy blueberries and they are sustainable) seems like actively/unnecessarily squandering an opportunity to enjoy life.
Progress and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive. To suggest that they are is a good way to scare people away from the former, or conclude it’s not worthwhile.
Editing to add: In all of the focus on blueberries, the broader point was lost - that we have better access to fruits/vegetables than we've had in the past. This is a big deal, and has a major impact on health. This does not reduce the importance or severity of climate change, and does raise questions about how sustainable that easy access is.
We can conclude that the analysis is poor, or misses key factors, or is only useful when answering a narrow set of questions, or requires additional disclaimers / context. But concluding that the author is dishonest takes us in a direction that is no longer focused on how the analysis can improve, and instead seeks to question motives directly, instead of expanding our shared understanding of the subject.
I do think the glaring issue with the piece is that we (the royal we) have not agreed on the list of factors that should be measured when examining living standards, nor the weights of those factors. The post doesn't really attempt to justify its chosen measures either, and would carry more weight if based on earlier scholarly attempts to quantify quality of life.
That is essentially what I said above. There are plenty of ways to pick this apart, and I have plenty of questions/issues with the content. I'm just saying we don't have to use ad hominem attacks to do so.
> and how it focuses attention away from the problems
An article titled "24 charts that show we’re (mostly) living better than our parents" is probably going to skew towards the things that are going well - that's kind of the point.
That doesn't automatically imply everything is awesome, and you might take issue with such an examination and argue it does not give enough airtime to other systemic issues, and indeed this is where I'd focus. But that is a different kind of conversation than one that disagrees with the conclusions about each of those 24 things.
Speaking of which, what are those primary problems from your perspective?
"Youngest adults" meaning ages 18-25 who include the legal women that don't want to have babies immediately and whom everyone wants to fuck, and the young men who look their best in their "pretty boy" like Ashton Kutcher appearance, because they have the thick hair and best skin and are skinny, and sure enough the same is true for them there's lots of men and women out to fuck them. Or exploit them. So all of them, youngest adults.
They are being harmed. Colleges--meaning not the faculty or the adjuncts who are true to the students but the administrators in the bloated bureaucracies--just charge up the ass. They say the students don't pay for that but they absolutely do, they lump that in with Tuition. It's not Tuition, in my case the money spent on administration was mostly to persecute me (I got lynched).
There should be three categories: tuition (strictly professor salaries, fuck that adjunct status promote them to professors), Room and Board (or better yet call it Rent and let students pay for food on their own), and then Administration. Just like other non-profits.
In some colleges the professors are the administrators, there's no bureaucrats.
And the harsh part is for youngest adults, you need to go through the gauntlet--the time you're told is the best time in your life, when it's really the absolute worst--to participate in the economy with dignity. Otherwise you get a shit job.
The only thing older adults want out of youngest adults, really, is their youth. They have no assets except for their admission letter, and no way to enforce their contracts to pay for college.
Older adults want to exploit that youth. And they youngest adults don't want to be prostitutes, so they go to college, but that doesn't change things by enough.
I've never interacted with a ghost on HN before.
Is this supposed to be a joke? "Let them eat fruit?"
> 9. Comparing wage growth to the cost of necessities
It's here, far below the fold, that the real story begins. Spoiler: health care, housing, and education did not get cheaper. Which you already knew, because you pay out the ass for them, and that's not a feeling one forgets.
But we are eating more fruit, so I guess on the balance everything is fine.