Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.
It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.
We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common
There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.
So for that alone we are extremely lucky.
Cheese
Oranges all year round. A heated house, lit after dark. Spices.
Crime accross the board continues to drop year over year in the US. There is still a ways to go but pharmaceutical costs are down for things like insulin thanks to the generic availability. On top of the policy changes, medical advances are moving at blazing speeds. Clinical trials for stem cell treatments are popping up everywhere. Basically a cure for everything except cancer nowadays. College athletes are no longer legal slaves and are able to be compensated for the work and risk they put themselves up to week in and week out. It’s an employees market for finding jobs. There are more companies looking to hire in all industries than there is available tradesman to fill the openings.
In this timeline, princess Leias bun stayed intact. Wholesome.
Everybody here things it so funny to talk about how we’ll all die ans it’s all horrible but really?
Lifw is pretty good. Yeah, we’re off worse off today than, say, 30 years ago, but compared to the 4 billion or so years before that? We’re doing awesome.
We have direct communicationto anyone in the world in the palm of our hands. Even the poor got better and nicer food today than kings had 300 years ago. Life expectancy even over the past 100 years has gone up dramatically…
This “we’re living in the worst times ever!” Is kind of like climate change deniers cherry picking a tiny sliver of a huge graph and say “see? Temperatures.are going down!” It’s nonsense. Yeah, things got a bit worse.over the past decade, they’ll get better again soon and we’re still way better off than, say, 1980
Tell me worst thing, I’ll tell you worser.
You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.
There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you’re in them, and I’m seriously super proud of you for making it to today.
Everyone replying seems to be confusing “timeline” with “generation” or “era”, discussing how this point in time is better than other times in history. That is not what OP was asking.
We live in a timeline where the niceties of this generation or era were possible and came to be. Seems like a pretty decent timeline to me.
If you’re wealthy, everything is better than ever before
Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.
There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.
Another one is called “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. I read it a few years ago and found it very encouraging
In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.
We’re getting awfully close to another World War given ongoing affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East…
Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though they’re not calling it war) is rising in many places.
It’s no longer true as of about two years ago no, but the measurement was always a bit skewed for Western audiences and glosses over increases in specific types of crimes ( categorically ) such as homicide bombings and domestic terrorism.
I don’t believe this is something easily tracked and updated annually. The point is in terms of amount of population as a percentage. People in the 21st century largely have more food, shelter, and general security worldwide than in all of known human history.
Don’t let anecdotal news about wars worldwide override the fact that much larger scale (as percent of world population) have occurred and occurred consistently in past history. Wars, famines, plagues, and other things have wiped out far more of the population overall historically. While the wars you see today are horrible, and in specific regions they might be decimating, they still pale in comparison to the level of death in human history and the scope of death of past wars.
The Black Death in the 1300s itself killed 30-50% of all of Europe. Ghengis Khan is estimated to have been responsible for killing 10% of the world population, which would be more than the entire population of Europe today. There’s a lot of less than documented Chinese history that also suggests massive deaths from famines and plagues and stuff that seem to have amounted to a large percentage of the world population at the time.
Another thing I have seen a lot of in the last decade, mostly relating the the US, is that while large scale violent crime may be up (like mass killings) overall murder and crime is lower than it has been in past decades. Again, in a macro scope of things. You’ll always have pockets of geography and/or time that are bad.
The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that
In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.
There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.
