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Maybe. I'm no anthropologist. Most of what I know about the lives of hunter-gatherers comes from watching "The Gods Must Be Crazy". The !Kung family seemed p

Maybe. I'm no anthropologist. Most of what I know about the lives of hunter-gatherers comes from watching "The Gods Must Be Crazy". The !Kung family seemed pretty happy (before the bottle fell into their lives... but I don't want to spoil it. It's a great movie.) I think it's clear though that the ordering of QoL goes roughly: Wealthy City/Farm > Hunter-Gatherer > Poor City/Farm So for about a million years most people had it pretty good, then for about ten thousand years most people had it pretty bad, and then the last hundred years or so many people have gone from bad to good conditions, but many still endure pretty bad conditions. If we could somehow compare the subjective quality of life of the people of Sentinel Island and the people of Manhattan Island I suspect that the least happy Sentinelese folks would be happier than the least happy New Yorkers.

ianai 6y ago
The hunter gatherers would be on the end of that list by most metrics. But that's of course not anything like the system I'm discussing. I'm discussing the perspective of how I, a US citizen, perceives the momentum of the US. The baby boom of the 50s has been studied and contrasts drastically with today. The other comments here are all making absolutist claims - "I can name a circumstance in all human history that was worse therefore your claim is wrong." But that's of course not how humans make decisions - they make decisions based off of what they know and have experienced. The situation in the US today does not lead people to have children in the same rates as the baby boom generation - and that's the difference between positive and negative growth. Yes, the cold war never ended. Yes, people have largely forgotten about it. Yes, any minute misunderstanding could really blossom into WWIII or worse, still. The fall of the USSR helped US society forget the anxieties of cold war. The cold war also existed in a universe of possibilities allowing for growth the US is unlikely to see again. There were big governmental projects in the recent past (to the cold war) that made whole industries and even cities (see: Las Vegas) possible and flourish where they weren't before those big governmental projects. The voracity with which they attacked my idea and the exact nature of their attacks shows the cynicism I mentioned in my original comment above. Granted, HN is only a website. But I certainly don't expect every post to be just some bot looking to spread cynicism. People have actually internalized and decided to spread and act upon cynicism.

ianai 6y ago

The hunter gatherers would be on the end of that list by most metrics. But that's of course not anything like the system I'm discussing. I'm discussing the perspective of how I, a US citizen, perceives the momentum of the US. The baby boom of the 50s has been studied and contrasts drastically with today. The other comments here are all making absolutist claims - "I can name a circumstance in all human history that was worse therefore your claim is wrong." But that's of course not how humans make decisions - they make decisions based off of what they know and have experienced. The situation in the US today does not lead people to have children in the same rates as the baby boom generation - and that's the difference between positive and negative growth. Yes, the cold war never ended. Yes, people have largely forgotten about it. Yes, any minute misunderstanding could really blossom into WWIII or worse, still. The fall of the USSR helped US society forget the anxieties of cold war. The cold war also existed in a universe of possibilities allowing for growth the US is unlikely to see again. There were big governmental projects in the recent past (to the cold war) that made whole industries and even cities (see: Las Vegas) possible and flourish where they weren't before those big governmental projects. The voracity with which they attacked my idea and the exact nature of their attacks shows the cynicism I mentioned in my original comment above. Granted, HN is only a website. But I certainly don't expect every post to be just some bot looking to spread cynicism. People have actually internalized and decided to spread and act upon cynicism.