5 ms·

Wrong turn? Rat race? Compared to what? Your ancestors 200 years ago were malnourished, working the fields all day to eke out a miserable existence, never enjo

• dendriti 4y ago
  Literacy rates in Western Europe and North America were quite high. There was an bustling trade in almanacs, pamphlets, periodicals and Bibles. Go read about Charles Dickens' career and how he succeeded by appealing to the tastes of the common man.
  • koheripbal 4y ago
    "quite high" but still horrible by today's standards.
• fulafel 4y ago
  The "once decent living standards were assured" part covers this.
  • leetcrew 4y ago
    "decent living standards" are a moving target; the definition is always relative to what is currently possible. in mill's time, this might have amounted to having a roof to sleep under and a reliable source of calories. germ theory of disease was just starting to gain acceptance in the latter part of his lifetime. today we seriously consider providing free healthcare to all, and in some countries this is already a reality.
    • thayne 4y ago
      In any major city in even the wealthiest of nations it isn't hard to find people who don't have a roof to sleep under and a reliable source of calories. For large portions of the population, things are definitely better than they were 200 years ago. But we are still a long ways away from decent living standards being assured to everyone.
      • fulafel 4y ago
        Many major are in countries with working social safety net that will feed and house people before they go hungry or roofless.
    • fulafel 4y ago
      Universal health care history details: it came about in the 1950s/60s in the poor post-ww2 conditions, and is now in 50+ countries.
• lm28469 4y ago
  The system crushed us so bad that people like you think we're living in the utopiest of utopias, even the idea of a better future disappeared, even suggesting it could have been better seems to trigger an allergic reaction, the cogs are willing to die for the machine that grinds them, and they seem happy about it. You focus on material goods while completely ignoring what came with it and what it took away from us, as if accumulating goods was a goal in itself. The bed of a min wage worker might be more luxurious than a king's bed from 200 years ago I very much doubt his life is anything luxurious, especially in comparison of a king's life > Compared to what? Compared to what it could have been I have a worse life than my grandparents by almost any conceivable metrics besides the fact that I own and consume more useless shit. They had no degrees, five kids and could afford to live in a city center. I have 0 kids, a master's degree and will never be able to afford 5 kids, let alone in a city center > Human progress has brought us to the point where we have the free time to complain about how disadvantaged we are and how unfair life is I work more and will work longer than my grandparents, I don't expect I'll be able to retire before 70, if not more. In France 25% of the poorest already die before reaching retirement age. > that our daily lives are far more luxurious than those of kings who lived 200 years ago. I'm still sitting a desk desk 8 hours a day, probably for the next 40 years, while technocrats of the 60s promised automation would bring the 3 days/15 hours workweek > The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. > The pseudoneeds imposed by modern consumerism cannot be opposed by any genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by society and its history. But commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life. Guy Debord, 1962 > The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive. > The distance has not changed between those who possess a lot and those who possess a small but ever-increasing amount; but the intermediate stages have multiplied, and have, so to speak, brought the two extremes, rulers and ruled, closer to the same centre of mediocrity. To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects. Raoul Vaneigem, 1967