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Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways:

by api 2y ago

Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc. Yet visit social media and it's absolutely overflowing with gloom and doom and histrionic political rage and fear bait. Saw a thread recently on Reddit about how many young people in the USA are contemplating suicide because the present or the future looks so bleak to them. We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II. It's convinced me that the human brain is just not wired for abundance. Our brain keeps searching and searching for the immediate existential threats that millions of years of evolution have programmed us to know absolutely must be there. If we don't see them it actually makes us panic more since it means the lion is hiding so well we can't spot it and it's about to jump out and get us.

tombert 2y ago
I think people are extremely sensitive to the first derivative of things happening to them, with a very short time window. Even if your life is objectively better (by any measurement you want) than it would have been 500 years ago, is it better than it was a week ago?
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  You also tend to compare yourself to others. For example, I am not happy when CEO gets a 20% raise while telling the rest of us that money is tight and no raises can be given. We all want some level of fairness.
edflsafoiewq 2y ago
People don't set their standard of a good life against a 3000 year old kingdom they've never seen or think about. Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things sound good by comparison.
- snozolli 2y ago
  Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things look good by comparison. Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for combating depression. If young people today in developed nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be grateful for what they have? Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing. "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my baby down and a croc took her."
  - edflsafoiewq 2y ago
    But it was the Faustian striving ever upwards that built a better world. Anyway, I'm not sure this is gratitude so much as the gratification in having someone you can look down on.
- api 2y ago
  It's entirely rational to be upset when things get worse, such as housing prices. IMHO housing prices are the big one for most young people in the developed world today... dig into why they're so upset and you get to housing prices pretty fast. I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have children because they're convinced the world is ending because of online discourse and/or paranoia. Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you are at least in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Maybe having a better view of human history would help combat the largely false narrative that things are overall getting worse, and there's little hope for future generations?
Hikikomori 2y ago
You do realize that many people in America live paycheck to paycheck and work more than full time in demanding jobs and still need foodstamps to afford enough food? Its not exactly a stress free life of leisure.
liontwist 2y ago
Do exotic foods, information, entertainment, and travel make you happy? Or are they more like cheap substitutes for the real thing.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Usually they do. That's why most people want access to those things. What is the "real thing" they are substitutes for?
  - liontwist 2y ago
    A safe place to live, meaningful work, good health, experiences with family and friends, feelings of contribution and importance.
    - nradov 2y ago
      If you live in the USA or other developed countries then your opportunity to have all of those things is greater than at any other time or place in human history. Of course, not everyone chooses to seize that opportunity. Some people would rather complain or blame others rather than grinding and delaying gratification to improve their circumstances.
      - liontwist 2y ago
        Blaming poor character may be true of individuals, but when you’re referring to large groups of people you have to look at the social system. And by those standards our economic system is not working for the vast majority of people and getting worse every year.
        nradov 2y ago
        That comment is just totally disconnected from reality. Sure, some people have it rough through no fault of their own and we should implement public policies to expand their opportunities. But the vast majority of people are doing pretty well by historical standards. The unemployment rate is 4.1%! The Consumer Confidence Index is 111! If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and other social media then you get a distorted view of the state of the country. The silent majority are doing fairly well.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
No one cares that our lives are better than humans who lived thousands of years ago or even 100 years ago. And why should we? The benchmark is other humans living today and how they are faring. > We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II. Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car, phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Wouldn’t roughly half of the population always be below average at getting what they want “that was available at the time”?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
naming_the_user 2y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks. It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in reality.
perihelions 2y ago
- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..." I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite. The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart. It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that. *(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor). (The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Convict labor is very much a thing in the US. That still counts as slavery.
  - perihelions 2y ago
    That's fair.
lm28469 2y ago
> Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc. It also created lifestyles which aren't sustainable, destroyed our ecosystem, made gluttony and sloth our main cause of death. If you look for the signs they're already visible, it's just that our system has a gigantic inertia. Look at things like ocean acidification and other climate feedback loops, massive wildlife extinction, loss of nutrients in veggies/fruit, PFAS in rain water, micro plastics polluting virtually every living organisms. Humans work on hope, when things are continuously getting better we're thriving, when things start to fall apart ever so slightly it's much less fun, and we're slowly getting to that point. It doesn't matter how high you start, what matters is the general trend

by api 2y ago

tombert 2y ago

I think people are extremely sensitive to the first derivative of things happening to them, with a very short time window. Even if your life is objectively better (by any measurement you want) than it would have been 500 years ago, is it better than it was a week ago?

rqtwteye 2y ago
You also tend to compare yourself to others. For example, I am not happy when CEO gets a 20% raise while telling the rest of us that money is tight and no raises can be given. We all want some level of fairness.

edflsafoiewq 2y ago

People don't set their standard of a good life against a 3000 year old kingdom they've never seen or think about. Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things sound good by comparison.

snozolli 2y ago
Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things look good by comparison. Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for combating depression. If young people today in developed nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be grateful for what they have? Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing. "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my baby down and a croc took her."
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  But it was the Faustian striving ever upwards that built a better world. Anyway, I'm not sure this is gratitude so much as the gratification in having someone you can look down on.
api 2y ago
It's entirely rational to be upset when things get worse, such as housing prices. IMHO housing prices are the big one for most young people in the developed world today... dig into why they're so upset and you get to housing prices pretty fast. I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have children because they're convinced the world is ending because of online discourse and/or paranoia. Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you are at least in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
goatlover 2y ago
Maybe having a better view of human history would help combat the largely false narrative that things are overall getting worse, and there's little hope for future generations?

Hikikomori 2y ago

You do realize that many people in America live paycheck to paycheck and work more than full time in demanding jobs and still need foodstamps to afford enough food? Its not exactly a stress free life of leisure.

liontwist 2y ago

Do exotic foods, information, entertainment, and travel make you happy? Or are they more like cheap substitutes for the real thing.

goatlover 2y ago
Usually they do. That's why most people want access to those things. What is the "real thing" they are substitutes for?
- liontwist 2y ago
  A safe place to live, meaningful work, good health, experiences with family and friends, feelings of contribution and importance.
  - nradov 2y ago
    If you live in the USA or other developed countries then your opportunity to have all of those things is greater than at any other time or place in human history. Of course, not everyone chooses to seize that opportunity. Some people would rather complain or blame others rather than grinding and delaying gratification to improve their circumstances.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      Blaming poor character may be true of individuals, but when you’re referring to large groups of people you have to look at the social system. And by those standards our economic system is not working for the vast majority of people and getting worse every year.
      - nradov 2y ago
        That comment is just totally disconnected from reality. Sure, some people have it rough through no fault of their own and we should implement public policies to expand their opportunities. But the vast majority of people are doing pretty well by historical standards. The unemployment rate is 4.1%! The Consumer Confidence Index is 111! If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and other social media then you get a distorted view of the state of the country. The silent majority are doing fairly well.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

No one cares that our lives are better than humans who lived thousands of years ago or even 100 years ago. And why should we? The benchmark is other humans living today and how they are faring. > We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II. Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car, phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Wouldn’t roughly half of the population always be below average at getting what they want “that was available at the time”?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

naming_the_user 2y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks. It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in reality.

perihelions 2y ago

- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..." I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite. The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart. It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that. *(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor). (The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).

zozbot234 2y ago
> The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Convict labor is very much a thing in the US. That still counts as slavery.
- perihelions 2y ago
  That's fair.

lm28469 2y ago

> Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc. It also created lifestyles which aren't sustainable, destroyed our ecosystem, made gluttony and sloth our main cause of death. If you look for the signs they're already visible, it's just that our system has a gigantic inertia. Look at things like ocean acidification and other climate feedback loops, massive wildlife extinction, loss of nutrients in veggies/fruit, PFAS in rain water, micro plastics polluting virtually every living organisms. Humans work on hope, when things are continuously getting better we're thriving, when things start to fall apart ever so slightly it's much less fun, and we're slowly getting to that point. It doesn't matter how high you start, what matters is the general trend