Comment by kjkjadksj
4 days ago
Then you’d at least be aware of the standard of living even the poorest among us enjoy compared to someone in say manchuria or eastern europe in 1941. The irony of the grandchildren and great grand children of actual holocaust survivors claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.
> claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.
But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.
Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is obviously aware that their standard of living is much higher than that of most of history. This is not novel, not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-terminating point.
In the Western world every single generation since WWII has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack. Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.
Realistically, we know that no-one’s level of happiness here in the present is determined by standards of living in Manchuria in 1941. You can argue the point intellectually that we are all very well off compared to most humans who have ever lived. Nonetheless, psychologically speaking, people’s satisfaction in life is determined by more local comparisons. (If new historical research showed that Manchurians in the 1940s were actually having a whale of a time, would that make you correspondingly miserable? Of course not!)