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Comment by stephancoral | Hacker News Reader

> Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort.

No, it doesn't. This isn't some intrinsic element of humanity, positive societal change requires dedicated effort, will, and resources.

Your point about flying cars is a joke right?Flying cars would kill thousands more and be a huge liability. Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have.

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I think there are two big things contributing to the lack of appreciation of the living standard:

- anything you experience daily becomes a baseline, so people keep complaining about relative differences within their wealth bracket instead of comparing to less wealthy societies

- a typical person in the West doesn't have that much time to enjoy their standard of living, having to slave away 10-12 hours a day (commute included), being burdened with mortgage and possibly other credits, and being one workplace fuckup from serious economic trouble...

> having to slave away 10-12 hours a day

Well, part of that is a choice to consume at a rate that requires such work. It's somewhat easy to have a nice financial position by delaying kids and not pouring money into cars and shopping ... but not many people choose that lifestyle.

The FIRE community is all about the alternatives.

FIRE community?

Financial Independence Retire Early

Everybody in the community has a different view of things, but for many "retire early" simply means "work on what you want to" rather than "bum around the beach all day for the rest of your life".

There are large subsections that focus on travel, giving up office jobs for being outdoors, and those that are truly much too frugal for my personal tastes.

You can't live in a van in an area as wintry as mine. A somewhat low standard of living is acceptable, but people need security.

I feel this argument is taking things to extremes. There are many intermediate states between living in a vehicle without heat and insisting on eating out, buying nice things, having vacations, expensive phones and plans, etc.

I dunno. I can easily give up on ever eating out, buying new things (I rarely do anyway, other than books), going on vacations (I only get a couple of weeks' vacation every year anyway), or purchasing new phones for un-cheap prices (I already keep mine until it breaks each time). Those are actually pretty negligible expenses. If I really want to speed up the trip towards financial independence, I have to reduce my housing and health-insurance premiums.

That's the only place the money can really come from to invest more than I already do.

Do you ever get tired of pushing the trope of "expensive phones and 4k TVs and eating out" ? I'm just curious.

Because the necessities have been going up at a far faster pace than the digital pseudo-luxuries.

Just as an example, my projected health care costs for 2017 went up by an amount that is larger than a nice phone + eating out every other week combined.

That's just the increase, with no appreciable benefit to me in the services provided.

I'm sure many people could provide similar examples with rent or other necessary services.

Even if I choose to not consume anything, I still have to foot the bills for medicine, apartment and transportation.

And those are unpayable for many people without working overtime, even if they don't consume anything extra.

- Political effort may accelerate it (as in the case of china), but barring war or disease, people with sufficient resources will just copy technology and improve their lives. And even large dedicated effort may be only partially successful, as in Africa [1,2,3].

- I was joking about flying cars but i don't understand your objection to them. Cars are a lot more dangerous; i 've never seen 2 birds collide.

- It's a good thing that people "don't appreciate" that what they have is all they could have; that's what generally drives things forward.

1. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-cnalp3t9UeS1QEfNt--ZG6ATQ...

2. http://lh4.ggpht.com/fhuebler/SCW62SGJMiI/AAAAAAAAAU4/nIiCXa...

3. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Li...

> i 've never seen 2 birds collide.

Just to nitpick, this is how birds of prey hunt :)

> "Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have."

You can appreciate what you have and still be cognizant of all the problems affecting you and your surroundings. They aren't mutually exclusive. Improvement and change often bring new or novel sets of problems or may have unintended consequences. I don't believe that enumerating those should necessarily imply ingratitude. That's a slippery slope.

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