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Comment by staticman2 | Hacker News Reader

"- Your access to crazy advanced cancer treatments that are making progress at almost miraculous paces"

If things were improving "exponentially" like you claim, our lifespan would be accelerating and these "miraculous" treatments would allow us to live 100s of years. What's actually happening is our lifespan is not increasing, and in some years has been decreasing.

>>maybe you're depressed

But if these "miraculous" "exponential" medical improvements were real, we would expect to see less and less people who were depressed every decade. Instead, depression rates have been increasing.

One might also suggest if the world were DRAMATICALLY better as you claim, depression rates would be going down, not going up.

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When I was a child in the early 90s, the likelihood they gave my mother to survive leukemia was slim to none. It was essentially a death sentence. And she died.

Now if you get leukemia in 2023, it's something close to a 70% survival rate over 5 years with significantly better treatments.

That seems dramatic to me.

Only if you have good insurance.

In the EU that isn't so much of an issue.

The push for early diagnosis skews the statistics. Early diagnosis gets the drug companies paid more. The actual lifespan may not have changed.

I'd say especially treatment for childhood leukemia is one of the real success stories in fighting cancer.

Sure but if life expectancy is not increasing then technology (or social change) is not just saving people, it's making them sicker as well.

But then you look at the cause of of the lifespan decrease; and it's mostly not directly related to healthcare or quality of life* (though easy to argue mental health)

It's drug overdoses, addiction, car accidents.

It's plausible that the world is demonstrably better in pretty much every way, but there is an overwhelming amount of propaganda telling us to believe otherwise.

Yeah pretty much. The data is pretty clear that life for most of the global population is getting objectively better overall such as declining poverty rates. Climate change is certainly looming and starting to have a real effect, but it is only starting. But a lot of people feel "the world is getting worse" because most news is negative and most social media is overly positive, meaning it makes people feel like they don't measure up to the influencers. I think the word "propaganda" implies a coordinated effort which I don't think is the case, but the current state of media seems to hurt mental health and biases perceived reality to the negative.

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