Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Cheer up! For the average HN user, things are better now than they ever have been in human history.

If my finger is broken and someone says "Cheer up! Your neighbor lost his leg and is in an incredible amount of pain", I may feel sympathy for my neighbor but, crucially, my finger still hurts just as much.

Some of you guys need to cowboy up and quit whining about trivial problems. A broken finger is a minor injury (nothing even remotely like a lost leg), and usually easily managed with basic medical treatment. Get it splinted, pop an ibuprofen, and move on. It seems like a lot of HN users have led such soft, sheltered lives that they fall apart when faced with the slightest adversity.

Right, it won't change the fact that the finger injury is sending pain signals to your brain. But it just might change what you do in reaction to that signal.

Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.

I think he was being sarcastic. But on the internet you can't really tell.

Adopt absurdism. Nothing really matters and it's grotesquely hilarious at the same time. That might cheer you up. Occasionally.

Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.

Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.

Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.

> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.

Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.

Turn that around and ask yourself why that's a reason to be miserable. Your sadness is a choice. Be miserable if you want to but that won't improve the circumstances for yourself or anyone else.

Cheer up, the lake of shit you’re caged in is at its lowest level on record.

Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.

That's a meaningless claim, devoid of any evidence. At most points in human history there were decent reasons to think we were near the peak. And yet with some occasional temporary valleys, average human living conditions continued to improve.

At most points in human history, the global economy was not so tightly integrated, and major powers didn't have the ability to devastate the globe in an afternoon.

There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.

The current time is not special just because it's when you're alive.

Conversely, the current time isn't like the past just because it immediately follows the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com