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Comment by harryquach | Hacker News Reader

This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.

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In some ways - particularly health and food security - definitely.

Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.

>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.

I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.

As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.

I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.

It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.

They aren’t.

how do you know?

And yet Americans have never been angrier.

Tom Nichols has a theory that people are actually just kind of bored.

Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off, for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...

Hardly oppressed people.

Social media algorithms tend to stir things a bit.

social media is people

I swear if the Boston Tea Party happened today it would be blamed on misinformation on social media

Social media is algorithms amplifying divisive content to increase engagement.

Eh, people got pretty worked up in the ‘70’s. And WW2. And the Cold War. And WW1.

Eventhoug JFK Jr

And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.

This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.

> good times breeds weak people

This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.

For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

Maybe arguing over different interpretations of it, but I think it's obviously true. Once you become separated by too many generations from the first-person experience of a world war, a famine, now-preventable childhood illnesses and deaths, fascism, etc. it becomes impossible to truly grok the fully weight and critical importance of why we take these menaces so seriously. And some of these things have happened more recently to some, and you don't see people from those regions being as confused as Americans, for example, for why you don't embrace fascism, or Russia, or anti vaccinations, etc.

When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-health-secr...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

And yet the second World War, the most destructive war in history, and fascism and nazism themselves, occurred within a generation of the end of the first World War, the most destructive war in their history.

Throughout history, war has always begotten more war. Look at the Middle East today: by your logic, it should be the most peaceful place on Earth by now, given how all of the people born there for the last 50 years had been through war (and often famine etc). And yet many of them are actively seeking more war to right the wrongs of the war before, or just because they see their neighbors are weak and it's a good chance to invade them and "rebuild our historic lands".

Beat me to the punch. That simplistic piece of fantasized trope needs to die as soon as possible.

> But good times breeds weak people

Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.

Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"

People don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists

You can’t fight it, you just endure, and one day you may die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.

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