Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
I don't know. All our generation and every generation since has been spoon fed since were old enough to listen was how screwed every aspect of life will be when "we grow up".
The environment? F***ed.
The economy? F***ed.
Overpopulation? F***ed.
World politics? F***ed.
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In my generation it was nuclear war, which a lot of people thought was pretty likely, and would kill off everyone on the planet. We watched TV shows about it when I was elementary school. Check out the Day After on youtube sometime. But unless you're a miserable person by disposition, you get over it and get on with your life.
Last century it was influenzas that killed millions on millions, or wars where young men were all conscripted into hellish battlefields. Before that it tyrant kings governing by mad whim, religious persecution and pogroms, the horrors of the industrial revolution and working in a mine or factory until you coughed up your lungs at 41, the relentless grinding poverty of being a smallhold farmer (which accounted for about 90 per cent of the people on the planet). Illiteracy, superstition, random violence (rates of violence today are a small fraction of what they were 300 years ago). And yet people carried on. Had lives. Found happiness.
Any midde-class person in 2015 North America who feels sorry about their lot in life is an idiot lacking any sense of perspective. 99 per cent of the people who have walked the planet would trade places with you in an instant. By almost any standard, this is the best time to be alive. Of course, people who want to feel sorry for themselves won't believe that. But then they would be miserable in any time or place in history.