You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.
There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you’re in them, and I’m seriously super proud of you for making it to today.
Everyone replying seems to be confusing “timeline” with “generation” or “era”, discussing how this point in time is better than other times in history. That is not what OP was asking.
There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.
Another one is called “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. I read it a few years ago and found it very encouraging
What makes me think this is “worst timeline” is that i fear things will start regressing and we will have to go back to the beforetimes or worse. And in some better world where people are less apathetic it might not go that way.
Well, surely the timeline where those things are already happening is worse?
Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.
In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.
Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though they’re not calling it war) is rising in many places.
I can think of a dozen ways to make it worse, so it’s clearly not “the worst”.
The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that
In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.
There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.
Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It’s all about perspective.
You get to exist and understand that you do. That’s pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.
I see no evidence that life is supposed to be easy, even if it is for the majority of us commenting here.
That’s an interesting comment. History and science have proven that we have evolved in a way that everything we do becomes easier. Arguably the end goal is that everything is easy (can be debated in many ways, even philosophcally), but there’s no denial that humanity has done everything in its power to make things easier. That’s the whole point of the creation and use of tools
I guess you’re referring to the part I edited out where I said that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that life is supposed to be easy. I don’t think that contradicts humans trying to make life easy.
But it seems to me that a lot of meaning is derived from being at the limit of what is impossible and staying at the level of easy makes people depressed and unhappy.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Laziness is the father.
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
Pizza
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
the south lost the American civil war,
They’ve been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
Pretty sure Japan wouldn’t agree with that last point…
No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn’t yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn’t use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.
Kinda terrible examples tho…
Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Wait, when you say Republicans, do you mean the organisation that Americans currently call the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the modern Republican Party? If so, I find it ironic that the party standing for freedom has evolved into the party that shields and encourages racists and criminals.
the party standing for freedom
That died with the Hayes Administration.
The American parties in the American civil war that share the names with the current parties are largely ideologically inverted at this point.
I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.
