You are living in the greatest time ever to be alive.
I know, it really doesn’t feel like it.
You’re not the only one.
The two constants of the previous few decades seem to be things becoming statistically better while everyone feels like they are statistically worse.
There is a lot of nuance here. Your opinion will depend on where you live and where you are from.
There are people in the West who can’t stop talking about immigration being the worst problem in the world while those trying to immigrate die of diseases that have already been cured.
I know, saying that others have it worse doesn’t make you not being able to buy a house feel any better, but I have to start there.
Let’s all just take a moment to agree that the world as a whole is much better off than it was 50 years ago. Child mortality, women dying during childbirth, medical care.
The worst-off people on the planet are far better off now than they were only a few decades ago.
If we are talking about net suffering of the world, they should be included in the conversation.
The success of the past was often built on top of the bodies of the less fortunate.
When we consider if this is the best time to ever be alive, then our principal metric should be whether the past was better. Surely if we can agree that we live in the best time ever, then we can be more grateful for the current problems we face.
I believe we should set about this task with a certain moral constant.
Let me give an example. If you were the emperor of Rome in 200 AD, you lived very well. It was likely a great time for you to be alive, but this is because you had—and this is important—a fuck load of slaves.
If you idolise the 1950s white American man then you also need to acknowledge the lack of rights his wife had. His children also went to school on a separate bus than the black kids.
When we compare the past we must acknowledge that we are cherry-picking our ideal role to play in the past while overlooking the many sufferers that enable that role to exist.
We can do the same in modern times of course. If our grievance is money, we could imagine ourselves as someone richer in our own society. If we zoom in too much on ourselves then we lose the objective lens on society as a whole.
The same is true for my opinion. I am very fortunate and am also able to make this error in reverse. Maybe I believe the world is better than it is.
So what times were better in the past without grievous morality compromises?
In 1950, almost one in four children worldwide died before their fifth birthday. Now it is one in twenty-eight.
We had two world wars to kick off the first 50 years of the 1900s. Then the next few decades were filled with smoking cigarettes and nuclear fears.
I don’t think any serious person will argue they would prefer to be alive before 1960.
So, what we’re arguing is about the last 60 years. I can understand the appeal.
When my dad first moved in the 1980s, he bought a nice apartment in a nice town. He worked as a bank teller and it cost him the equivalent of two or three years’ salary.
This is what people think about when they consider the doom of the past. Selectively picking and choosing benefits that they would like to enjoy in the present. Suits, bowling clubs, manufacturing.
If you want the prosperity of the roaring 20s then you need to murder millions of people in a war to reset the economy.
If you want the housing prices of the 80s then you need the high inflation rates of the previous decade. You would also harm the many normal people who hold most of their net worth in their primary home.
No matter how much I talk about the positives of the world, housing is actually kind of fucked right now. No matter how far back you go in time, something is always kind of fucked.
Personally I would rather be priced out of the housing market than drafted into WWII, but here I am cherry-picking the past.
My dad in order to be the perfect age to buy a house for sweet fuck all also had to grow up with a black and white television. When he would try to call my mum once a week he would have to be connected by the phone service and hear them listening into the phone call until they got bored and left them alone.
The baby boomer has had a pretty sweet life economically. The middle class was thriving, housing was affordable, social clubs were booming.
But it’s never quite that easy to define a generation. In Australia the interest rates peaked at about 17.5% in 1990. He bought a house for fuck-all but likely paid a now-unthinkable amount in interest on any property he was holding for the next few decades.
The white-male baby boomer might have had it pretty good, but women in the US couldn’t get credit in their own names until the mid 70s.
Homosexual sex, aka being gay, was illegal in the US until 2003. African American boomers were raised in segregation and had to survive a military draft.
Every decade of the adult boomer life had some form of macro shock. Golden eras are only defined by those who didn’t live through them.
So now we’re somewhere in the 80s/90s, which is where many of you were born.
In all of global history, it’s not bad to be within a few years of the best time ever to be alive.
I can hear what you are thinking. You’re thinking jords, I know it is a good time to be born but it’s such a terrible time to be alive.
Comparison is usually the thief of joy, but sometimes comparison can bring gratitude.
So I ask: if today is so bad, when was better?
Yes, I agree, I would have loved to listen to Kurt Cobain live and not be constantly pulled into my pocket by this fucking iPhone, but does that mean I’d rather be born in the 70s? Absolutely not.
The 90s was a beautiful time, but half the medication that you’d be given now didn’t exist and the global child mortality rate was significantly higher. Yes it is seductive to argue the world was more peaceful before the internet, but I don’t think it’s a serious argument that the world was better off before the 2000s.
So here we are, together in the 2000s.
The last period we need to address is the one most people alive today seem to mourn. 2012-2019. Post financial crisis and pre-COVID.
Interest rates were near-zero, which contributed toward housing prices becoming unaffordable. The iPhone both connected the world and ruined social connection.
We may yearn for a time before TikTok but wanting to stall technology is like not wanting our favourite band to get too famous because we like them as they were.
But what are we doing now? We’re picking apart a tiny fraction of human history in order to feel like we are living in the worst of times. We are living in the 99.99th percentile of human history.
I too fear for my future generations. The current landscape of addiction, gambling, the K-shaped economy, AI fears. There is a loneliness epidemic and a mental health crisis. Perhaps some people would argue that we are so much worse off mentally that it would be a worthy trade to return to the pre-tech era.
Although there is some merit to it, this is an extremely privileged position to be able to take. In order to trade away life expectancy and child mortality improvements we must be pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs.
All of these problems create an uncomfortable world—but why do we believe the world was ever comfortable?
Even the mythical Garden of Eden sounded pretty uncomfortable.
There hasn’t been a generation in the past thousand years that felt at peace with their surroundings and their future. The ones that were close to peace often faced genocide soon after.
People have been fucking scared of the immediate future while dreaming of the past since the dawn of time. A world before the war, a world before the television, a world before AI.
The past always seems more comfortable because we know the ending. We know what happened and that makes it seem easy. Y2K didn’t destroy the world so therefore those fears were silly and the people were happy.
We don’t know how our days will end, we don’t know what comes next.
We are on the precipice of super-intelligence that will change the world as we know it, and it would be much more comfortable to know what that looks like, even if it’s bad.
People in 50 years will likely look back on us and think wow, how fucking easy that must have been. Imagine how simple life must have been before we were cyborgs.
If we acknowledge that we were born in the best time there ever was to be born, and living in the best time there ever was to live, then perhaps we can view the problems of today the same as the problems of yesterday.
We are not unique in our suffering but we are unique in our progress.
We are living in a golden age that is not yet defined. Our kids will say we had it easy.
