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.
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.
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
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.
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 or at least difficult, 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
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.
Basically nothing. Gimme back the 90s when the world wasn’t collapsing on itself.
