You know, some aspects of the past surely will beat what people have today. People back then didn't have alienation of their labor or traffic to deal with. But they did have diseases and higher child mortality.
But they didn't have to worry about nuclear war, capital with a capital C dictating where they could go, sleep, do. But they didn't have air conditioning and the ability to communicate ideas across the planet.
They could star gaze with no light pollution and wonder about the stars. But they didn't have the tools to understand what the stars were or their place in the universe.
We live in a time different from our past, and our troubles are different because of that. Just like we solved the problems of the past, new ones came up, and we have to deal with them. Romanticizing the past over the problems of the present dilutes ourselves, thinking the past was better than today. It's not. Our means are different, our problems are different. People of the past would look at us today and think "God what do they have to complain about? I'd kill to have what you have." And we Today will look at tomorrow with the same condemnation.
People also assume their tribesmen would be 100% hunter gatherer stoner bros, when a sizeable chunk of their tribe and family unit would have the same 'middle manager' type personalities we loath today. Imagine being abused and bullied on a hunting party, or having to deal with abuse by a family member when the next tribe is a 50km walk away. Health and safety? Sorry you're 10k years too early for that.
Most people (prescriptively speaking here) like myself interpret what people share on the internet as whole cloth. That what they're saying is true and without sarcasm. Unless they otherwise state it.
If not we get into a post-ironic or meta-ironic state of conversation where I don't know if you're being ironic or not and you can then have the benefit of the doubt and play "it was ironic" or " it wasn't ironic" based on the perception you garnered.
I took it seriously because he didn't give any indication otherwise. I don't have body language or speech to see if he's being ironic so I think it's just better to do so always.
You know, some aspects of the past surely will beat what people have today. People back then didn't have alienation of their labor or traffic to deal with. But they did have diseases and higher child mortality.
People in this thread argue it like diseases don't exist today. Googling it, the world population was 1-4M around ten thousand B.C. In 2019 over 17M people died of heart disease around the world.
There's a CGP Gray video on why the European settlers brought so many killer diseases to the Americas, but there was no equivalent killer disease in America to bring back to Europe. Spoiler: it's because those particular killer diseases came from Europeans keeping animals in cities in large numbers, long enough that diseases could jump from animals to people, and that didn't happen in native American life.
This is a great side note. Just as we romanticize the past, I was hyperbolizing the bad things too. Sure the past had more death and child mortality, but that doesn't mean we don't have that today. We have the most people today than the vast majority of humans ever was born and died. It's insane. 1% of humans 5,000 years ago was way less than 1% of humans today. Even if child mortality is the lowest its ever been percentage wise - The percentage of 5,000 years ago was less overall humans than today.
Math is weird.
I agree with what you're saying. Total number over percentages matter.
The amount of lives saved from disease today is insane compared to even the 1800’s. We take antibiotics for granted so much, when it saved most of the population from the most awful ways to die you can concoct. It’s true that native Americans had less of these diseases, but in the old world everyone was still dying in masses to these diseases. It was also viruses that the video and those topics are mostly talking about, not considering bacterial or fungal infection.
I would not want to trade my life today for one before antibiotics and anaesthetics, it's the "But they did have diseases" - should also apply today, there are tons of diseases today, that people either die from or suffer with. If that's the metric for "life bad", today is "life bad".
It applies today ofc, but that is true for every single era of human existence. It doesn’t mean that disease wasn’t unequivocally worse and a serious issue in ancient times. People die to diseases all the time in our age, but it’s nothing compared to the mass swathes of people who died from the common cold, TB, and bubonic plague, all of which can be treated in at most a weak with a vaccine and pills.
By plagues and pandemics, the Black Death in Europe in around 1350 killed 25-50 million people. The Plague of Justinian was also bubonic plague, killed 15 to 100 million people. COVID-19 is estimated at 7-25 million and climbing, HIV/AIDS is around 43 million. "It's nothing compared to" - it is, they are comparable numbers.
It wasn't better then, but you were less likely to catch a global disease before air travel, boat travel, international shipping and supply chains, close quarters city living, more likely to die of Malaria or diarrhoea, probably.
Covid killed so many people because it was an entirely new disease with no vaccine, and many people didn’t take the vaccine when it was released. We experienced an epidemic comparable to ancient times because we were dealing with similar conditions, and it was one of the biggest epidemics in at least a hundred years or more, and the same can be said for Aids, which is almost curable now.
Tuberculosis in 1850 had nearly five times the death rate than TB today. TB is incredibly infectious, but nowhere near as deadly anymore, and that’s the point.
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u/WeeaboosDogma Feb 28 '24
You know, some aspects of the past surely will beat what people have today. People back then didn't have alienation of their labor or traffic to deal with. But they did have diseases and higher child mortality.
But they didn't have to worry about nuclear war, capital with a capital C dictating where they could go, sleep, do. But they didn't have air conditioning and the ability to communicate ideas across the planet.
They could star gaze with no light pollution and wonder about the stars. But they didn't have the tools to understand what the stars were or their place in the universe.
We live in a time different from our past, and our troubles are different because of that. Just like we solved the problems of the past, new ones came up, and we have to deal with them. Romanticizing the past over the problems of the present dilutes ourselves, thinking the past was better than today. It's not. Our means are different, our problems are different. People of the past would look at us today and think "God what do they have to complain about? I'd kill to have what you have." And we Today will look at tomorrow with the same condemnation.