| HN Mirror

To play devil's advocate here: things are of course better today than they have been for most of human history. But for those of us in prosperous Western countries, they aren't necessarily better than they were, say, 50 years ago. In fact I would argue that we're in much worse shape. Part of the problem is that things have gotten worse on a rather short timescale. Millenials know very well the feeling of being judged by the older generations for not owning a house and two cars, not having a wife and children, not having a high-paying job to go with our university degrees.

Some of your points are true, but I would argue about these in particular:

> * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.

> * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.

> * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)

Many more Americans are food insecure than they were 50 years ago. The USDA estimates that 11 million children are food insecure in the US. Poverty in the US has in fact been increasing for decades, but government statistics don't reflect it because they measure poverty based on a 1950s spending model.

The West has endured decades of trickle down economics when the reality is that wealth trickles up. Of course total wealth is increasing, but the lower and middle classes have captured none of it. The vast majority of humans on Earth cannot afford to travel or even take vacations, and those in prosperous Western countries have had continually decreasing disposable income for decades.

> * No cold war, no dooms day clock

> * Democracy, information is basically free.

You have this so backwards that it's baffling. The doomsday clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been since its inception in 1947. It currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight. World leaders have become increasingly reckless, unstable and authoritarian. The last US president said, "We have all these nukes, why aren't we using them?"

Whether we lack a cold war is debatable. There has not been a significant drop in proxy wars or in militarization of world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US still spends an ever increasing share of its budget on military, and it actually uses it to kill. The US has been in a continuous state of war for the longest period in its entire history. There are people voting today that were not yet born when the war with Afghanistan started.

> Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID. Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better

This is not as true as you think, and I don't believe it will be true for long. For most of human history there were very few humans. There were probably about 100 billion humans that have ever lived, and about 8 billion are alive today. So if you were to pick a random human from history, there's a non-negligible chance that your pick would be alive today.

I've argued above that we in the West are experiencing decreasing quality of life. I worry it will start to fall much more rapidly over the coming decades due to climate change, wealth inequality and potential nuclear war. Considering the big picture is probably not a good idea; we may be better off living in ignorant bliss.