[somenameforme]

This article is speaking of the distant past (and perhaps you are as well) but in relatively recent history, I think the losses can be clearly demonstrated. Near to every form of emotional and mental disorder is at record highs in most Western countries, including the US. [1] IQ levels, after increasing ever since it began being measured, have started declining. [2] Testosterone levels are plummeting, obesity is skyrocketing, social divides are reaching catastrophic levels (which I mention since I think it's viable that the digital age is meaningfully contributing to this), and so on. And yes I obviously see the argument re: obesity vs famine, but the issue is malnourishment. One can be obese or overweight and malnourished, and in fact most people suffering from malnutrition are. [3]

Perhaps most importantly of all - fertility rates have fallen so low that we have created literally unsustainable societies. I don't think people realize how catastrophic our fertility rates have grown. You can estimate the impact of a fertility rate (once an entire population shares it) as being a factor of fertility_rate/2 applied every ~20 years to a population. So South Korea, with its 0.68 fertility rate, will eventually start losing about 66% of its population every ~20 years. And this will happen until they go extinct (which is surprisingly rapid at such a scale), or start having more children. And while they have, by far, the lowest fertility rate in the world, most of the world is on a trendline to follow right behind them.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...

[2] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...

[3] - https://cardiology.medicine.ufl.edu/2020/08/13/malnutrition-...

[bsder]

> but in relatively recent history, I think the losses can be clearly demonstrated.

Maybe within the last 30 years but certainly not if you count even just prior to 1970 when heavy manufacturing still provided the primary jobs.

Mill and mine jobs sucked worse than agriculture. Women had zero choice other than homemaker, teacher and secretary. Many Rust Belt men were basically functional alcoholics because life was so damn difficult. For example, a black humor joke at Bethlehem Steel was that nobody ever retired from the car shop (they manufactured railroad cars)--they died of some form of weird cancer long before that.

People complain about how badly we deal with "mental health" now but everybody had to just suck it up and effectively smoked and drank themselves stupid to deal with it in the past. And prior to World War II and the broad distribution of antibiotics, basic physical health was a crapshoot let alone mental health.

I'm not happy about IQ starting to trend down. However, IQ continuously increasing indicates that groups of people were still systematically malnourished up into the early 1990s.

I may have a bunch of problems with the way things are going, but I'm having a tough time coming up with a time when it was that much better than things are right now.

Certainly most of the people sitting here reading HN would have had a really shitty time in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably even 1970s). They've forgotten that smart people had a hard time escaping their local social area and were strongly ostracized up through even the 1980s.

[somenameforme]

Studies on the decline of IQ (and various other issues) normalize for socioeconomic and other obvious factors. So it's not just e.g. malnourishment. Studies in Scandiland (which are easy to carry out due to compulsory enlistment + IQ testing) have even observed the decline within the same family over time! Nobody knows why they're decreasing, similar to the mystery of why testosterone levels are plummeting, autism/depression/anxiety/etc rates are increasing, and so on.

With mental health, the issue is not of how we deal with it, but with the rate of disorders. Rates seem to be perpetually moving upward with no end or even slowing down in sight. As per the previously linked article [1], it's estimated that about 1 in 4 Americans have had such severe anxiety or depression that they'd been unable to continue regular activities for 2+ weeks. That's not the sort of stuff that could be treated with alcohol and cigs. And these rates are all rapidly increasing.

And again the fertility issue, which you failed to even consider, is just so huge. Our society is literally unsustainable. If humanity, at any time, started acting like we are today (and did not meaningfully change) then humanity literally would not exist today. That alone makes glamorizing modern society essentially a nonstarter, because it means it is inherently liminal - temporary, a placeholder as we more onto something else. And I'm not especially fond of what that "something else" may easily be, which is why I think emphasizing that we need to correct this issue is so important.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...

[darby_nine]

> I'm not happy about IQ starting to trend down. However, IQ continuously increasing indicates that groups of people were still systematically malnourished up into the early 1990s.

Eh with access to information IQ has become much less useful. We need a test much less bound to culture than what is currently offered—which includes at least a rework of verbal intelligence, which is literally just knowledge of culture. Knowledge without context is basically useless and certainly has little to do with intelligence.