• Shardikprime@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      Depends on your starting point, but, in broad strokes, the world is getting overall better. Some things are getting worse in some places, especially over short periods of time, and a big part of the goodness is coming from technology, but overall we’re getting richer, and less a-holy with each other.

      We tend to focus on what sucks now, and forget how much things sucked before :). For example, if you’re in the US, the civil rights movement was still happening ~50 years ago. Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963, 60 years ago, and MLK in 1969, 54 years ago.

      For an international example, the GDP of China has gone up 100x since 1986. WWII ended just 80 years ago.

      There is more wealth disparity but people are still less in poverty than before and have higher living standards. Lower class can still have shelter, food, technology, and new inventions nowadays.

      By a modern measure. The 70’s were insanely racist. Better not be gay, let alone trans. A women who wants to be an accomplished professional? Better be ten times smarter than your compatriots, and even then maybe better to marry a man you can work with.

      I mean we don’t have roving bands of marauders that are raping and pillaging across the land. Most of the world is not starving and there are no ongoing plagues wiping out humanity.

      As bad as things seem we are living in one of the most peaceful and plentiful times. We have access to most of the world’s knowledge and entertainment in the palm of our hand.

      Not saying things could not be better but they could be a hell of a lot worse.

      People who don’t see that basically want to live in extreme stress for no apparent reason

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        Now do the same Maths for just the last decade, and then compare it with, say, the 80s.

        Human’s judgment of “how things are going” is anchored on what they have lived through, not on how things were long before they were born - nobody is going “Well, we must live in a wonderful World because Ghengis-Khan’s Great Horde isn’t just surrounding cities and killing everybody inside if they don’t immediatelly surrender”.

        Further, our Economic systems are massivelly biased for First Mover Advantage: bought a house in an big city back in the 80s - congratulations, you’re now one of life’s winners; you great-grandpappy moved to a plot of land in the 1800s that turned out to have oil - congratulations, you were born one of the greatest winners in life.

        So when the trend of improvement reverses you’re going to hear people complain, starting by the ones who were born too late to benefit from the “good times” that are now over, which I why you’re hearing it from Millenials.

        But worry not, if the trend downwards continues, eventually even the average peons with the “merit” of having been born in the 60s will be wiped out since in a downtrend Wealth tries to preserve its position and that’s generally done by leveraging political influence to take whatever little bit of wealth the peons have managed to accumulate (which is why you’re seeing indebtness go up: that’s generally how people’s assets end up legally getting taken - they were forced to use it as collateral for loans because cost of life exceeded income)

        Also don’t get me started on how most of the “prosperity” was achieved with unsustainable practices: it’s like overexploiting one’s farmland to get a couple of years of bumper crops for sale only to end up starving because the land has become unfertile. Sure, if one only looks at at those bumper years and totally ignores the consequences after those years, it’s all wonderful.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
          0·
          5 months ago

          Even events that happen with perfectly uniform randomness will cause situations were the event happens multiple times in close proximity.

          It’s just that we humans just love to see patterns were there are none (and suck at spotting true randomness) and will focus on the purelly coincidental “many of the same within a short time frame” whilst for example ignoring longer than “normal” periods when the event did not happen.

          Not saying “doom and gloom posts” have purelly uniform randomness (frankly, I doubt it, as most human stuff tends to have Normal or similar probability distributions), just pointing out that without actually having measured both the events and the non-events, your (and everybody else’s) natural perception will be heavilly skewed by the tendency to notice seemingly unusual patterns of events and assigning them meaning when they might have no meaning at all because pure randomness will on occasion by pure complete chance produce such patterns.

          In summary: there might be an explanation, but it can also just be pure chance, so beware of expecting such things to have a reason.

  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
    0·
    5 months ago

    Cats are the prime example of

    “I don’t care and I don’t need you. Bye!”

    …

    “Oh… Now how do I get my free lasagne?”

    I think the giraffes will be okay though.

    • nul@programming.dev
      0·
      5 months ago

      I feel so lucky with my cat. Would never dream of scratching me. Loves belly rubs. Most affectionate one in my life. If I ever pet him the wrong way he lets me know by giving me the gentlest “bite” basically just touching his teeth to my hand. I don’t deserve him.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 months ago

      Have you read about giraffes?

      They weren’t okay even before interaction with humans.

    • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      There are a shitton of examples of house cats that went wild cats. They’d do okay in the current climate. Dogs most likely as well. But I doubt any of those 3 species would survive in a climate that kills humanity…

      If we go extinct, this will be the world of rats and roaches.

      • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
        0·
        5 months ago

        I don’t think they are at any risk of going extinct. They are considered hyper-predators and dangerously invasive species for a reason. They have been moved to environments they weren’t meant to be in and thrived there to the detriment of everything else several times over. Sure it will kill some of them, but overall they will probably come out on top.

    • uienia@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      Lots of “sticking your head in the sand” comments lately. Do you not like to be reminded of reality?

      • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
        0·
        5 months ago

        For some it’s doom and gloom for others it’s flourish and best times since forever. Such is life

        Ancient cycle of bad good bad good as old as history.

        Still, we are lucky to be born in first world countries, we probably share that in common, so our situation is from the start nicer than 80% of the world.

        I recently discovered I suffer a lot of victim mentality which constrained me and probably made me partly insufferable so maybe it is something that troubles you too or not

    • burgersc12@mander.xyz
      0·
      5 months ago

      Probably cause deep down we know something is happening and it feels like shits about to hit the fan. Ocean temperatures are skyrocketing and we can’t pretend everything is fine like we have for the past couple of years

        • burgersc12@mander.xyz
          0·
          5 months ago

          The scientist expected it to not look like this, it is not due to the solar maximum, literally no one has any idea why the oceans are not cooling. The best idea we have is that something is different than it was a couple of years ago, but afaik no one has been able to pin down exactly what it is thats causing the surge in ocean temps. And this is in 2024, when the warming is supposed to be manageable, imagine it in 2100 and beyond. We are fucked, been fucked for years, we just pretend like we have some control over nature. Full system collapse around 2050 at the latest by most estimates, and thats the optimistic outlook on the future. The capitalist system might just keep grinding along, destroying everything and everyone in its path until there is nothing left to consume.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      Seriously it happened very quickly, what’s going on? Did lemmy get linked to some sad doomer community elsewhere on the internet?

          • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Was talking about the general tone of Lemmy of late, not the OP specifically. This is easy to surmise from context clues…

            • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              I tend to notice the Reddit Influxes because I get more people going “Religion Bad, Upvotes to the left!”

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      Things in generally seem to be getting worse for at least a decade, especially for those born in this century.

      Granted, the whole Ecological problems thing has been going on for longer, though there were some improvements in the 70s (polution controls that stopped acid rain) and the 90s (replacing CFCs and reverting the hole in the Ozone layer) but even some of those things were partially reverted in the last decade or two (the whole Diesel Emissions Scandal is to a large extent about emissions of the very same stuff that caused acid rain and hole in Ozone layer is growing again apparently due to CFC use in China).

      As many have pointed out, the reversal of the trend of improvement in the median quality of life is probably because we’ve reached Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism.

  • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Yeah, if conditions get to worse for us, those three species have little chances I guess. So, the question arises, why are they not discussing this? Is there a plan behind that?