I've wondered. Are current years getting worse in crises, or has the world always been like this and we just didn't notice because we didn't have the Internet and social media in prior decades to make sure everyone in the world knows about every crises. We haven't had a recession on the level of the 1929 crash and we haven't had World War III. Peaking in 1918 and lasting through the early twenties, the Spanish Flu killed more people in a shorter period of time than any disease in history, including the Black Plague (which killed proportionally more people) and malaria (which killed far more people but took decades) and small pox (which wins the prize for most people killed by a disease but took centuries). Fun fact: The Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain, and Spain was not the hardest hit nation. The main vector that the disease spread initially was through soldiers in World War I. The Allied Powers and the Central Powers both leaned on their newspapers and would not let their media outlets report on their fighting men catching a modern plague. Spain was neutral in WWI, so newspapers on both sides were allowed to report the death toll of the disease in Spain. Hence the disease became known as the "Spanish Flu". The Spanish Flu was an anomaly among diseases. Usually diseases kill lots of elderly people and young children. The main thing about it that actually killed people was an overzealous immune system response. Young adults in their prime were more likely to die than elderly people and children. Most of the people who died in WWI were men born between 1889 and 1900. Most of the people who died in WWI were men born between 1889 and 1900. I had a high history school teacher that had the class of around twelve boys and twelve girls stand up. He had 2 girls and 10 boys sit down and gestured at the people still standing. "This is about what your 20 year high school reunion would have looked like." Mahrlect. -Maybe we are entering a dark time where everything in the world apart from Lustria-Online is getting darker and scarier. -Maybe things have always been this bad, we just never noticed before the entire world had Internet access? -Maybe since the end of World War II, we've replaced periodic giant crises with frequent small crises. -Maybe things are not worse than they used to be, but we in the modern world are softer and whinier than our forebears. It just seems worse.
Whilst we shouldn't be over complacent; when I was at Jnr school in the 80's, it was widely expected that fossil fuels would run out by the millennium. And we would all die in a nuclear war!
That's true, there are some unique problems of our time. Climate change is one of them and so is mass surveillance for example. I still think that many people, especially in the rich countries, are pretty whiny about pretty much everything, which does contribute to how we see the world.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t say the younger folks are that whiny, I think it’s a certain group of crusty old people (Forgive me, it’s somewhat offensive to the elderly)
My dad used to be in charge of the facilities of a good sized university. Dorms, class rooms, the stadium, labs, the who shebang. He joked that there were ten nice days year. 10 days out of 365 the university did not run the heat or the air conditioning. 5 in the Fall, 5 in the Spring. We lived in the midwest where the weather is temperamental. Sometimes due to weird weather snaps he'd have to switch back and forth between heat and air conditioning. Not a big deal for a homehowner, but given that all the buildings were linked by steam tunnels and heated and cooled on an industrial, switching from heat to AC is expensive and time consuming.