Asklemmy

You get to exist and understand that you do. That's pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.

The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that

Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It's all about perspective.

Pizza

I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.

The vast amount of good quality video games out there to play, the amount of good quality animated shows ranging from cartoons to anime to even Chinese Donghua (not you I'm Joybo) like the Legend of Hei movie or All Saints Street, the amount of amazing music being made today by hard working individuals (if you are into what I call the vocalsynth genre (vocaloid, utau, deepvocal, enunu, diffsinger, etcetera)), the ever growing amount of good yiff on E621, and more.

All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.

The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I'm in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.

I know it isn't perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food ... but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.

I'm Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren't starving or anything.

However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children ... in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn't find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)

In my grandparents time ... starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.

It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years ... food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.

In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems ... it is all hinging on a very delicate balance ... because as Will Durant put it ..

"From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day"

Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.

I'm sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I'm currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn't move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.

The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.

I believe we are statistically in the most peaceful time in world history right now. Unless someone triggers a nuke.

Humans domesticated wolves in this timeline. Imagine being in one of the dogless hellscapes.

Pick any human development index measurement and view its progress over the past 10 years

We’re still here.

US centric, violent crime is down. Not the lowest it’s been currently, but better than it was when I was growing up.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/

The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey's Beads. It's an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn't be possible.

Nuclear war has been mentioned a couple times but i feel it deserves elaboration: We've been real fucking close a couple times. There was a Soviet "nuclear counterattack station", or whatever, that got the "nuclear strike detected, fire retaliatory missiles" signal and the person responsible simply refused. The signal was due to a glitch, there was no attack. That guy probably saved millions and millions of lives by refusing to carry out his duty.

If you consider (potential) timelines being "close" to ours in terms of only a small number of things needing to change to get us there, the one where everything went to nuclear hell is very close to ours--but we're not in that one.

I’m more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png

We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg

Poverty is down: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2545610/Screen_Shot_2014-12-12_at_10.34.38_AM.0.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100

Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/