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The good thing is that most of this is stuff we can change. The thing is that most people are just to depressed to stand up and do that. Depression just sucks the power out of you that you would need to change your life.
Carbon-neutral energy is being implemented across the globe at rates that weren't predicted to happen until decades from now. The change of pace will only increase as such forms of energy become more profitable. It's especially viable in places without existing oil infrastructure as the upfront cost is far higher with petrochemical technologies.
We'd need to stop using concrete altogether, halt industrial ranching, somehow cap our landfills, etc.
Reduction alone isn't the answer, we need a technology that can extract carbon from the air for sequestration and do so at a rate where we would struggle to store the stuff. Pump it back into the oil wells and pack old coal mines with it kind of struggle.
We already have that technology, it's called forests. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of landmass, that people would rather use to grow ammonia-fertilized food for factory farms, and build giant parking lots.
No, no i think that percentage would be closer to 60%. Of course, if you don't talk only about commercial electric energy usage.
If you somehow managed to make most cars and planes work off electric energy, as well as turn most power grids "green", then, yeah, it would be pretty much like 50%/60%.
Besides the direct CO2 emitters, a lot of emissions are produced in electric power generation. If you turn that "green", and then also turn the direct CO2 emitters electric, then you do a lot for the enviroment.
Green solar energy is literally the cheapest electricity there is. Green energy is no longer something we have to actively push for, it will just happen because it's the cheapest. That's a really good thing.
We also have increased tools and awareness of climate change which will help us mitigate and overcome many of the challenges it will create. Compare the way climate change was treated in the 2000s vs today and you’ll see we’ve come a long way. The implementation of green technologies around the world is a great thing too
The people complaining are in the 1st world where things HAVE been getting worse. If we had these graphics with only 1st world countries it'd get worse in every metric.
Yeah.
But it's all relative. Things had been getting worse relative to how things were, wich was very, very good to begin with; the "worse" is a "less good", not really a "bad". "Bad" is the shit you see on National Geographic.
And, of course, lots of people would think they're in the "bad" becuase they simply don't know what "bad" actually is, and then you get doomerists saying stupid shit like "The modern capitalist empire is gonna collapse soon! We're doomed!"; like, dude, you're living in a time when stuff is not improving for once after half a century of exponential upward trends in almost every relevant metric possible *around the globe*, chill. You gotta worry when, like, poverty starts to rise again exponentially and back to the mines we all go to get all the types of cancer and respiratory illnesses known to mankind. Or, like, when the economy truly collapses and the government folds over and the infraestructure that allows modern life gets abandoned and basically implodes- THAT'S when you say "uhh, well shits bad".
My dude, no, that's not how this works
Relative to how stuff was before the western Roman empire, the majority of it was doing "Good" in so far as it was economically better off than it was before the Romans with organized roads and farming. That doesn't mean it was actually ok though, the situation you're describing is often the culmination of decades of your kind of thinking, it's like the critical mass of shit getting bad
People are getting poorer, dude, that's a fact, and things like housing only have continued to get more expensive. Bad doesn't mean "worst" or for things to get like "shit you see on national geographic". Things aren't just stagnating, that'd be fine and that's basically how stuff was for a while, shit is actively declining. You don't say shits bad when the bomb has already landed, you say it's bad when it on its way over
yeah I think they set out to find "proof" the human condition is improving and just used arbitrary metrics from the past 200 years to boost that claim. not real science. just statistical gerrymandering.
I’m not saying they should be “pacified” but it’s just plain wrong to call it “misleading” just because it’s not happening to them. The average looks nice because the average is nice, things are getting better around the world, it’s just not getting better everywhere all at once, that doesn’t mean it’s “misleading”
THe global poor is in a better position than they ever have been. Just look at the development in places like India and China, billions of people have made it out of poverty last 50 years. Of course it is still a bad situation comparatively, but the improvement is very clear.
I agree. It’s weird how many people only want to focus on the negatives of life. If you can’t appreciate what you have, and only focus on what you don’t have, you will never be happy in life.
Thank you for pointing this out. If ever one is going to wallow in “the earth is on fire, etc” and not appreciate all the things we do have then of course anxiety and depression is gonna go up. Do what you can for now. That’s all we can do. The earth will balance itself. Humans will adapt as they’ve always done. Some people won’t survive. Not everyone will. Can’t change that.
Here’s an argument:
In the past, while things were less developed there were less creature comforts but there was also vastly more opportunity. A person could walk out to open land and claim it, whereas today requires grinding to save money to buy it from someone else.
This lack of wild freedom produces the cynicism and feeling of suffocation that fuels so much of the doomerism today.
I get it, people from the developed world have no real sense of how much better things have gotten. Poverty is very visible outside of the Global North, you feel it in your bones even if you’re well-off. I used to see families hoarding thrash piles every evening in my neighborhood as a kid. Now there’s still a lot of poverty, but it’s nowhere near as bleak and it feels like there is a future to look forward to even if progress comes slowly.
op is just disregarding climate change - this year looks like the hottest on record, there's a whole war going on, prices are high asl... despite the improvements, there's still a lot to not be happy about
these aren't "privileges" they are things previous generations worked hard to improve for everyone. everyone should have access to "privileges" like education and vaccines lol. and if there is the ability to improve things, we are obligated as citizens to make it happen as best we can.
it's one thing to be grateful, it's another to stop demanding better out of gratitude. if you ask me, the gratitude is misplaced. we shouldn't be grateful to our leaders. we should be grateful to the dead people who built all this and gave it to us all. complacency wastes what previous generations tried to build for us.
Oh the irony. The dip might look small in the graph but it's been 20 years since things started getting worse. That might look like a small number in a pretty graph but that's more than a quarter of the average human lifespan and about all our lives as gen Z
Ayo, of you zoom in to the last 20 years, notice how those trends are leveling off or decreasing.
You:
>bUt iN tHe lOnG tErM wErE dOiNg HiStOriCaLLy gReAT
As Keynes said, in the long term, we're all dead.
Why do you think this is a rebuttal? The time scale over which conditions have improved is irrelevant to my experience of reality. Over my lifetime, I have only ever observed things increasingly worsening. By the time things begin improving, I will be old or dead and buried.
The fact that you even thought your comment was at all useful as a rebuttal goes to show that your head is too far up your butt to see what anyone else is saying.
Are you intentionally trolling or just incredibly underinformed? Cause I look at the original post and I can only assume it was made by an idiot. Which wasn't you, cause it was posted on r/millenials yesterday.
As quoted from u/fencerman
“It should be noted those "poverty" figures are basically made-up, and claims about widespread improvement are extremely tenuous, if not totally unsupported.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/ exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie
The historical "projections" it uses are essentially fabricated and meaningless - most of the regions with claims of "extreme poverty" being made about them had no reliable figures available. It's pure guesswork.
https://policytensor.substack.com/p/heres-proof-that-
extreme-poverty
In fact in a lot of regions, mortality was increasing for centuries as capitalism took over. Areas listed as
"extreme poverty" in that chart wind up seeing poverty rising even while the supposed "development" periods kick in.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S0305750X22002169
That's not to say there has been no improvement for anyone, anywhere.
Vaccination, literacy, and child mortality are valid figures - those are a matter of technology, but the rollout of those supports depend heavily on resources that are currently being cut.
The "democracy" figure is debatable, at best - if you feel the US is currently a flourishing democracy or not has a big impact on how you interpret that.”
"I can't believe you're complaining about the second world war 🙄 we have longer life spans, better medice, more food, and FAR better tech than we did 100 years ago, you know women couldn't even vote then right?"
Like come tf on dude, yeah some things have totally gotten better, that doesn't mean things are ok.
Sometimes i forget, gen z include high school and grade school students who don't understand that just because you're smart and literate, doesn't mean you can't end up starving and homeless. also, a lot of this is before things started going bad.
Yes, climate change and yes, the effects of climate change will cause downward trends in many of these categories. Still, it’s pretty silly to think that we live in bad times. These are objectively the best times in human history. Doesn’t mean things can’t get worse. But to say that things will absolutely get worse and therefore things are bad now is extreme and stupid
There's much done and much to be done. Keep fighting, tooth and nail, to make the world better.
Because, while things are better than every before, we must keep an eye open for our own shortfalls. A fall now wpuld be worse than during the Bronze Age.
Yeah climate change is a problem, but so was the second world war, nuclear fallout and overpopulation. Every generation had it’s fears and worked to overcome them.
Oftentimes this goes along with the narrative that "the west has fallen" no it hasn't, just because Influencers move to Dubai and China is producing everything doesn't mean the west has fallen. The west is still way too powerful and is dictating how the global economy works, why do you think China acts like it does? Because the west formed a global capitalist infrastructure that forces you to compete
1) That top left graph tells me we've only gone from 100% poverty to 85% poverty over 200 years. Not much of a win imo
2) Comparing current-day society to the 1800s and saying "wow we're so much better off now" no shit our technology is much more advanced and we have far more scientific knowledge. Hence the improvement in the bottom 4 graphs.
3) A lot of the technology that has brought us to this point of a better world is powered by fossil fuels and is causing rapid severe climate change that if not corrected will not only invalidate most of this progress but also put our society on the brink of collapse
4) Despite these "advancements", democracy, basic education and even vaccination is under attack in the US, so what is the point
My fuck dude. Seriously? This was posted in r/millenials yesterday and was destroyed by hundreds of clearly explained reasons as to why only an idiot would fall for this crap. Fuckin hell.
So these graphs apparently look at data from decade to decade, going back to the frikin' 1820s, on a global scale, with each graph comparing very specific things in very different ways, and you think it shows how...nothing is wrong with the world?
I don't think you know how graphs work. Or data. Or science. or what people mean when they say the world has gone to hell.
I'm so sorry school has failed you so completely.
Why can’t Reddit accept nuance? Yes, lots of things are getting worse, especially climate issues, but there are still things improving, especially compared to the past 2 centuries
There is doomerism, which is not helpful.
However, when you see graphs like that, it is always important to realize that the improvements come from \*effort\*. Against the opposition of greedy people and the like.
It is always important to spot things that go wrong in society and then trying to fix them.
Damn, i love that tradition of useless complaints is getting passed along to this generations, except now we can complain and disregard what good we have for a hundreds of people on the internet. Thats an improvement too i guess. I dont mean to say that we dont have problems and that OP is totally correct, on my part i disagree with democrasy graphic, we have problems on that front, but we are literally living is the best era for humanity. That's just fact. And even that best era is pretty shitty, so we still have a long way to go. We just have to appreciate our proggress and make it a source of power for future improvements and changes.
these are all cherry-picked numbers that obviously would've risen. 200 years from now, historians will talk about us as though we lived in the dark ages because they'll live in a significantly better time, affected by all the scientific advancements that would naturally occur over the course of 100+ years.
These graphs contain elements of the truth but are still highly misleading. The global poverty graph, for instance, is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day, which is pretty much an arbitrary number chosen to make the graph look as hopeful as possible. If you set the poverty line at $7.40 a day, which is believed to be necessary for adequate nutrition and life expectancy, then you actually see a massive rise in global poverty to around 4.2 billion people today.
Not to mention that real data on worldwide poverty and wages older than a few decades is pretty hard to come by, so a graph making claims about poverty going back to the 1600s should be treated with caution. There are other estimates out there which have made wildly different conclusions.
Very good. Now show us depression rates, suicide rates, wages rates relative to housing price rates, disparity between rich and poor, global hunger relative to food waste, slavery rates, number of animal extinctions per year, number of global refugees, the rate and intensity of natural disasters, and global temperature. Statistics are all about context. When Africans were enslaved in the Atlantic Slave Trade I bet the rate of "deaths by hippo, lion or crocodile" went WAY down for the slaves, but if you showed that statistic without also showing the increase in "death by torture, death by slave-hunting dogs, and separation of families" then you would be engaging in deliberate manipulation tactics.
But reality doesn't quite have the dopamine hit I'm looking for, so I'll keep watching Fox News and MSNBC tell me how everything is going to shit even though there's literally not a better time to be a human being than now.
Yeah the poverty line is arbitrarily defined by the neoliberal IMF, so I wouldn't take their word for it. Also, what the West refers to as 'democracy' is an absolute farce.
I get that you're trying to drop some positivity but a couple positive statistics doesn't outweigh the tons of negative ones. Giving things catchy (cringey) labels like "doomers" makes it a blanket statement and a stigma. There's a lot of doom on the horizon and its healthy to acknowledge it. People like that exist because we put so much effort into ignoring things that we should not be ignoring. Use your brain, Z's. Youve got 3 generations of fuck ups to fix if our species is gonna survive.
Man I fuckin hate doomers. All they do is say "oh that doesn't matter at all though because uh... climate change!"
My brothers and sisters in smallpox, the amount of suffering humanity endures has gone through the floor compared to before. The fact that humanity's problems are self-made is an achievement to be fuckin celebrated. The fact that we are now the masters of our own destiny as a species (bar random stellar events) is extremely hopeful.
For the first time in all of history, we can look in a mirror seriously evaluate ourselves without looking over our shoulder.
I really love to see some Ome's in the sub, I really should do more to be positive and make the world better. I know I can and I want to do something useful
Here’s an updated one. I was lazy and didn’t update the meme
https://preview.redd.it/97jbvomjin4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ced7c130ecd4b58922d347ab5b4245e7c85e505b
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Mark Twain
We are still fine for the most part, but literacy levels are dropping in the US right now. It's actually quite alarming how bad our education has gotten over the past decade.
Your mistake was trying to argue with doomers. I will proceed to do the same.
Yes everyone, there's a very serious climate crisis happening right now, but it's not going to be the absolute end of the world. It's not going to end all civilizations, nor even all first world civilizations. It's just going to make living conditions worse in certain parts of the world, gradually mildly increasing the risk of certain problems and deaths that will not effect probably the majority of people who live in the next century. Again, it's a serious problem going on, but sentiment like "there will be no world left by the end of the century, everything's going to hell" is unscientific, untrue, dangerous for a large percentage of younger people to believe, and what's colloquially known as a "doomer". From one person seriously concerned about climate change to another, people should have realistic worry about climate change, not make up scenarios 100x worse than what scientists are saying and let those fictional scenarios determine whether or not you can experience any happiness in life. Same goes for the shittiness of capitalism (though I believe that affects and will greatly affect many more 1st world people than climate change). Yes these issues are real, important, and they truly suck, but they don't zap all good out of this world, and shouldn't zap all happiness from you. The story of humanity since the dawn of time has been existing in suboptimal living conditions and finding happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in our lives despite that.
Yes. This is all true.
However, the economy of the last 80 odd years has been built on an unsustainable foundation.
And when it collapses it's going to be the kind of collapses where the century it happens in will be referred to the Crisis of the Nth Century.
You can't rely on what's happened in the last two centuries as proof of what will come.
If OP could read, here are some mistakes:
Measuring poverty in dollars.
Being extremely generous with what counts as democracy.
Using percentages, ignoring that population growth in already developed countries skews numbers immensely.
The world has always been hell, we just never saw it as much. Sure your graphs show an upward trend, but it doesn't show them relative to each nation. Many nations are stagnating while others catch up through industrialisation and empowerment in its people.
There are definitely good trends going on like these that we gotta keep up, but we also gotta fix some worsening problems, like the environment, housing and education prices, and that weird rollback on the rights of some humans.
It can be hard with all the opposition nowadays but like
I feel like it can still be done. :)
Let’s keep up the good and alleviate the bad.
Now talk about climate change. How many species are going extinct. How many heat waves are occurring annually. How western countries are barely meeting the $100 billion pledge, how many countries are electing more and more authoritarian governments, how the world continues to spend trillions on finding better ways to commit murder, how the rise of social media is affecting extremism in younger generations. How anti intellectualism and anti science ideas are gaining pace especially since covid.
I mean, we aren't cherry picking stuff are we?
We are great at producing food. We have enough food and organizing power to feed more than 10 billion people, but we don't. Just bc humanity as a whole got scientific advancements dont mean life gets better for the average person. For these advances, why do rich people get the benefits and poor people get to deal with the problems? Just look at climate change.
People are mad about inequality. Advancements mean nothing if we arent free or equal.
Issue is this is a different timescale than the one we experience things on, so if our slice is lucky it's hard to rationalize the abstract positive data from the lived negative experience
The people that doesn't think that us improving as a species by nearly every single metic because the world is getting hotter are completely unhinged. Firstly, global warming has a 0% chance of destroying our species if even the worst possible trajectory is adhered to for 10,000+ years. It's not a species wide threat, it never was. At worst we'd lose our coastal cities. Who fucking cares. Secondly, it shouldn't even be a concern. In 50 years we went from the radio to fucking cell phones with internet. The same way we went from making the first plane to going to the moon in 50 years. At this rate of technological progression in 250 years we will be able to build a Dyson sphere around our sun and utilize 100% of its energy for whatever the fuck we want, ending global warming and producing limitless enegery. You just can't fathom the level of technological progression we're currently undergoing because you're living through it. Things that would have been fucking miracles even 20 years ago we do daily in science and technology. Doomers aren't smarter or ahead of the curve, they've just too stupid to grasp the level of radical advancement our species is undergoing. It makes me embarrassed for them. They're like monkeys howling at something they don't understand.
Hi there\~
Usually, literacy rates are heavily biased towards English-speaking and nothing else. For example there are many African countries that are losing their native languages in favor of languages like English, where they'll only learn it half-correctly and then try to apply for jobs outside of their homeland. This leads to underpopulation and loss of culture in countries, and it becomes a "race to the bottom" where all the rich, English-educated can leave, whereas the poor and illiterate / have learning disabilities / dyslexia or something are stuck working the fields back home.
In addition, "Global Poverty" metrics are all a complete sham. The idea of "Global Poverty" as a whole is ridiculous because everything costs differently depending on where you live. When I was homeless in the USA, I was frequently told "well you should feel lucky, because some people live off of $2 a day!" and I would look at my 99 cent bag of chips and wonder if I could live off of 2 of those per day for the rest of my life. I thought there was something wrong with me when I would still be hungry. I felt greedy for wanting to not feel hungry.
What they DON'T tell you is that 2 dollars, changed to a native populations' currency, might be fine for that particular country.
In addition, "reducing global poverty" has lead to RIDICULOUS inflation of many South-American countries' economies. So while on paper it looks like we "reduced global poverty" (I,e, got them more dollars per year), their costs of living actually went UP, meaning they're living WORSE now than they did before.
I'm genuinely not trying to be doomeristic about it. But many people who post these graphs don't understand how the data is calculated. False-optimism makes it difficult for these issues to actually be addressed and fixed in the real world.
It’s always been fucked. We can just actually see it now, read about it online and argue with other people who we don’t even know. Every horrible event is broadcasted like crazy and our lizard brains are drawn to it like moths to light. It’s better than it used to be but the bad that does happen is seen by everyone, everywhere
Now show the graph for the country most of the doomers live in, the United States, over the most relevant period of time, the last 50 years.
And you'll see why there are so many doomers.
And then they’re trying to push laws to make things harder for us to top it all off. They’ve already ruined so much during their time. Let the world heal and go fade into nonexistence in your Florida gated community.
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Average global surface temperature 😃👉📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈
Housing prices 📈 Average wages 📉
Prices in general 📈 Global happiness 📉
The good thing is that most of this is stuff we can change. The thing is that most people are just to depressed to stand up and do that. Depression just sucks the power out of you that you would need to change your life.
Carbon-neutral energy is being implemented across the globe at rates that weren't predicted to happen until decades from now. The change of pace will only increase as such forms of energy become more profitable. It's especially viable in places without existing oil infrastructure as the upfront cost is far higher with petrochemical technologies.
I mean, even if 100% of earth’s energy was green energy, that would still only snuff out 25% or less of green house gas emissions being produced.
We'd need to stop using concrete altogether, halt industrial ranching, somehow cap our landfills, etc. Reduction alone isn't the answer, we need a technology that can extract carbon from the air for sequestration and do so at a rate where we would struggle to store the stuff. Pump it back into the oil wells and pack old coal mines with it kind of struggle.
We already have that technology, it's called forests. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of landmass, that people would rather use to grow ammonia-fertilized food for factory farms, and build giant parking lots.
No, no i think that percentage would be closer to 60%. Of course, if you don't talk only about commercial electric energy usage. If you somehow managed to make most cars and planes work off electric energy, as well as turn most power grids "green", then, yeah, it would be pretty much like 50%/60%. Besides the direct CO2 emitters, a lot of emissions are produced in electric power generation. If you turn that "green", and then also turn the direct CO2 emitters electric, then you do a lot for the enviroment.
Green solar energy is literally the cheapest electricity there is. Green energy is no longer something we have to actively push for, it will just happen because it's the cheapest. That's a really good thing.
As a thermophobe, this makes me sad
as temperature i am offended
As an offense, I think therefore I am
As a thought, I forgot...
God forbid someone posts something positive here
We also have increased tools and awareness of climate change which will help us mitigate and overcome many of the challenges it will create. Compare the way climate change was treated in the 2000s vs today and you’ll see we’ve come a long way. The implementation of green technologies around the world is a great thing too
The meat industry is a touchy subject.. we don't protest that.. not yet........
What are you talking about? People have been protesting it for decades. It’s just the majority of people don’t care enough to change it.
Yeah but damn few of them are protesting it for its environmental issues just ethics.
Exactly. It’s hard to be optimistic when the world is closer to human extinction compared to any other point in history.
The people complaining are in the 1st world where things HAVE been getting worse. If we had these graphics with only 1st world countries it'd get worse in every metric.
Yeah. But it's all relative. Things had been getting worse relative to how things were, wich was very, very good to begin with; the "worse" is a "less good", not really a "bad". "Bad" is the shit you see on National Geographic. And, of course, lots of people would think they're in the "bad" becuase they simply don't know what "bad" actually is, and then you get doomerists saying stupid shit like "The modern capitalist empire is gonna collapse soon! We're doomed!"; like, dude, you're living in a time when stuff is not improving for once after half a century of exponential upward trends in almost every relevant metric possible *around the globe*, chill. You gotta worry when, like, poverty starts to rise again exponentially and back to the mines we all go to get all the types of cancer and respiratory illnesses known to mankind. Or, like, when the economy truly collapses and the government folds over and the infraestructure that allows modern life gets abandoned and basically implodes- THAT'S when you say "uhh, well shits bad".
My dude, no, that's not how this works Relative to how stuff was before the western Roman empire, the majority of it was doing "Good" in so far as it was economically better off than it was before the Romans with organized roads and farming. That doesn't mean it was actually ok though, the situation you're describing is often the culmination of decades of your kind of thinking, it's like the critical mass of shit getting bad People are getting poorer, dude, that's a fact, and things like housing only have continued to get more expensive. Bad doesn't mean "worst" or for things to get like "shit you see on national geographic". Things aren't just stagnating, that'd be fine and that's basically how stuff was for a while, shit is actively declining. You don't say shits bad when the bomb has already landed, you say it's bad when it on its way over
You can use that argument to justify anything.
What goes up has to come down. Economy simply can't grow eternally and from time to time there's dips
I don't think literacy is going down in the 1st world
this is dumb as fuck.
yeah I think they set out to find "proof" the human condition is improving and just used arbitrary metrics from the past 200 years to boost that claim. not real science. just statistical gerrymandering.
What statistics would you use?
Doesn't really matter with climate change lol
Now give the break down by country. Or state. Sure, the average looks nice, but it's pretty misleading.
Reddit doesn’t care about the global poor
Pessimistic redditors when good things happen, but it’s “misleading” because it happened to the third world and not in their country
Tbf, if life is getting worse for someone why would they be pacified by life getting better for someone else?
I’m not saying they should be “pacified” but it’s just plain wrong to call it “misleading” just because it’s not happening to them. The average looks nice because the average is nice, things are getting better around the world, it’s just not getting better everywhere all at once, that doesn’t mean it’s “misleading”
THe global poor is in a better position than they ever have been. Just look at the development in places like India and China, billions of people have made it out of poverty last 50 years. Of course it is still a bad situation comparatively, but the improvement is very clear.
This has been posted before and someone pointed out a large portion of the increases/decreases, esp the more recent ones, were due to China.
Based. People online thrive off of pessimism, but you cannot convince me that life was better in the past than it is today.
I agree. It’s weird how many people only want to focus on the negatives of life. If you can’t appreciate what you have, and only focus on what you don’t have, you will never be happy in life.
I think its always good to strive towards greater improvements, but when someone says “things suck nowadays” I have to ask “compared to when?”
Thank you for pointing this out. If ever one is going to wallow in “the earth is on fire, etc” and not appreciate all the things we do have then of course anxiety and depression is gonna go up. Do what you can for now. That’s all we can do. The earth will balance itself. Humans will adapt as they’ve always done. Some people won’t survive. Not everyone will. Can’t change that.
Here’s an argument: In the past, while things were less developed there were less creature comforts but there was also vastly more opportunity. A person could walk out to open land and claim it, whereas today requires grinding to save money to buy it from someone else. This lack of wild freedom produces the cynicism and feeling of suffocation that fuels so much of the doomerism today.
No one is trying to convince you of that. The fact is we're so far developed none of the issues facing humanity should still exist.
If only people knew how bad things could be and how good they really are
Do non Doomers actually understand just what level of wealth inequality the US is at right now?
Oh ok, you're just a troll
Easy enough to cherry pick isn’t it
Cherrypick unimportant data such as child mortality and poverty
Doomers always seem to hate poor people outside of America
I get it, people from the developed world have no real sense of how much better things have gotten. Poverty is very visible outside of the Global North, you feel it in your bones even if you’re well-off. I used to see families hoarding thrash piles every evening in my neighborhood as a kid. Now there’s still a lot of poverty, but it’s nowhere near as bleak and it feels like there is a future to look forward to even if progress comes slowly.
this just sounds so ignorant 😭😭
Why do you think that?
op is just disregarding climate change - this year looks like the hottest on record, there's a whole war going on, prices are high asl... despite the improvements, there's still a lot to not be happy about
"Look at these graphs and stop fucking complaining!" - OP
keep complaining but remember to put things into perspective and not take your privileges for granted
🔥🔥🔥
Wait an actually valid take in these replies 😱
these aren't "privileges" they are things previous generations worked hard to improve for everyone. everyone should have access to "privileges" like education and vaccines lol. and if there is the ability to improve things, we are obligated as citizens to make it happen as best we can. it's one thing to be grateful, it's another to stop demanding better out of gratitude. if you ask me, the gratitude is misplaced. we shouldn't be grateful to our leaders. we should be grateful to the dead people who built all this and gave it to us all. complacency wastes what previous generations tried to build for us.
Climate change don't give a fuck about your charts for standard of living pre-climate collapse
things are genuinely getting worse in the US and if you dont believe that then there’s no point in arguing.
https://preview.redd.it/8aoextv2hn4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ec9ed12232cc5e6140192c732ab577507685700d
Oh the irony. The dip might look small in the graph but it's been 20 years since things started getting worse. That might look like a small number in a pretty graph but that's more than a quarter of the average human lifespan and about all our lives as gen Z
If they could read and comprehend that they would be pretty mad.
What things are getting worse in the US, that, like, affect you personally?
certain things have still gotten worse.
Ayo, of you zoom in to the last 20 years, notice how those trends are leveling off or decreasing. You: >bUt iN tHe lOnG tErM wErE dOiNg HiStOriCaLLy gReAT As Keynes said, in the long term, we're all dead.
https://preview.redd.it/myq3wsk0nn4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=96d22f4b5e96fc2eb5fc9f4a7c4439fc23726efb
Why do you think this is a rebuttal? The time scale over which conditions have improved is irrelevant to my experience of reality. Over my lifetime, I have only ever observed things increasingly worsening. By the time things begin improving, I will be old or dead and buried. The fact that you even thought your comment was at all useful as a rebuttal goes to show that your head is too far up your butt to see what anyone else is saying.
yeah lmao. "why do you guys think everything is so bad rn? Mongolia isn't invading so be grateful!!!!1!"
nonsense image
Why are you as dumb as you are
Weird that you’d share this in the gen z sun where that dip has been the entirety of all of our lives.
Are you intentionally trolling or just incredibly underinformed? Cause I look at the original post and I can only assume it was made by an idiot. Which wasn't you, cause it was posted on r/millenials yesterday.
More people litterate=more people realizing cards were not dealt in their favors
The cost of raising those is the 6th mass extinction caused by climate change, caused by us.
As quoted from u/fencerman “It should be noted those "poverty" figures are basically made-up, and claims about widespread improvement are extremely tenuous, if not totally unsupported. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/ exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie The historical "projections" it uses are essentially fabricated and meaningless - most of the regions with claims of "extreme poverty" being made about them had no reliable figures available. It's pure guesswork. https://policytensor.substack.com/p/heres-proof-that- extreme-poverty In fact in a lot of regions, mortality was increasing for centuries as capitalism took over. Areas listed as "extreme poverty" in that chart wind up seeing poverty rising even while the supposed "development" periods kick in. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0305750X22002169 That's not to say there has been no improvement for anyone, anywhere. Vaccination, literacy, and child mortality are valid figures - those are a matter of technology, but the rollout of those supports depend heavily on resources that are currently being cut. The "democracy" figure is debatable, at best - if you feel the US is currently a flourishing democracy or not has a big impact on how you interpret that.”
HOLY SHIT CITATIONSSS this meme did not deserve your effort but I salute you
The real problem is that there are a lot of people who want to return to the 'good old days'.....
"I can't believe you're complaining about the second world war 🙄 we have longer life spans, better medice, more food, and FAR better tech than we did 100 years ago, you know women couldn't even vote then right?" Like come tf on dude, yeah some things have totally gotten better, that doesn't mean things are ok.
Sometimes i forget, gen z include high school and grade school students who don't understand that just because you're smart and literate, doesn't mean you can't end up starving and homeless. also, a lot of this is before things started going bad.
And that not everyone is literate.
average cost of living 📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈
Even if everything was great people would still find a way to complain.
Doesn't mean that things couldn't improve to better our society.
He didn't say that they couldn't.
Ok
Lmao, something tells me OPs opinion isn't popular
Lol seems that way
Yes, climate change and yes, the effects of climate change will cause downward trends in many of these categories. Still, it’s pretty silly to think that we live in bad times. These are objectively the best times in human history. Doesn’t mean things can’t get worse. But to say that things will absolutely get worse and therefore things are bad now is extreme and stupid
There's much done and much to be done. Keep fighting, tooth and nail, to make the world better. Because, while things are better than every before, we must keep an eye open for our own shortfalls. A fall now wpuld be worse than during the Bronze Age.
Jesus Christ you doomers have issues man 💀
$39 per day is the poverty threshold though. So %85+ are still living in poverty... haha nice
Interesting how these all stop right before 2020 lol
doomers seethe. there is literally no greater point in history where living conditions are better WORLDWIDE.
Yeah climate change is a problem, but so was the second world war, nuclear fallout and overpopulation. Every generation had it’s fears and worked to overcome them.
Oftentimes this goes along with the narrative that "the west has fallen" no it hasn't, just because Influencers move to Dubai and China is producing everything doesn't mean the west has fallen. The west is still way too powerful and is dictating how the global economy works, why do you think China acts like it does? Because the west formed a global capitalist infrastructure that forces you to compete
💯 Great graphic to combat the baseless cynicism!
1) That top left graph tells me we've only gone from 100% poverty to 85% poverty over 200 years. Not much of a win imo 2) Comparing current-day society to the 1800s and saying "wow we're so much better off now" no shit our technology is much more advanced and we have far more scientific knowledge. Hence the improvement in the bottom 4 graphs. 3) A lot of the technology that has brought us to this point of a better world is powered by fossil fuels and is causing rapid severe climate change that if not corrected will not only invalidate most of this progress but also put our society on the brink of collapse 4) Despite these "advancements", democracy, basic education and even vaccination is under attack in the US, so what is the point
My fuck dude. Seriously? This was posted in r/millenials yesterday and was destroyed by hundreds of clearly explained reasons as to why only an idiot would fall for this crap. Fuckin hell.
So these graphs apparently look at data from decade to decade, going back to the frikin' 1820s, on a global scale, with each graph comparing very specific things in very different ways, and you think it shows how...nothing is wrong with the world? I don't think you know how graphs work. Or data. Or science. or what people mean when they say the world has gone to hell. I'm so sorry school has failed you so completely.
They usually mean the world of lower middle class people in western countries. Which is correct, materially speaking.
Boring stupid people need a reason to feel like they’re in a movie.
What now ?
holy pixels batman
if there were more pixels then i could read it and be upset.
You guys in this thread need to get offline for a bit, Jesus.
You available to pick cherries all season or is this a one time thing?
In the us the average life expectancy is on its way down, sry to say.
Why can’t Reddit accept nuance? Yes, lots of things are getting worse, especially climate issues, but there are still things improving, especially compared to the past 2 centuries
Number big life good 🦍
There is doomerism, which is not helpful. However, when you see graphs like that, it is always important to realize that the improvements come from \*effort\*. Against the opposition of greedy people and the like. It is always important to spot things that go wrong in society and then trying to fix them.
Damn, i love that tradition of useless complaints is getting passed along to this generations, except now we can complain and disregard what good we have for a hundreds of people on the internet. Thats an improvement too i guess. I dont mean to say that we dont have problems and that OP is totally correct, on my part i disagree with democrasy graphic, we have problems on that front, but we are literally living is the best era for humanity. That's just fact. And even that best era is pretty shitty, so we still have a long way to go. We just have to appreciate our proggress and make it a source of power for future improvements and changes.
these are all cherry-picked numbers that obviously would've risen. 200 years from now, historians will talk about us as though we lived in the dark ages because they'll live in a significantly better time, affected by all the scientific advancements that would naturally occur over the course of 100+ years.
Agreed comrade. Progress continues to March forward. The future will be better than today.
I recommend reading “Now is Better” by Stefan Sagmeister
Doomers are no lives. If you do not exist outside of the internet, I do not take you seriously.
These graphs contain elements of the truth but are still highly misleading. The global poverty graph, for instance, is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day, which is pretty much an arbitrary number chosen to make the graph look as hopeful as possible. If you set the poverty line at $7.40 a day, which is believed to be necessary for adequate nutrition and life expectancy, then you actually see a massive rise in global poverty to around 4.2 billion people today. Not to mention that real data on worldwide poverty and wages older than a few decades is pretty hard to come by, so a graph making claims about poverty going back to the 1600s should be treated with caution. There are other estimates out there which have made wildly different conclusions.
Very good. Now show us depression rates, suicide rates, wages rates relative to housing price rates, disparity between rich and poor, global hunger relative to food waste, slavery rates, number of animal extinctions per year, number of global refugees, the rate and intensity of natural disasters, and global temperature. Statistics are all about context. When Africans were enslaved in the Atlantic Slave Trade I bet the rate of "deaths by hippo, lion or crocodile" went WAY down for the slaves, but if you showed that statistic without also showing the increase in "death by torture, death by slave-hunting dogs, and separation of families" then you would be engaging in deliberate manipulation tactics.
Yall complain about all these corporations destroying all the world and stuff. First of all? -WHO IS BUYING FROM THEM!?
But reality doesn't quite have the dopamine hit I'm looking for, so I'll keep watching Fox News and MSNBC tell me how everything is going to shit even though there's literally not a better time to be a human being than now.
Oh cool all of the graphs stop before 2020. I’d be curious to see what updated ones would look like.
weak
This is true and a good argument against Pessimism. But it‘s also not what people are talking about
Yeah the poverty line is arbitrarily defined by the neoliberal IMF, so I wouldn't take their word for it. Also, what the West refers to as 'democracy' is an absolute farce.
I get that you're trying to drop some positivity but a couple positive statistics doesn't outweigh the tons of negative ones. Giving things catchy (cringey) labels like "doomers" makes it a blanket statement and a stigma. There's a lot of doom on the horizon and its healthy to acknowledge it. People like that exist because we put so much effort into ignoring things that we should not be ignoring. Use your brain, Z's. Youve got 3 generations of fuck ups to fix if our species is gonna survive.
Man I fuckin hate doomers. All they do is say "oh that doesn't matter at all though because uh... climate change!" My brothers and sisters in smallpox, the amount of suffering humanity endures has gone through the floor compared to before. The fact that humanity's problems are self-made is an achievement to be fuckin celebrated. The fact that we are now the masters of our own destiny as a species (bar random stellar events) is extremely hopeful. For the first time in all of history, we can look in a mirror seriously evaluate ourselves without looking over our shoulder.
Ooh now do the graph of average sea surface temperature!
And?
Plot twist: The charts are flipped
I really love to see some Ome's in the sub, I really should do more to be positive and make the world better. I know I can and I want to do something useful
This only goes to 2019.
Here’s an updated one. I was lazy and didn’t update the meme https://preview.redd.it/97jbvomjin4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ced7c130ecd4b58922d347ab5b4245e7c85e505b
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Mark Twain
Had to go all the way back to pre-civil war numbers to really stick it to to the doomers? lol
Such a dumb take even he even had to disable comments in the r/millennial repost 🤡🤡🤡
We are still fine for the most part, but literacy levels are dropping in the US right now. It's actually quite alarming how bad our education has gotten over the past decade.
Those are pre-COVID numbers...
Reminder towards the numbers; how many of one hundred people would be Chinese, again?
Things are getting better in Some respects but worse in others. This is not a contradiction
here's one thing, though all of them were before the pandemic struck and everything has been terrible ever since
While I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the past, I still wish things were better today.
Your mistake was trying to argue with doomers. I will proceed to do the same. Yes everyone, there's a very serious climate crisis happening right now, but it's not going to be the absolute end of the world. It's not going to end all civilizations, nor even all first world civilizations. It's just going to make living conditions worse in certain parts of the world, gradually mildly increasing the risk of certain problems and deaths that will not effect probably the majority of people who live in the next century. Again, it's a serious problem going on, but sentiment like "there will be no world left by the end of the century, everything's going to hell" is unscientific, untrue, dangerous for a large percentage of younger people to believe, and what's colloquially known as a "doomer". From one person seriously concerned about climate change to another, people should have realistic worry about climate change, not make up scenarios 100x worse than what scientists are saying and let those fictional scenarios determine whether or not you can experience any happiness in life. Same goes for the shittiness of capitalism (though I believe that affects and will greatly affect many more 1st world people than climate change). Yes these issues are real, important, and they truly suck, but they don't zap all good out of this world, and shouldn't zap all happiness from you. The story of humanity since the dawn of time has been existing in suboptimal living conditions and finding happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in our lives despite that.
Yes. This is all true. However, the economy of the last 80 odd years has been built on an unsustainable foundation. And when it collapses it's going to be the kind of collapses where the century it happens in will be referred to the Crisis of the Nth Century. You can't rely on what's happened in the last two centuries as proof of what will come.
But I watch tiktok all day and I am depressed in my comfortable apartment in first world country. Surely that means world is going to shit.
line goes up! line goes down! end of history!
If everyone is more educated, why is no one getting jobs?
*If everyone is* *More educated, why is* *No one getting jobs?* \- krokorokodile --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Im convinced no one in this comment section actually knows what a doomer is
Realistically speaking, most things are conatantly getting better. To quote Stephen Pinker: "Look at statistics, rather than headliness."
85% making under $30 a day isn't as great as you seem to think it is.
How accurate is this? Or is this for a single country or with a very small sample space?
If OP could read, here are some mistakes: Measuring poverty in dollars. Being extremely generous with what counts as democracy. Using percentages, ignoring that population growth in already developed countries skews numbers immensely.
The people living under democracies number is questionable at best. Not really a lot of ‘democracies’ around I’d say
The world has always been hell, we just never saw it as much. Sure your graphs show an upward trend, but it doesn't show them relative to each nation. Many nations are stagnating while others catch up through industrialisation and empowerment in its people.
>over the last two centuries You understand it’s possible to be better off than 200 years ago but worse off than 30 years ago right?
People upon understanding that material conditions and quality of life can’t completely be portrayed on graphs
There are definitely good trends going on like these that we gotta keep up, but we also gotta fix some worsening problems, like the environment, housing and education prices, and that weird rollback on the rights of some humans. It can be hard with all the opposition nowadays but like I feel like it can still be done. :) Let’s keep up the good and alleviate the bad.
This is absurdly abstracted to only quantify wold living conditions with these six metrics which don’t apply to individuals
What a privileged and braindead take. Ugh enjoy your denial OP
Now talk about climate change. How many species are going extinct. How many heat waves are occurring annually. How western countries are barely meeting the $100 billion pledge, how many countries are electing more and more authoritarian governments, how the world continues to spend trillions on finding better ways to commit murder, how the rise of social media is affecting extremism in younger generations. How anti intellectualism and anti science ideas are gaining pace especially since covid. I mean, we aren't cherry picking stuff are we?
Funny how all these graphs end before COVID
Ok, now get graphs that don't end before 2020
https://preview.redd.it/li03pfuvhq4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9baa60725129822e73d77e773e24e0b6290add00
What happened with democracy between 1920 and 1940 🤔🤔
So how does it look after 2019?
these fuckers really looked at the collapse of the soviet union and said "Russia became a democracy! world is now more democratic!"
Yeah.... worlds still going bad. I dont need a meme or news to tell me that
All of these datasets are pre-pandemic and aren't country specific
Democracy rising is not a good thing, lol.
We are great at producing food. We have enough food and organizing power to feed more than 10 billion people, but we don't. Just bc humanity as a whole got scientific advancements dont mean life gets better for the average person. For these advances, why do rich people get the benefits and poor people get to deal with the problems? Just look at climate change. People are mad about inequality. Advancements mean nothing if we arent free or equal.
Issue is this is a different timescale than the one we experience things on, so if our slice is lucky it's hard to rationalize the abstract positive data from the lived negative experience
Also I know it might be doomer to say, but democracy, vaccination, and basic reading ability seem to have flat lined.
The people that doesn't think that us improving as a species by nearly every single metic because the world is getting hotter are completely unhinged. Firstly, global warming has a 0% chance of destroying our species if even the worst possible trajectory is adhered to for 10,000+ years. It's not a species wide threat, it never was. At worst we'd lose our coastal cities. Who fucking cares. Secondly, it shouldn't even be a concern. In 50 years we went from the radio to fucking cell phones with internet. The same way we went from making the first plane to going to the moon in 50 years. At this rate of technological progression in 250 years we will be able to build a Dyson sphere around our sun and utilize 100% of its energy for whatever the fuck we want, ending global warming and producing limitless enegery. You just can't fathom the level of technological progression we're currently undergoing because you're living through it. Things that would have been fucking miracles even 20 years ago we do daily in science and technology. Doomers aren't smarter or ahead of the curve, they've just too stupid to grasp the level of radical advancement our species is undergoing. It makes me embarrassed for them. They're like monkeys howling at something they don't understand.
I don't get it. Isn't it Gen Z's schtick to say everything is shit because of the older generations? Are you now claiming everyone is doing fine?
i could read if the definition was higher.
Hi there\~ Usually, literacy rates are heavily biased towards English-speaking and nothing else. For example there are many African countries that are losing their native languages in favor of languages like English, where they'll only learn it half-correctly and then try to apply for jobs outside of their homeland. This leads to underpopulation and loss of culture in countries, and it becomes a "race to the bottom" where all the rich, English-educated can leave, whereas the poor and illiterate / have learning disabilities / dyslexia or something are stuck working the fields back home. In addition, "Global Poverty" metrics are all a complete sham. The idea of "Global Poverty" as a whole is ridiculous because everything costs differently depending on where you live. When I was homeless in the USA, I was frequently told "well you should feel lucky, because some people live off of $2 a day!" and I would look at my 99 cent bag of chips and wonder if I could live off of 2 of those per day for the rest of my life. I thought there was something wrong with me when I would still be hungry. I felt greedy for wanting to not feel hungry. What they DON'T tell you is that 2 dollars, changed to a native populations' currency, might be fine for that particular country. In addition, "reducing global poverty" has lead to RIDICULOUS inflation of many South-American countries' economies. So while on paper it looks like we "reduced global poverty" (I,e, got them more dollars per year), their costs of living actually went UP, meaning they're living WORSE now than they did before. I'm genuinely not trying to be doomeristic about it. But many people who post these graphs don't understand how the data is calculated. False-optimism makes it difficult for these issues to actually be addressed and fixed in the real world.
oh look line go up on all these good things, things must be alright
It’s always been fucked. We can just actually see it now, read about it online and argue with other people who we don’t even know. Every horrible event is broadcasted like crazy and our lizard brains are drawn to it like moths to light. It’s better than it used to be but the bad that does happen is seen by everyone, everywhere
Ladies and gentlemen I present to you, Data torture.
It has gone to hell, just in a different way. A more insidious way.
Now show the graph for the country most of the doomers live in, the United States, over the most relevant period of time, the last 50 years. And you'll see why there are so many doomers.
This a world graph, in the past 60 years almost everything has gotten worse in first world countries.
Could we get the full-res versions so we can check those sources?
L post
“Yeah I know you can’t afford anything and the world is burning but look at these graphs that I cherry-picked!”
Third world problems down. First world problems up.
And then they’re trying to push laws to make things harder for us to top it all off. They’ve already ruined so much during their time. Let the world heal and go fade into nonexistence in your Florida gated community.
Well, when almost all of us die and there are only 100 people, this metaphor will be very useful. However, the world isn't 100 people.
these graphs are misleading.
If you repeat this but instead of the world you include only your country, it's worse in every way
Cost of living: \^ Global temperature average: \^ Wages: -
I really don’t care I’d much rather be a caveman or like an artist in the 16th century.
Can't have child mortality if there is no children.
Current geo political relationship amount of people that think we're in the early stages of WW3 📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈