Imagine if you were Born in 1900?

https://www.whiterocklocators.com/blog/imagine-if-you-were-born-1900 I guess it kinda puts today's problems in perspective hey?

Larry

No lame attempts at jocularity - - sometimes I wish I were born many years earlier so I would have died already.

Call me a feckless wimp, (I'm 71.5 now) but I find life nowadays overly complex for a litany of reasons.

NJ Fred

It's always a wild ride whatever the generation (or year) one is born into.

Wars, pandemics, economic downturns, and the like, are all just cyclic enough to occur with regularity in all of our lives and generations.

Pick any year, and during the following 70-80 years it's all but guaranteed there will be something unwelcome on a wide scale that happens.

But Skypilot56 does have a point. Sometimes bad things do cluster. Must have something to do with statistical variation or something. Maybe the fellow born in 1900 really was on the short end of the bad-things-in-our-lives stick.

But we do make progress. Medicine and health have improved dramatically over the past couple of centuries or so. Technological advances have been extraordinary, sometimes even world-changing (think computers).

Progress even occurs in some of those no-good cyclic things mentioned above.

For example, take the matter of "major" wars. And by "major" I mean wars like World War 2, or the American Civil War, etc., the really big and costly ones, happening somewhere in the world at some time. (Of course, for those who fight in the "minor" wars, like Korea, Vietnam, the Middle Eastern wars, etc., they for sure seem pretty major, but I think you get my drift. Some wars really are more "biggies" than others).

But to my point. As of right now, it's been been 75 years since the end of World War 2, the last "major" war in the world.

Would anyone care to venture a guess as to when the last time was that the world went more than 70 years without a "major" war going on somewhere on the planet?

According to a history website I visited recently (and unfortunately I have misplaced its URL, but can report what it said), it was during the reign of the emperor Trajan (98-117 AD) during the third century of the Roman Empire.

Almost 2,000 years ago!

Some might argue that the modern presence of nuclear deterrence has been responsible for this wonderful fact of major war absence, and failing that, that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would have become engaged in a major "conventional" war sometime during the 1950s or 1960s.

But even so, we're still setting a record for the most time in history passed since a "major" war! May we continue to do so!

And THAT'S progress!

So, the unpleasant cycles of bad things are still there, but things really can get better!

I read the article....and the thought struck me: We have become a nation of wimps. Most of us--have truly never known really hard times.

PC surgery in 1954? Brutal. That's the only word.

"... but I find life nowadays overly complex for a litany of reasons."

I suppose that is so but to some degree one can choose how much of it to engage in. For myself, I don't watch TV and pretty much use my large collection of American and British radio shows when I want that kind of entertainment. I have 3 cars that I drive regularly, a '59, a '65, and an '83, all of which I can work on. I am deep into photography and still do film in my own own darkroom. I really like using my reel-to-reel tape decks and have lately been indulging, again, in the world of 8-track tapes in a big way. I do lots of woodworking and none of my tools is digital or has lasers. I am working on an art degree and while I do have to do some online stuff to turn in papers, the drawing, ceramics, sculpture, and painting classes are as they were 100 years ago. That is not to say I am a Luddite by any means. I do write software on the side, use an iPhone, Ipad, and Apple pencil regularly.

I would NOT want to go back in time. I am grateful for the technological advancements, especially in medicine, and the leaps we have made in the area of civil rights.