More and more it seems like we are slipping towards a dystopia. Inch by inch our privacy rights are slowly being striped away. Not just by governments but by corporations, and once they are gone it is next to impossible to get them back.
You might as well say life was in black and white before the invention of the color photograph. Fun for me sometimes consisted of just a stick and a rock or a stick and my dog. The first industrial revolution initially lowered the quality of life and contentment for workers
It'd take you less than a month to adapt if there were no time machine.
The opportunities I have for travel, education, healthcare, access to arts, and other experiences are far greater than my ancestors had. The opportunities my daughters have are so much greater than even my grandmother had. I wouldn't give any of it up.
Within a month you'd be over it. It's surprising how well humans adapt to their situation
Stephen Hawking's debilitating illness doesn't stop him. He still finds joy in life and has a happy, successful marriage in addition to being the world's preeminent physicist.
This may sound weird, but I kind of dreamed of living in a dystopia. I read of a lot of Gibson and Stephenson as a kid. Utopias like heaven frankly sounds kind of boring...no challenges or struggles to overcome or face.
If I could afford to be retired today, I could easily fill the rest of my days working on things that I want to work on. I'd love to learn more about cooking, learn another language, take up carpentry, learn how to ride a trials bike, get stronger, learn to play an instrument, work towards a degree in mathematics, volunteer in my community, get my amateur radio license, travel with my wife, work on my marksmanship skills, learn watchmaking, build electronics projects, join a bowling league, and on and on. I'm very fortunate in that I love my job, but it does take up most of my time.
It's not quite so one-sided as it might at first appear.
Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking -- one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation.
One can't really prosecute this generation, for its art, its understanding, its virtuosity and good sense lies in reaching a judgment or a decision, not in taking action.
[after William Gibson...]