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Comment by Klinky | Hacker News Reader

200 years ago the western world reacted with magnitude 9 to the thought of an independent woman or African American, or a homosexual. Shockingly some westerners still do. While we've moved further towards a post-scarcity world, forced artificial scarcity to prop up 200-year-old economic models has become problematic. Perhaps you now have this potential access to more "luxury"(education, healthcare, housing, transport, communication), but no way to actually afford it without massive debt. You end up with a lot of people feeling insecurity about their future & the end goal of society as a whole.

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There's something to be said for what you're saying. It is for sure legit that a pretty consequential risk today -- saying something dumb on Twitter and becoming unemployable in your chosen career for 5 years -- is not a thing that had to be worried about before. I acknowledge that this really does happen and it is a real thing for some people. In order to make a comment that was not completely larded with disclaimers, I didn't mention this kind of thing in my original remark.

However.

I don't care how much it hurts to be canceled, or how ponderous your student loans are, or how sad you are that you can't afford a house. Shortly before my own lifetime, my parents worried about being ruined for good when an industry moved out of our Midwestern town. They wondered how they would literally eat if that were to happen. Where could they go? What could they do? Even in the midst of current uncertainties, these worries are laughably remote for almost everyone not on the far tail of the socioeconomic distribution, a membership that includes far fewer people than ever before in history. I volunteered at a homeless shelter during peak COVID. The state of those homeless folks, vs the state of my family from the rural Midwest a few decades earlier, would be unfathomable to those who had not personally witnessed both.

Progress is real. That it doesn't _feel_ real for some is exactly my point.

Was your family being threatened by bears? Why do you mention 200 years ago initially, but your anecdote is from the 90s? Do you think they were crying wolf or overreacting and not appreciating the 170 years of progress that preceded them? Perhaps progress isn't as swift or tangible as you think it is?

I think appealing to the past generations being "a tougher breed" to undermine the current concerns of now is a weak argument. A lot of people were just told to shut up and know their place or literally die.

I use the example because I can speak to my and my family's experience directly.

I think life or death -- the prospect of starving or being homeless without recourse from relations or from society -- is different from the prospect of being stressed for other reasons. That people mistake more benign stressors for "life or death" these days is the hypothesis I am proffering.

And while I expect that you intend it as a dunk, I'll grant the point unreservedly: I very much _do_ think people were tougher in previous eras. When I read about the lives of our predecessors, and what they endured and how they bore up under it, I feel disgusted with myself. They were not perfect moral gods, but tougher? Jesus, yes.

Obviously you can speak to your family's experience, but your argument seemed to suggest they would have no room to complain compared their predecessors from 170 years ago. I don't know your exact family's story, but 30 years ago was not that long ago, and the problems faced then, many still face today. Homelessness and hunger are still major issues. Medical debt is still the largest contributor to bankruptcies. On top of this you have a major pandemic, re-stoking of cold war tensions and women's rights being rewound to the 70s.

When I look back at history I am more disgusted with the rampant exploitation that occurred, which made lives harder, an issue yet to be solved in the modern era. Sure people survived, but living a hard life is nothing anyone should aspire to, nor a reason society should be telling someone to "suck it up and stop whining".

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