Maybe substitute "improvement" for "justice"? I'd rather be in the bottom 5% than the middle 50, given better health and comfort in absolute terms. That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.
> That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.
You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.
I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source).
But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water.
In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources...
I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
Revisiting your provocative comments, I agree w/ much of it but not that there is less "free time" now than in centuries past. On the contrary -- for the vast majority of people, most waking hours were actively spent on subsistence and survival until very recently in human history.
> for the vast majority of people, most waking hours were actively spent on subsistence and survival
Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]
If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).
When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]
