C'on Ibian, we have never in history lived better than we do for the past few decades. Or can you point out any moment in time you would have better preferred to live?
this depends entirely on the metrics you measure your quality of life with. Also, as always, social class has a great influence.
I think I would be perfectly happy as a petty aristocrat in Roman Britain for example. For many, a life in a clean and abundant environment with actual unclaimed wonder over the horizon would be far preferable to today's dystopian prison web of interstate highways and satellites.
Honestly I would rather live in hunter gatherer times. Before agriculture started
But they only lived 40 years if they were lucky.
Suicide was practically non existent among indigenous tribes. It's clear that modern society is ruining peoples mental health and happiness.
There wasn't much time to think about suicide is my guess.
The Hobbesian "nasty brutish and short" fallacy again.
As I said, social class is always a strong predictor of longevity, not always for the best, sometimes the party lifestyle is so intense the dukes die early, however we really need to put Hobbes out to pasture on this;
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevityIf one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.
In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old.
Then there are tombstone inscriptions and grave epigrams, such as this one for a woman who died in Alexandria in the 3rd Century BC. “She was 80 years old, but able to weave a delicate weft with the shrill shuttle”, the epigram reads admiringly.
Bang on, I was going to leave this one alone, but you are quite right. Anyone who survived the things that did kill (more often) back then, had a fairly good chance of living almost as long as people today.
Even hunter-gatherers, who were fitter and had a much more varied diet lived well if they were not taken off by disease or accident. Obviously infant mortality was higher, and a badly broken leg could kill you, since it was not as operable as today, but people lived well and archaeologists' research indicates pre-agricultural era hunter-gatherers appear to have had a varied and well-balanced diet of nuts, seeds, berries, roots etc. that were far more healthy than many modern human diets are today.
Today in the west, we eat processed foods from a reduced number of food groups and are less mobile, less fit and more obese on average. So our average age may be higher before death, but we are not (on average) healthier, we just don't die from as many risk factors which we can avoid with drugs and modern medicine. Obese, immobile people live longer, sure but.....
In some modern, western societies average longevity is actually falling. Pre-modern societies didn't self harm with drugs, had less risk of mass epidemics and certainly had less food-related diabetes (now hugely on the rise in the West, due to bad diet and lack of exercise).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-lifeexpectancy/life-expectancy-declines-seen-in-u-s-and-other-high-income-countries-idUSKCN1L723RI ain't sayin' life was better in some golden age - Jojo is right: NOT 'everyone' died horrible deaths much younger than we do today.
