The prevailing narrative among particular segments of the population is that life today is infinitely better than ever in human history — and, by extrapolation, seemingly only liable to get better and better.
That claim may have been true — and, perhaps, inarguable — a couple of decades ago.
But I would argue it’s an anachronism now, a relic of a more idealistic time — pre-pandemic (and the much-hyped Pandemic 2.0), pre-War of Terror (now aimed at “domestic terrorist” Americans themselves), pre-2008 Collapse (when the patches made were only metaphorical duct tape on the Titanic that is the fiat central banking system).
People get mad at me whenever I discuss the generational divide in terms of how the current society and economy and their prospects for the future are perceived, and who might be blinded by their personal history and normalcy bias, but c’est la vie.
Related: Zoomers vs Boomers: Let’s Play the Generational Blame Game
Piers Morgan is a quintessential Boomer with conventional sensibilities (although British and not American). He doesn’t understand the pessimism that seems to grip the youth of the West today, opining with Jordan Peterson recently:
By any sort of conventional metric of what is it like to live right now, it should be, and it should feel like, the best time to ever be alive. You know, we’re living longer, we’re living healthier, there are actually fewer wars than in recorded history, the water’s cleaner, there’s less abject poverty, and so on and so son, and yet young people in particular… seem completely gripped in a kind of doom-laden neurosis about life. What is going on there?
Wrong.
Absolutely wrong.
F-.
None of that is remotely true.
That whole spiel is total delusion.
Maybe it’s “the best time to ever be alive” for an overfed multimillionaire cable news host feeding on what remains of the industry he helped destroy.
If ever a “fact-check” were truly deserved…
a.) We’re not living longer; that trendline is going in the opposite direction now. This is established fact.
b.) We’re not healthier than ever; America has the highest chronic disease rate in the world despite spending more both as a raw figure and as a proportion of GDP on so-called “healthcare” than any country in world history.
Via Children's Health Defense (emphasis added):
The U.S. healthcare system ranks last among 10 advanced economies, according to a report released today by the Commonwealth Fund.
One of the report’s key findings is that the U.S. lags behind its international peers considerably in terms of health system performance — yet the U.S. is also “an outlier on health care spending.”
In 1980, U.S. health expenditures were “comparable to outlays in Sweden and Germany (8.2% of GDP).” However, since then, “the U.S. has far outpaced other nations, spending more than 16 percent of its GDP on health care in 2022” — a figure “predicted to exceed 20 percent by 2035.”
According to the report, this finding reflects the “enduring U.S. dilemma of spending vast amounts for generally poor results — the very definition of a low-value health system.”
c.) We find ourselves on the eve of World War III, it seems, but with nuclear weapons.
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d.) The water is in no way “cleaner” than ever, and neither is the food supply.
