I don't starve if I don't work the fields.

Linux was invented and the concept of open web and right to your own hardware, although that could change.

Also, vaccines.

I regularly shop at a supermarket built on a site where people were burned as witches in the 17th century.

A ship's captain was away at sea and died after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Back home, his housemaid was accused of having created the storm and was burned at the stake. And there I am buying lemons and ice cream and toothpaste. It blows my mind.

we have a lot of life saving technology medically that we use to snap people from the jaws of death so that the state can execute them later

WIN WIN WIN

Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.

But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it's very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.

Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)

There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.

So for that alone we are extremely lucky.

GAY RIGHTS

TRANS RIGHTS

it's not perfect, but we're still getting there!

LGBTQIAPN+ I stand with you!

Medical science.

Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.

I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

you can look at old 8mm documentaries from the 1960s

Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket

We live in a world of plenty where we still produce enough food that nobody need go hungry.

We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common

The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that

Cheese

Oranges all year round. A heated house, lit after dark. Spices.

I mean, we're communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?

On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it's pretty cool. Um.

Hi. :waves:

In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.

David Bowie and Freddie Mercury did a duet.

We got the Beetlejuice sequel we have now instead of the original script they had planned.

The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey's Beads. It's an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn't be possible.

You could have been born on Mars when it had water. All that's left is dust

You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.

There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you're in them, and I'm seriously super proud of you for making it to today.

Standard of living has been steadily improving in China since the revolution, and it has managed to develop in an overwhelmingly peaceful fashion. China has achieved astounding feats of engineering with projects like cross country high speed rail, and it's currently leading the clean energy revolution globally.