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0 pointsonion2k7y ago0 comments

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.

Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons about being happy with what you have.

Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.

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crimsonalucard7y ago· 2 in thread

>Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.

Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is:

People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout history many people have felt either way. It is not a new phenomenon. Whether these feelings lead to revolution in the future is impossible to determine.

You need to look at trendlines, data points and evidence.

onion2kOP7y ago

It is not a new phenomenon.

When I said "relatively new" I meant "in the past 300 years or so". When I said "any old philosophy book" I meant "one written 1500 years ago". I didn't make my frame of reference clear; that was obviously a mistake on my part. Saying things like "new" on a tech forum has a very different meaning compared to "new" in terms of history and philosophy. 300 years ago people were born in to a strata of society and couldn't work their way out even if they wanted to. Social mobility in the middle ages didn't exist (with a few notable exceptions like demonstrating valour in warfare.)

More recently (in the past 50 years) there have been some quite extensive studies of happiness, and envy is almost always found to be a confounding factor. Why that is seems to be the case is an interesting evolutionary question - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0161...

crimsonalucard7y ago

Still I'm looking for quantitative data, not anecdotal. Things like energy usage measured in joules or Green house gas emissions by weight or climate change by temperature.

A philosophy book offers conjecture not evidence.

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