The Best Time, Period.
Lately on various social media platforms, I’ve been seeing a lot of people posting statuses lamenting the current times. They say things like, “I grew up in the 80’s. A time when you had to actually talk to a person face to face, you didn’t always have your eyes glued on your cell phone. We didn’t have video games, we had to go outside and play. AIDS scared the shit out of everyone!” I actually haven’t seen one that said that last bit, however it demonstrates my point. Right now is the greatest time in history to be alive.
But Kurtis, times used to be so much simpler back in the day. To which I say, “Duh.” No matter what time you are in, the times before then were simpler. As we have progressed through the ages, things have become more complex. Things will continue to become more complex in the future. That’s just how it works. We can accept that and adapt, as our species has done throughout history; or we can plant our heels into the ground, close our eyes, plug our ears, and reminisce about the good old days.
Were they really that good though? Might we be romanticizing the past a tad bit? Here is a post I saw on Facebook the other day:
“Remember when your Mom would bake and you got to lick the beaters without someone freaking out because it may contain raw eggs? LIKE if you did ..... and lived to tell about it!”
Yes most people survived eating raw cookie dough, but the fact of the matter is SOME people did get Salmonella. From 1980 to 1989 the rate of Salmonella in the Northeast United States increased from about 1.8 per 100,000 people to 10.2 per 100,000 people. The number of cases peaked in 1989 and dropped to about 4.0 per 100,000 people in 1999. (CDC.gov)
The technology of today is growing faster than anyone could have imagined. To try and describe everything that is happening in every field would take many, many, hours of watching videos, reading articles, and general googling. Fortunately I love doing exactly that. But the list of things is extremely long, sticking with the salmonella tangent; I’m going to focus on a few of the things happening in the medical field.
First out of the gate, we have the world’s first prosthetic leg that has a sense of feeling. Pause on that for a second. That’s some Star Wars level shit, and it exists right now. How about 3-D printing skin for burn victims, that’s not even something anyone could have possibly predicted was coming, but it’s here. Just this May scientists successfully used a virus to attack cancer cells. The fact of the matter is, right now is the best time ever to get sick.
Obviously this is just a blip on the spectrum of things happening in the medical field. Every single field is growing and advancing faster than it ever has in history, it’s the idea of exponential growth, and it’s very difficult for the human mind to truly understand. This is because exponential growth does not exist in nature, everything that grows, plateaus in nature. The growth of our understanding and knowledge does not have any such plateau, and the more that we learn, the faster we are able learn in the future. This explosion of knowledge is creating better, more advanced technology, and it keeps happening faster and faster.
Still, I hear things like, “Technology is ruining the world. There’s no more privacy.” Well yea, our idea of privacy is going to have to change, the whole way the world works is changing and evolving, and barring some cataclysmic destruction of civilization, it’s not going to stop. So we have to accept it and evolve with it, or eventually we’ll go extinct, like every other species that failed to adapt.
I am extremely excited to be living in the current times. We are going to start seeing truly mind boggling things in the coming decades, the potential is limitless. They’re working on artificial intelligence, faster than light travel, switching to 100% renewable energy, and so many more beautiful ideas that will alter the world in ways we can’t even fathom. I will not spend one moment longing for a more simple time; I prefer to spend my time dreaming of a future full of promise.