@real-cool-cat I disagree. Different generations find different solutions to different problems but they always stay the same at the heart. Socrates (or it might have been Aristotle) already lamented the state of the youth. The older generations will always criticize the young without realizing that their elders did the exact same thing. And the young will always turn out to be just fine only to go on to criticize their own children's ways. It's all just nostalgia.
I don't see how you could call these times boring. I have the world at the tip of the finger. Just before I started writing this response to you I learned Japanese. I can talk to and share knowledge with people on the other side of the globe without ever having met them simply by responding to them on a forum like this. I can learn about history, about physics, chemistry, or anything else. I can watch thousands of movies, read millions of books in whatever language I desire. I find out about events everywhere in the world minutes after it happened. And all of that with nothing more than a mouseclick. So yes, this world is a boring one but only for those who don't know how to entertain themselves as it has always been.
Violent crimes are mostly going down. The amount of armed conflicts has gone down since WWII and wars between countries has almost completely vanished. The world is becoming a more peaceful and better place every day. What's become more is media coverage of crimes and conflicts. Some decades ago you'd only hear about, say, a murder if it happened somewhere in your region, nowadays such things are reported way beyond where it happened, across borders and continents. There were school shootings, anorexic people and other things you just rarely heard about them. Often especially in the case of psychological problems they weren't even classified as such and people rarely got help.
When books became something that could be mass produced, something that even the poor could buy, people feared children would become socially isolated shut-ins, only interested in the world of letters and not in the real world. There were articles that sounded exactly like those published today about the dangers of the Internet and the smartphone. (Just look at this two xkcd comic http://www.xkcd.com/1227/http://www.xkcd.com/1601/ )
The world never truly changes. Or at least, we don't. We learn different skills because we need different things (which city-dweller really needs to know how chop wood?) but at our core we stay the same. I envy those that'll come after us. For they will be the ones who will walk on Mars and travel between planets, who will build robots and advanced AI, who will find the Theory of Everything and reach the heights of gods.
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@real-cool-cat I disagree. Different generations find different solutions to different problems but they always stay the same at the heart. Socrates (or it might have been Aristotle) already lamented the state of the youth. The older generations will always criticize the young without realizing that their elders did the exact same thing. And the young will always turn out to be just fine only to go on to criticize their own children's ways. It's all just nostalgia.
I don't see how you could call these times boring. I have the world at the tip of the finger. Just before I started writing this response to you I learned Japanese. I can talk to and share knowledge with people on the other side of the globe without ever having met them simply by responding to them on a forum like this. I can learn about history, about physics, chemistry, or anything else. I can watch thousands of movies, read millions of books in whatever language I desire. I find out about events everywhere in the world minutes after it happened. And all of that with nothing more than a mouseclick. So yes, this world is a boring one but only for those who don't know how to entertain themselves as it has always been.
Violent crimes are mostly going down. The amount of armed conflicts has gone down since WWII and wars between countries has almost completely vanished. The world is becoming a more peaceful and better place every day. What's become more is media coverage of crimes and conflicts. Some decades ago you'd only hear about, say, a murder if it happened somewhere in your region, nowadays such things are reported way beyond where it happened, across borders and continents. There were school shootings, anorexic people and other things you just rarely heard about them. Often especially in the case of psychological problems they weren't even classified as such and people rarely got help.
When books became something that could be mass produced, something that even the poor could buy, people feared children would become socially isolated shut-ins, only interested in the world of letters and not in the real world. There were articles that sounded exactly like those published today about the dangers of the Internet and the smartphone. (Just look at this two xkcd comic http://www.xkcd.com/1227/ http://www.xkcd.com/1601/ )
The world never truly changes. Or at least, we don't. We learn different skills because we need different things (which city-dweller really needs to know how chop wood?) but at our core we stay the same. I envy those that'll come after us. For they will be the ones who will walk on Mars and travel between planets, who will build robots and advanced AI, who will find the Theory of Everything and reach the heights of gods.