Is modern era comfortable, but empty?

[The Architect Of Fate]

Lately I have been thinking about the kind of lives that most people lead nowadays, and can’t help but thinking that we are living in such a way that is fundamentally incompatible with our nature.

Nowadays most of our necessities are satisfied, and there is a lot of entertainment available, nowadays pretty much 24/7 thanks to our phones. Work is another factor that comes into play, since we spend most of our day, and perhaps life, working usually meaningless jobs.
Add to that an education that only exists to brainwash us, and teach us a lot of meaningless things.

I think this environment has made us forget what is of most importance in life, and stops us from exploring ourselves, and the world around us. There is more to life than this.

Now I am not romanticizing the past. I know there was a lot of awful stuff around. But those who managed to live (and not be slaves), many lived very fulfilling and adventurous lives, achieved great things. And I think that living through hardships leads to a more fulfilling life and wisdom than scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram.

Many examples can be mentioned. Writers such as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, scientists such as Galileo, artists such as Da Vinci, philosophers such as Spinoza, and the list goes.

Nowadays too many institutions control how we live, the state and companies together dictate how we live, how we socialize, how we think, where we work, where we live, etc.

Yes modern medicine and anestesia is nice. But there must be more to life than the avoidance of pain (which in some cases is still not possible nowadays).

The number of great achievers in any period of history has never been more than a minuscule fraction of the human population. The idea that great achievements aren’t being realized in the modern era is simply not supportable. A brief Google will turn up massive current advancements in science, the arts, and philosophy.

Your moaning kind of boils down to a lack of awareness.

Boru

The only we don't speak of great achievements in the modern age is because we're so surrounded by them every day they no longer seem great they just seem normal and that itself is a great achievement.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Hell we just stepped into the era of Fusion Tech something Galileo and Spinoza would have considered magic.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Lately I have been thinking about the kind of lives that most people lead nowadays, and can’t help but thinking that we are living in such a way that is fundamentally incompatible with our nature.

Nowadays most of our necessities are satisfied, and there is a lot of entertainment available, nowadays pretty much 24/7 thanks to our phones. Work is another factor that comes into play, since we spend most of our day, and perhaps life, working usually meaningless jobs.
Add to that an education that only exists to brainwash us, and teach us a lot of meaningless things.

I think this environment has made us forget what is of most importance in life, and stops us from exploring ourselves, and the world around us. There is more to life than this.

Now I am not romanticizing the past. I know there was a lot of awful stuff around. But those who managed to live (and not be slaves), many lived very fulfilling and adventurous lives, achieved great things. And I think that living through hardships leads to a more fulfilling life and wisdom than scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram.

Many examples can be mentioned. Writers such as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, scientists such as Galileo, artists such as Da Vinci, philosophers such as Spinoza, and the list goes.

Nowadays too many institutions control how we live, the state and companies together dictate how we live, how we socialize, how we think, where we work, where we live, etc.

Yes modern medicine and anestesia is nice. But there must be more to life than the avoidance of pain (which in some cases is still not possible nowadays).

The number of great achievers in any period of history has never been more than a minuscule fraction of the human population. The idea that great achievements aren’t being realized in the modern era is simply not supportable. A brief Google will turn up massive current advancements in science, the arts, and philosophy.

Your moaning kind of boils down to a lack of awareness.

Boru

Also, consider how those great men died from stuff we would know now how to prevent or treat.

[The Grand Nudger]

The only we don't speak of great achievements in the modern age is because we're so surrounded by them every day they no longer seem great they just seem normal and that itself is a great achievement.

We may have found an example of winning so much, we actually are tired of winning.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

While it's perfectly true that a lot of people spend time 'trolling through TikTok and Instagram', it's equally true that 500 years ago, most people - when they weren't trying to avoid starving to death - spent what little leisure time they had playing games like Cholera Roulette and Stun-A-Stoat.

Simpler times, but good fun all the same.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

People today have more psychological disorders because they have doctors for mental help. In the past you just got yelled at by others to shut up and suffer - or today in less developed countries, where they get less or no mental help, undiagnosed lunatics are walking around, teaching in schools, being cops, politicians, etc.

And how animated life was in the past... Take that in medieval times people slept for 12 hours a day in winter months because there was nothing for them to do. Most of them were surfs who were not allowed to leave their village because if they did they would be put in the pillory. And although there weren't computers and TVs, it is not like they could have sex for fun because they would be punished with beatings in front of the church. And pretty much every girl/ woman in the past was below Moleco's standards of attractiveness as they had hairy legs, crooked teeth, fleas all over the body, and not exactly today's hygiene. So he would again be a whining virgin even in the past.

[Mister Agenda]

Struggling for survival, working yourself to exahaustion every day, and marrying at fourteen while seeing 40% of your children die before the age of five does probably leave you with little headspace for nonimmediate problems.

[LinuxGal]

Now I am not romanticizing the past. I know there was a lot of awful stuff around. But those who managed to live (and not be slaves), many lived very fulfilling and adventurous lives, achieved great things. And I think that living through hardships leads to a more fulfilling life and wisdom than scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram.

[Anomalocaris]

Look, fullness of life depends on what you fill your life with.   In any of the past ages there were far less with which to fill anyone’s life, and yet far more people had far less access to even what had been available, compared to now.   This you in your self pitying funk willfully ignore.

You live in an age where there are far more with which to fill any life, and you have access to far more of what is available.     Yet instead of proactively filling your life with more you just bitch and moan about how empty you’ve left your life,  and by way of justifying the effete fruitless self pity you stand up some fantasy idealized vision of the age past that ridiculously generalizes what perhaps 1/10000 of 1% of those who live then had been able to achieve. 

Well, make yourself into an apple so you can compare apples to apples.   Be the modern version of that 1/10000 of 1% of the people, and i guarantee your life will not be empty.

You are completely missing the point. Nowadays from the start since the education, everything is designed into shaping how you think, how you do, and what you will do for the rest of your life. People are less likely to think by themselves, imagine and explore because everything is already “set on stone”. Add to that all the meaningless entertainment that surrounds us every day, and you end up with robots.

You only talk about resources, and I agree that nowadays we have more. I even acknowledged it on the OP. But it is not only about the resources, is what we do with our time, and what we consume. You mentioned illiteracy, yet what do people read nowadays? Reddit, Facebook posts?

Just because we have more nowadays does not mean our thoughts and lives are more free. To the contrary, we may be less free. Companies monitor our behavior 24/7 through our phones.

Also stop attacking me saying things like “self-pity”. As hominem. Grow up

Self-pity is an observation, not an attack.   Grow up

Some people in the past lived productive lives.   But you won’t be one of them if you were born into any of their times, just as you are not one of the more productive people of this era.   those who lived a productive lives seized the fact that they were alive, and ignored the miserable shortcomings of their time, in order to make much of very little.    You have much more, yet disparaged what you have, and pity yourself for not having some productive life, productive in exactly what way you apparently don’t know, forced down your throat.    You really think you would not have complained more and would have pitied yourself less had you been born during and earlier more impoverished era?    You think every hovel before some open cesspits on dirt trails would be populated by people who have nothing better to do than to ensure YOU are only subjected to influences that makes your life meaningful?   

It is not the era.   It is you.    Wailing about the shortcomings of the era in which you find yourself is just thinly veiled unproductive self pity.   The alleged faults of the age seems to justify the self pity.   Your self pity keeps from from making the most of what the age has given to you.    You are hardly in any virtuous cycle that will let you rise above yourself.

[Aegon]

People today have more psychological disorders because they have doctors for mental help. In the past you just got yelled at by others to shut up and suffer - or today in less developed countries, where they get less or no mental help, undiagnosed lunatics are walking around, teaching in schools, being cops, politicians, etc.

That cannot possibly account for the intense rise in mental health issues.