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If you could choose to live out your entire life in any time and place in history, what would you choose and why?
There are many periods and places of history that are romantic to me, but I wonder which would have been the best/most interesting to actually live in.
The further back we go into the past the more prejudices, racism, hate and injustice we are going to find. The best time is generally the present, and if I am allowed to choose from the future then I'd like to try 100 years from now. I would not like to be in the middle of WWII (or I), be a farmer in the 1800s or the slave of a king in the 1400s. The chances of being someone important back in time are pretty low and the quality of life was definitely worse than it is today.
Try telling that to the millions of people around the world being displaced as refugees or starving in famines or dying in civil wars or being persecuted for their beliefs/gender/sexuality. Some of those regions had more peaceful and plentiful pasts than presents.
Today is not necessarily the best time for all parts of the world. It might be the best time for your particular part of the world, but not for everyone.
The world as an average without looking at any specific locations is almost uniformly becoming a better place to live. I highly recommend reading "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling or watch one of his talks on youtube if you would prefer a video.
Here's one that I just searched up (I haven't fully watched this video because it covers very similar content from the book)
Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker is another excellent book on the subject.
You are right, that's why I said generally. A good example is Venezuela, they were certainly better a few years ago.
I'm thinking of more than just the past few years. I mean, human history is thousands of years long. I'm pretty sure that we can find a lot of variety in the human condition around the world across that timescale.
I think the biggest issues with going back in time more than a few dozen years are health care (except in the US where it still sucks today) and medicine. You may be able to find people living better as a society, but medicine has never been as good as it is today.
Yep. I don't think I could give up computers and the internet happily either. The World Wide Web is, among other things, a massive searchable library I can access nearly anywhere from a pocket-sized device. Without it, I would feel isolated from a global community and crippled in terms of access to knowledge.
Yep. That is probably the best answer. Even being Rockefeller or the king of England a hundred years ago would still suck compared to today.
I agree with all of that. Things are always going to get better for the average person. I suppose I should have made the question, "If you HAD to choose to live out your entire life in any time and place in history, what would you choose and why?"
If I had to choose my choice would be the same as @Heichou, 10 years earlier. I think the 80s would be interesting for growing up: the arcades, the first personal computers, the first gaming consoles, etc.
...the AIDS scare, realistic concern about war with the USSR, and economic recession from '81 to '82 with lasting effects into Reagan's second term. So you could either catch a fatal disease from a blood transfusion, get burnt to a crisp in a nuclear blast, or your dad could lose his job three times in 10 years.
At least the music was good (generally, Wham! happened). And honestly I think race relations in the US were better in the 80s than they are today.
You might go 100 years into the future just to meet our AI overlords :(
If it's my entire life, then I'm going to assume some sort of reincarnation into the past type thing, and I can grow up knowing what I need to about where I am and how things work.
I pick Eurasia, 60,000 years ago. After our brains became biologically modern, but before the extinction of the Neanderthals.
Prehistory fascinates me to no end, and I would love to experience what it must have been like to grow up in a world where Sapiens was not the only human species and we hadn't yet developed agriculture or civilization. How did the people of those days feel about the world? How did they see Neanderthals? How did man see themselves in conjunction with nature and everything within it? What were their myths and oral histories? What were their hopes, fears, and dreams?
Even if we someday learn everything there is to know about the universe, we'll likely never understand what it must have been like. Not really.
The problem with going back to prehistoric times is that you'll be no different than any human living in that time. All the knowledge you have today is dependent on existing technology. For example you know that penicillin can cure infections and illnesses, but do you know how to make penicillin from scratch?
I imagine that your life will be pretty short lived, you likely won't have the time or resources to truly observe how humanity was like back then on a larger scale. But I admit it still will be interesting to see how humans acted and how they spoke in those times. It would be cool to hear the jokes and stories that they told.
If I get to have my memories from this life, I could make a rudimentary medicine making some bread and allowing it to get moldy. I have knowledge of medicinal plants, field aid such as patching wounds or setting broken bones, and I have most of an undergrad in Chemistry that could come in handy.
Even if I'm going in with a clean mind, that's perfectly fine. We all die eventually, and life is painful for many even today. It's really the experience I'm interested by. The subjective, individual experience of being a human in that time period. What it would have been like to grow up in a world so alien compared to even early Mesopotamian cultures, and see through those eyes.
Watch as man discovers MRSA millennia earlier than intended.
I'd love to see late Victorian England: the 1880s & '90s. To rub shoulders with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle. To see bicycles freeing women. To watch the suffragettes in action. To watch Wilde's plays. To attend evening salons. To experience the final decades of Queen Victoria's reign over the largest empire in the world's history.
Or the late Roman Republic. To befriend Cicero. To see Julius Caesar in person. To watch young Octavian conquer Rome and form an empire.
And, to all the negative nellies and nay-sayers: I don't care about your doom and gloom regarding sickness and prejudice and all that crap. This is a hypothetical scenario, asking people to indulge their fantasies, not an actual one-way ticket to misery. I'm letting my imagination have its way. It's fun!
Thank you! Everyone is trying to make this all realistic. I just assumed we wouldn't have to deal with prejudice, sickness, etc. because this is a hypothetical situation.
To be honest I wish I were born 10 years earlier. Growing up in the 90's seemed so cool and I feel like I could've had a much more interesting childhood. I also would have been able to be much more impressed with technology since I wasn't too cognizant once it had been advancing quickly. The music scene was fantastic, too.
Us 80-90's kids are going to miss a lot healthcare innovation that your generation will enjoy and be able to live a lot longer.
I'd give up tmnt and vhs for that.
I mean I was born '97. It was the ass end of the 90's but I still had VHS and all that. I just wish I was cognizant enough to really get into things. Kids don't really turn on until they're like 3 lol
I feel a similar way about the 80's. (I was born in '87.) There's something tantalizing about a period you just missed out on. It's the culture of the kids just older than you, and you get the lingering remnants of it. It's like walking into a party just as it ends and people are cleaning up.
That's pretty well put - I kind of feel the same way about the 80's (was born around the same time as you).
You know what we did a lot in the nineties? Talk about the 70s and 80s!
You think that because the 90s are super trendy at the moment. Come 5-10 years from now everyone will be raving about the 00s. 5-10 years ago it was 80s that were huge. This shit happens over and over.
I doubt this is the reason. People born roughly when Heichou was have been pushing 90s nostalgia and wanting to be "90s kids" pretty consistently regardless of trends. I'm guessing it's more like what Eylrid is getting at...catching the tail-end of something and constructing what you think "cool" is by observing that makes it super tempting to gravitate toward.
Plus 80s nostalgia seems the most dominant in the mainstream right now, though they're both present. I don't think there's a firm cycle with that anymore anyway, everyone's nostalgia is being exploited all the time.
Well, as a Chinese person, going back too far and going to foreign countries would mean I'll face a significant amount of racism, not to mention language and cultural barriers, so that's out of the question. So I stay in China, but what time period do I go to? The last two hundred years in China should be avoided: too many wars, famines, revolutions, and invasions for an average citizen to have a good life. If I go further back, the tang dynasty is commonly recognized as the most prosperous era of Chinese history. However, that is in 618—907, and I'm sure that my current standard of living is higher than the emperor of that time. So I don't think I would travel to the past.
The only choice left is the future. But the future is uncertain - I don't know if there will be a war 100 years from now, so traveling to the future is a gamble. In the end, I don't think I would travel at all.
Apart from high suicide rates, economic recession, immense academic pressure, over-working culture, rampant alcoholism and smoking, and lack of individuality and independent thinking;
I think that growing up in rural or suburban Japan in the 80's and 90's would've been great. It was a time where their beautiful culture and advanced technology perfectly mixed with each other.
I'd pick five hundred years before the end of humanity. I'm not sure if I'd like it, but if I didn't I imagine I could simulate myself back here or possibly travel time.
If I couldn't bring my SO, then I'd pick where I am.
Now, in the developed world (or fairly developed LA countries like Uruguay & Costa Rica). Despite the problems facing us (climate change, polarization/populism, inequality, etc), we have modern medicine, the internet, relatively low pollution in the developed world, air conditioning, planes, a good chance of moon/mars missions in the next 20 years, democracy, Netflix, electricity, clean running water, and haven't started to feel the worst effects of climate change yet.
I'm generally happy with the last five decades I've lived through. But if I had to pick another time, and if I could take my current knowledge and experience with me (and be guaranteed to be born both male and caucasian), I'd probably choose to be born in the early 1800s in the United States. The first half of the 1800s in the U.S. was an unprecedented period of economic and personal opportunity for a man with initiative (and a little foreknowledge of events to come). In the span of 50 years, the U.S. expanded its territory from the Mississippi to the Pacific. If you could evade the disease and war, there was fortune to be had.