Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.
Turn that around and ask yourself why that's a reason to be miserable. Your sadness is a choice. Be miserable if you want to but that won't improve the circumstances for yourself or anyone else.
Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.
Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
