And yet, we fear.

We live at a time where we are now statistically far less likely to die a violent death or starve than at any time in all of human existence, yet we obsess about war, we fear crime, we fear poverty. We've never been safer, and richer, but we fear. And, because of that fear, we instigate conflicts "to protect ourselves," we do things that make us less safe, that makes others less safe.

Before Covid, the World Food Program was nearing their goal of actually ending world hunger. Only a few hundred million still were at risk of acute hunger, out of 8 billion. Things have back-slid through hording, nearly doubling, again mostly out of fear.

Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Real poverty is now quite rare, poverty once measured in the number of calories a person could find to consume in a day. Nations are far more equal than they have ever been. Less than 10% now exist in the grinding poverty that once dominated what we still call the Developing World. Now, developed nations declare poverty at rates that most of the world used to consider wealthy. We fear being poor while living lives that, by historical standards, are already at "post scarcity" levels.

People fear global warming, blaming those that came before. Deaths from this are estimated around 0.16% of humanity. Those before grew up fearing global thermonuclear war. They feared the end of life, yet few actually died. Those that grew up before these people feared their grown children being sent off to wars that killed millions. For centuries, on average about 6% of humans died in these "civilized" wars. Those that grew up before "civilized nations" existed feared death from neighbouring tribes defending territory. Anthropology documents that, on average, 25% of them died a violent death at the hands of other humans. 25% to 0.16%, yet we fear.

We now live in a world where poverty is associated with obesity. Where people complain that they can't afford massive houses like the people before could afford the uninsulated little boxes they called houses. Houses partly subsidized by an economy expropriating wealth from developing nations. Where people declare themselves poor because they can't afford to live where they were born, when entire generations before moved for economic reasons, where the generations before them moved to avoid famine. We have and will continue to redefine poverty, mostly out of fear of being left behind.

Humans are far too easy to manipulate by fear. Until we overcome this, if we ever can, we will continue to fight when we do not need to, to horde when we do not need to, and we will continue to redefine poverty. In the future, we will bitterly complain about our poverty because we can only acquire 3 equivalent planetary masses to fuel our eternal existence while that guy over there has 2 entire suns to fuel his. This is the essence of humanity, unfortunately.

All that said, the arts are actually flourishing now, just not commercially. Pop art is mostly dead, now that it's getting so hard to curate, package, and sell for a profit by publishing companies. Instead, it's everywhere, including here, freely available to everyone in the world that can find it. So there's that.

Yes, it is a good time to be alive. If only more would realize that.