Ever think about how lucky you are to live in 2020? Imagine living 500 years ago, or more.

Greg wrote:

Imagine living in the Roman Empire.

How would you brush your teeth? I wonder what people did for dental health back then.

Imagine you had poor eyesight. I have a pretty high prescription yet contacts and glasses make it seem as though my vision is fine.

Imagine you slept around. I wonder what happened to people with std's back then.

Life is so good in todays world. Not much to worry about.

How would you brush your teeth? - Romans didn't consume sugary foods like we do, so probably had much better teeth. They had toothbrushes back then anyway.

Imagine you had poor eyesight. - Romans didn't stare at smartphones and computer screens half of the day. They probably had much better eyesight. Not exactly many books for them to read anyway.

Imagine you slept around. - no #MeToo. Most of the sleeping around (for men) would have been done with virgins and slaves.

BTW., given the difference in populations, any random human alive in the last 2,000 years would be statistically far more likely to be alive today than in the time of the Romans. So you'd have to be 'unlucky' to be born then (if you think life was so much worse), not 'lucky' to be born today.

axtual historian wrote:

Kvothe wrote:

There were no Romans 500 years ago.

Yeah, there were.

And there still are today.

indeed. Also, there were several "Roman" empires, far removed from Rome, sp. the Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum Imperium Romanum) and Byzantium (Basileia Rhomaion), the former a early-medieval iteration building upon a far-fetched notion of translatio imperii, and the latter a true continuation of the old regime.

Anyway,e ever looked at the teeth of skeletons from antiquity and the middle ages....the teeth on those things (the ones that are still there) are often (not always) great. good times, good times.

lol I bet people thought the same at that time about a time that preceded it, and, in the same way, in 200 years people people will be like “ugh, I got cancer again, just gonna stop by the pharmacy to get another pill for it and I should be good by Sunday. Remember when people died of cancer? LMAO imagine how bad it was living back then.”

IDK man, toothbrushes probably weren't invented so people back then probably didn't worry about it. There's probably stuff on earth today that's not invented that people in the future will use. We don't sit around and say "It's a bummer I'm alive now cause <whatever> isn't invented yet".

People back then didnt know any better.

As for living....Darwins theory was the rule of the day. If you were born with a defect...you likely died or thrown to the wolves. If you had poor genetics, you didnt live long.

Most of the human population was of superior genetics, today we let all the crappy gene pool survive by providing sick care till they live and breed again.

Broadly speaking, anyone living in the first world exists in the best possible place, in the best possible time, anywhere or at any point in human history.

This is no small matter, nor something to brush off as mere trivia. I try and remind myself every day, but it's just as way to forget it again straight away.

Clean water gushing out of a hole in the wall, on demand is usually what reminds me.

Greg wrote:

Imagine living in the Roman Empire.

How would you brush your teeth? I wonder what people did for dental health back then.

Imagine you had poor eyesight. I have a pretty high prescription yet contacts and glasses make it seem as though my vision is fine.

Imagine you slept around. I wonder what happened to people with std's back then.

Life is so good in todays world. Not much to worry about.

You left some things out. A typical Roman was poor, but never ate any processed food. And, there was not much in the way of pollution. As for sex, there was plenty of it. Especially if you had any status at all. The bath houses were everywhere, and women from conquered villages and towns were assigned to these places. You could easily go to a bathhouse for sex whenever you wanted if you were someone who was above the average person in status.

They (Roman Empire) did have toothbrushes. They also had dentists . They expected people to work hard and given a large part of their life to the commonwealth.

The actual son of God couldn't even make it much past 30 then.

I once read somewhere that tooth pain was the main reason for suicide in ancient times.

If you survived childhood it meant you were strong and healthy and had an immune system to handle adulthood. Nowdays the weak and sickly children are medicated enough to reach maturity and a life time of suffering through medical issues and poor health.

Greg wrote:

Imagine living in the Roman Empire.

How would you brush your teeth? I wonder what people did for dental health back then.

Imagine you had poor eyesight. I have a pretty high prescription yet contacts and glasses make it seem as though my vision is fine.

Imagine you slept around. I wonder what happened to people with std's back then.

Life is so good in todays world. Not much to worry about.

You need to retake world history. The roman empire was not around 500 years ago.

Yes we have wrote:

Greg wrote:

Imagine living in the Roman Empire.

How would you brush your teeth? I wonder what people did for dental health back then.

Imagine you had poor eyesight. I have a pretty high prescription yet contacts and glasses make it seem as though my vision is fine.

Imagine you slept around. I wonder what happened to people with std's back then.

Life is so good in todays world. Not much to worry about.

You need to retake world history. The roman empire was not around 500 years ago.

0/10 for your reading comprehension.

Actually Greg, living during the Roman Empire was pretty damn good. It was a period of "Pax Romana" meaning Period of Peace between 27 BCE to 180 CE. All of the land surrounding the Mediterranean was at peace because everyone was under Roman Law.

You could travel anywhere within the Roman Empire without danger and live your life however you chose just as long as you paid your taxes to Rome. Even the Jews were allowed to live and worship freely (they just blew it politically but this is another discussion)...

I think the worst time in history to have been alive would have been in Europe between 1915 and 1945. Truly nightmarish. God forbid we never see times like that again.

Yes, it is good to be alive in 2020 comparatively speaking.

I hope and pray we all learn what is important from these trying times and not have a short term memory.

Peace brother.

Great post. Thank you.

500 years ago was a great age of exploration by daring swashbucklers and merchants. But your chance of being one of them was pretty low. Mostly you could be a peasant.

In roman times you usually had to be a slave to a cruel master who would subject you to ritual torture or even serve you up as the main course at a feast. The romans were well-known cannibals.

The unluckiest time to be alive in human history is probably today.

Simply because we are likely about 50 - 100 years away from defeating aging, disease, pain, boredom etc. People will travel to the stars, be able to experience anything they want to in matrix style virtual reality.

So out of all the thousands of generations of humans, we will be the very last to grow old and die, suffer from.want and disease.

Future generations wont distinguish the lives of royalty from those of peasants, of the people who lived before the 22nd century. They will see them all as having lived unimaginably nasty, brutal, and short lives.

If you also consider that 'humans' might continue for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, colonizing solar systems and even other galaxies, we are incredibly unlucky to be born just before all the exciting stuff.

I think something like 20 billion humans have ever walked the Earth.

In another 100,000 years, it might be 200,000,billion humans spread out over the galaxy.

In fact, it's so statistically unlikely that we have been born into one of the first few billions of humans, that philosophers consider it an argument that we will become extinct quite soon. It's called 'the Doomsday Argument'.

Yeah it was all good except for that Jesus guy and his followers

It’s ironic you chose the Roman Empire... they were one of the few moments in history when society was (comparatively) civilized. I don’t think most people appreciate how rare the past 300 years are in historical context. We whine about 40 hour weeks and guaranteed healthcare, but our ancestors worked nonstop with no modern medicine and other humans constantly trying to kill them to take their assets.

That turned out to be a pretty good thing for his followers, eternally speaking.