Do you think 1914-1945 was a bad time to be alive?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I am thinking about mortality. Overall, human lifespan improved during the period. On the other hand, it was already improving before 1914 and continued to improve after 1945. In the period in particular, the Spanish Flu seems to have had a brief impact. WWII had an impact in Germany, massive one in WWII while not affecting the USA in a measurable sense.

So while lifespan increased during the period, those improvements were likely going to take place regardless and the era deserves no special credit in those improvements, while the social, political, and economic unrest still impacted life negatively, to a greater or lesser degree depending on location.

22

Off-topic, but I’ve never heard this expression before. I’ve always heard/used “flash in the pan.” Was this a typo, or is the expression one you use regularly?

23

I remember a Hardcore History podcast about the very high death rates among upper class Englishmen of that age, as they were often the young officers leading the charges.

But I am sure that applied to many nationalities.

24

Especially if you were also Jewish. Or gay. Etc.

I expect there were a batch of people in not-yet-significantly-disturbed-by-outsiders areas of the Amazon who’d think it was a whole lot better in 1914-45. They might be using different definitions of “better” than many on this board, of course.

I also expect there were other areas, but that I don’t know for sure which they were, because my history education was rather lacking.

25

That’s about what I figured; just because things are bad somewhere now doesn’t mean that they weren’t much worse back then. (The flip side is that just because things are better somewhere now doesn’t mean they’re good.)

“Flash in the pan” is the correct expression, as it originates from flintlock muskets in which the primer ignited in the pan but did not ignite the main propellant charge.

26

I don’t know that it did exactly. The UK seemed to be unusually class-conscious for that era, and the requirements for officers basically required a degree of independent wealth that wasn’t there in Germany, and especially in France and the US.

So the British upper class and gentry were the province of the officer corps, and the officers were the first ones over the top, so they died in a much higher proportion to young men in other parts of society.

27

I don’t mean this to be a hijack, but here’s an article about the disastrous year 536 that may be interesting:

28

I’m not sure improvements happen “regardless”; they tend to be the result of workers fighting to improve conditions with unions, strikes, and voting. That’s why in North America and other places, income equality improved during and just after WW I and WW II, when the shortage of labour gave workers a slight edge in pressing their demands. Of course capital struck back as soon as it could, and incomes in North America have been stagnant since the 1970s while social welfare has been cut

29

During the 1914-1945 period my father’s parents (in order)

  • had four children in six years
  • lost one of them to the Spanish Flu
  • were financially ruined in the Great Depression
  • had another child when they could least afford it
  • saw their two oldest sons fight in World War II

And they considered themselves better off than my mother’s parents were.

30

If you had been born at that time in Russia, even more so.

31

I don’t know as much about the history of Korea as I probably should, but I do know that pre-division Korea was basically a Third World country, and even South Korea may be technologically advanced on the surface, but it’s one of the worst places to be female in the developed world.

32

I’ve had quite a few teenagers and young adults lament having missed the 1980s. Having been that age in the 1980s, I told them that they should be GRATEFUL they weren’t around for it. Enjoy the music and laugh at the hair and clothing styles, and hope we never have anything like AIDS or Chernobyl again, among other things.

33

You stopped just short of the “best” (worst) part. Being occupied by the Nazis for four years.

Although I have to say the people of Iraq have not exactly had the easiest last half century. So I guess I agree it depends on where we’re talking about.

34

Yup that’s a typo. Flash in the pan was the expression I was trying to write (from musketry as someone pointed out)

35

The peak of human wealth and happiness so far was probably 2019. In the last three years we’ve seen life expectancy drop and the world thrown into conflict. This winter could be brutal for Europe, and there is a chance again of nuclear war.

Still, 2022 is better than almost any other time in human history. The reduction in human poverty in the third world over the last few decades has been astounding. Advances in health care and technology have made us richer and healthier and given us more free time than people had at any other time in the past.

Take 1950, considered to be the start of a ‘golden period’ in America. Let’s even say you are a white suburbanite not subject to racism or other social ills.

If you are a typical middle class family, you had a lousy car, and lived in a 900-1100 sq ft bungalow with 3-5 kids.

You might have a black and white TV and pick up three channels.

Health care was cheap, but only because it couldn’t do much for you. Dentistry wasn’t as advanced. If you got cancer, there were few treatments.

You didn’t fly - vacations involved piling the kids into a car and going camping or visiting relatives.

You didn’t have a microwave oven, air conditioning, or a portable phone. You had one phone in the house, but anything other than local calls were expensive and rationed carefully.

If you were lucky, you had a washer, but probably not a dryer. Clotheslines were all the rage. Maintaining a home and cooking was a full time job. Some of your richer friends might have a vacuum cleaner, but others still had to have area rugs and take them outside and beat them to clean them.

Food poisoning was fairly common, and you didn’t have access to the wide variety of fruits and vegetables we have now. Most meals were made from scratch.

I could go on. We take for granted an awful lot of modern conveniences that have made life much better for everyone.

36

Indeed, providing you didn’t die from the Spanish flu, I believe The Roaring 20s was a halcyon time to live for white Americans. Not so halcyon for others.

And it can be argued that the reason no conventional wars have been waged between powerful nation states since WWII is because of nuclear capability, particularly with the advent of second strike capability. No sane government will take the risk of self-annihilation (MAD—mutually assured destruction), nor any insane government without a death wish. Armed conflicts nowadays tend to be proxy wars, insurgencies, uprisings and acts of terrorism involving non-state enemies targeting civilians.

37

The thing about this is, you can make the same argument with respect to the future. In 100 years time, the average, not-prejudiced-against household will be living a far better life than we do now. (Let’s be optimistic). The things we think of as luxuries will seem just as unpleasant or limited as expensive long-distance telephony or long road trips do to us, while the lack of varoius inventions will seem just as awful as not having air-con or microwaves.

So does this mean we’re actually miserable? Are you wrong to think that microwaves and air-con and tourist hotels are good things we should be happy about?

Surely not. We are right to enjoy what we’ve got, blessed by our ignorance of what miracles our great-grandchildren will enjoy. So it can’t be right to say that people in the 1950s who thought they were happy with their new fridge and their station wagon and their black and white TV were actually miserable. While they weren’t as materially wealthy, they may well have been as happy - perhaps even happier? - because these things were wonderful to them.

38

No, 2022 isn’t as bad as 1914-1945. It’s the trajectory and potential for worsening that has me concerned. We aren’t doing nearly as well as we were in the Obama years. On top of that we have a good chunk of the world population that wants to make things worse. Currently that group is led by Vladimir Putin, but they had a different leader a few years ago, and may again in another few years. Regardless of how 2024 turns out, the base is there (not just in the US and Russia, but in every country around the world) and they aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon. Then there’s all that CO2 that is going to have it’s say as well.

39

I agree. The “good old days” aren’t something my grandma told stories about, or even my own youth in the 80s that I have nostalgia for. No, the good old days were just before COVID-19. Admittedly there have been a few other major setbacks since then which we can’t attribute to a novel coronavirus, but it does seem like that’s when the problems became obvious.

At least future generations will have an easy time with dividing the decades of the 10s and 20s, rather than having some messy debate like the whole “the 60s started in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated and not in 1960.”

40

Yup.

I remember much of the 50’s. We were at the cutting edge of new technology. We had wonders. We were living really, really well. (Some of us, anyway.)

And whether people think they’re “living well” doesn’t actually have much to do with technology. It has to do with whether they have, and expect to continue to have, what they’re used to having in order to stay alive and – by their standards – comfortable; and whether they’re living with the people they want to live with, and able to do the things they want to do. There are, right now, significant numbers of people who would rather spend more time cleaning their houses and cooking than spend that time commuting in traffic, or being continually expected by their employers to be available on the phone; let alone being expected to hunt up a new job multiple times in their life. I could go on.

And there are entire communities in various places in the world fighting desperately for the right to continue living as hunters and gatherers. Most of them would like to pick a few selective bits of modern – or relatively modern – technology, sure. But they think that they’re overall living better than we are.

Even modern hunter/gatherers, remaining mostly only in the hardest places on the planet to pull this off in, have a lot more free time than almost anybody in modern society has. For that matter, a lot of people in the 1950’s had more free time than those in their equivalent position do now – because when they were off work, they were off work. The boss couldn’t text them or email them out of work hours, and didn’t expect in most cases to be able to call them, because almost nobody was expected to sit waiting by that corded phone at home.

There are a lot of advantages to modern life. There are a whole lot of disadvantages, also. We’re used to both sets. People in previous times had their own set of advantages and disadvantages, and were used to those. Right now, some of us are happy, some of us are miserable, some of us are inbetween. In previous times, yes, some were worse than others; but much of the time, some people were happy, some were miserable, some were inbetween.