Was the past SO bad?

As I battled with opening an account on Facebook and making it visible to the rest of the Facebookians, I got to thinking. (It happens sometimes.)

We are now in the year 2012. We have made many advances in medicine, technology, power harnessing, food growing, entertainment and on the list goes. In our never-ending quest for growth and advancement (ie making life easier for us), we have had to make some small sacrifices- like ruining the Ozone layer, poisoning the air we breath, helping other species to the land of extinction (some even before we knew they existed), killing each other, creating deserts that grow in size, producing products that produce radiation-without knowing the long term effects of this (Look Sally, Billy has 5 ears) in the future, pumping growth hormones into foodstuffs to make them grow bigger and quicker (again, with no research done with the future effects in mind) and of course, coating our crops and orchards with vile poisons to drive insects away- again, not taking the effect into consideration until later down the line. Small things that may cause us grave harm in decades to come.

Granted we are not as advanced as we thought we would be at this stage of our evolution. I remember in the '70's and '80's we thought that by the year 2000, among other things, we would have flying cars, human filled and thriving bases on other planets, pills for food, regular space travel for the man on the street and of course-time travel. The year 2000 was a big thing then.

However, it came and went without that much change to the way we were living back then. Granted we had new cool things like Cell Phones and flat screen TV's, and the clumsy Walkman was replaced by the cool MP3/4 player and Ipod but generally not much changed. (Have to add-We had really brilliant music in that era though, unlike the commercial rubbish of today)

 Life was simpler then. Now we live in a world where technology is the backbone of everything we do- from the running of electricity grids to the very radio stations we listen to. Look, I am not saying that our advances have been all bad, because they have made life a lot easier and more pleasant. But with technology, comes headaches, especially when the tech fails to work. For example, in the 80's when particles from sun flares rushed towards earth, nobody cared, because there was little it could harm. However, now it is a big thing that could cripple GPS systems, communication, entire power grids.....wow!

Yes, time has moved on and we have grown in many ways with it. With an ever increasing human population, we have needed to find way to feed more hungry mouths, thus we have genetically altered genes to make them stronger and immune to insects. We have developed new and powerful drugs, we can perform medical operations we never could, we use lasers for everything(In the 80's lasers were stuff of Sci- Fi Weaponry), we can splice genetic material, our computers and the like are growing ever more powerful and intelligent..the list just goes on and on.

As I mentioned though- there is nothing without consequences. For example, many drug resistant strains of bacteria are emerging, our reliance on technology, makes us impotent when it does not function as it should.n Strangely, our life expectancy has not lengthened much. Hypertension, heart disease and respiratory disease are on the rise. As are a number of cancers. All of these have been attributed on one way or another to the lifestyle and the world we live in today. 

I could go on and on and on some more, comparing eras and showing the pay off from the technology we currently use and mostly enjoy. But I won't!
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of technology- I mean photography has become a breeze and has made everybody think they were a born photographer and thanks to technology, many mess ups can be fixed to a certain degree. Music sharing and listening is a breeze as is recording. Games are fun as anything to play.

Anyway- there I was, cursing, as I often do, at the program for not playing along, and I thought, if life was simpler in the 80's, think how simple life used to be thousands of life ago. The biggest issues you had were to be born, stay alive until you could outrun or out-hide predators, find a robust cave and an even more robust partner, provide food and use the food's skin as clothes and produce some fur covered children to carry the cycle forward. That was pretty much it. You became sick- either your immune system won or you died. Simple. Having said that, I am sure nobody died from hypertension or stress related diseases.
Yes, life was simpler then.