I was reading a really long essay recently about the sheer incomprehensible scale of violence that happened during World War II, and among other things, it reminded me that this isn’t the worst time to be alive for the general human population. I can very much picture people during WWII thinking it was the end of days, and for millions of people, it was. Up to 60-75 million people died during WWII, and that doesn’t count those who survived injuries, starvation, occupation, bombings, etc. Millions upon millions of people killed or mentally fucked up for the rest of their lives, and this was after the first World War! Imagine the psychological toll of going through two world wars. None of us really can, nor can we comprehend that body count. WWII was so bad that, just in terms of numbers regarding the death count, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a drop in the bucket. Even the Holocaust didn't make up the majority of the death count, despite killing an insanely high amount of people at an insanely fast pace. It's hard to quantify the worst events in human history, but WWII has to be up there.
Obviously, a shit ton of scholarship has been written on the long-term effects of WWII both on individual societies and the world as a whole, so it's not like the war ended and then everything was fine and dandy, but the fact that human society continued to exist after that at all, and even thrive in some cases, is insane. It's just something to keep in mind as you're inundated with a constant stream of "nothing will ever get better" posts from people clinical depression posting on main. Things were so, so, so much worse not even 100 years ago.
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