Surviving in the present world we live in

When I look around me in this world (as opposed to the world I grew up in in the1950s) survival is mostly about psychological survival. Maybe it was then too but it didn't seem that way at the time.

The dangers are different now. In the 1950s you might not grow up at all. Today you are likely to grow up but then who are you and where are you going and what are you going to do?

These are different questions in some ways than we asked in the 1950s.

In the 1950s the question was more: "Can I survive to adulthood?" The answer might be: "Maybe".

Nothing was certain then. IF you look at animals in the wild it was more like that being a human being anywhere then.

There was polio (that my best friend had and wore leg braces until he was 6. But we didn't meet until I gave him my newspaper route when I was 10 years old. There was whooping cough that I almost died from at 2. There was Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy which is why I was giving my newspaper route to this boy who would become my best friend in Junior High school when I was 12 when I changed schools. We both were more serious than most other kids because we had already almost died as children.

By the time I met him he could walk and ride a bicycle and seemed perfectly normal. But 3 or 4 years later when I climbed the rusted ladder on a dam and he froze 100 feet up I had to rescue him because he froze there and would likely have died if I hadn't rescued him because I wasn't afraid of heights and didn't know he was either at the time.

So, surviving now is much different than then. Medical Care is much better. Food is much better and also much worse. So, if you have the intelligence and experience to choose good foods to eat you live longer, otherwise people often die in their 20s now.

This wasn't true in the 1950s. Either you died between zero and 20 or you tended to live to 35 or 40 at least even if all your teeth were gone by 40. This was more what the 1950s were like.

So, surviving in 2018 is much much different than surviving in the 1950s. In the 1950s you have no sureness you were even going to survive one more day, which is why people believed in God more then. Because it was an alternative to just running screaming and jumping off a cliff and ending it.