Historyspeaking topic
People who fantasize about surviving an apocalypse or living in primitive times have no idea how brutal that life would be. Why do we romanticize hardship we never experienced?
— r/unpopularopinion
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- How did the Napoleonic Code (Code Civil), with its principles of property and equality, influence modern legal systems?
- The French Revolution's 'rational' overhauls like the new calendar and the metric system: let's talk about the ambition to redesign everything from scratch.
- Was it really a single bullet that started the First World War? Let's talk about the alliances, nationalism, and arms race behind the assassination in Sarajevo.
- The banana we eat today is not the variety people ate fifty years ago; the tastier original was nearly wiped out by a plant disease, and we now eat its understudy. If the artificial 'banana flavor' in candy actually imitates a fruit that no longer exists, does that mean our sense of taste has stayed loyal to a ghost?
- The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary exhibition structure meant to be dismantled after twenty years; what saved it was not its aesthetic value but the military usefulness of the radio antennas mounted on top. A landmark now considered the soul of a city surviving purely because it was useful suggests that most things we call 'iconic' are really just accidents that survived.