The Best Time To Be Alive

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Take a look at some of the wealthiest people in the history of our planet:

Unimaginable wealth, extravagant lifestyles, and immense power — these people seemingly had it all. But would you trade places with any of them? No amount of money or influence could have afforded them common conveniences like air conditioning, internet, or penicillin.

If you polled the average person on the street, most would say that things aren't looking great. In fact, two-thirds of Americans think the next generation of adults will be worse off than their parents. The mood has been pessimistic for as long as I can remember. With bad news bombarding us on a 24/7 cycle and social media magnifying it all, you don’t have to look far to find negativity.

Three years of covid, fear of a nuclear WWIII, rampant inflation, school shootings, culture wars, recession, the constant threat of climate change. Our society is enduring a lot and it’s easy to believe life sucks. Let me tell you why 2023 is the greatest time in history to be alive.

It all starts with survival. We usually imagine kids as resilient little monsters who bounce back from everything but history tells a much different story. All throughout time, the odds of reaching your 15th birthday were down to a coin flip.

The actual number is 46.2% but think about that for a moment. Half. The worst experience a parent can endure, the loss of a child, was commonplace for most of human history. Even up until 1900.

Whether you were born in China during the Ming dynasty, in Paris during the Age of Enlightenment, or in the Roman Empire, it didn't matter.

Starting in the late 1800s, something dramatically changed and it's been improving ever since. That's where our story starts to get very interesting.

Advances in medicine took the world by storm.

For most of human history, medicine was a complete disaster. Going to the doctor was often worse than doing nothing at all. President Garfield learned this the hard way.

In 1881 he was shot and as historian David Oshinsky puts it, "Had the responding physicians done nothing more than make Garfield comfortable, he almost certainly would have survived. Instead they searched clumsily for the bullet, inserting unwashed fingers and filthy probes into the open wound."

At his trial, Garfield's assassin famously said, "Yes, I shot the President, but his physicians killed him." It would be another few years before microscopes revealed the invisible world of bacteria and convinced society of the germ theory, leading to antibiotics and vaccines.

The thought of a world without these things is terrifying, but that was the harsh reality for most of history.

Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in history. Once someone was infected it was impossible to treat them; you just helplessly let the disease run its course. With a fatality rate of 30%, it killed half a billion people in the final 100 years of its existence. Fast forward to 1980, smallpox was declared completely eradicated from humanity.

It's hard to overstate how much modern medicine has contributed to present-day society. Epidemics have become so incredibly rare that until 2020 we all but forgot about them as a potential risk. Then there's penicillin which has saved over 200 million lives. That's the death toll of World War II more than three times over.

Advances like these amount to a global youth mortality rate that is down to 4.6% today. Not only in America, but across the globe — from places building artificial intelligence to places building plumbing.

With people living longer, the global economy becomes much more productive. As countries develop, more jobs are created, wages rise, and citizens have greater opportunities to improve their standard of living.

The decline of global extreme poverty is one of the most important developments in our lifetime. It means that fewer people are suffering from malnutrition and preventable diseases. It means that more children are becoming educated and literate. More people have access to clean water, and more families can afford basic necessities like food and shelter.

In 1850, 9 out of 10 people on Earth were living on less than $1.90 a day. Today, it's under 1 out of 10. To put that another way, on average, 130,000 people have risen out of extreme poverty every single day since 1990.

This is not to say that we don't have real problems, but we often forget how much the bar has risen. Today, being poor in a developed country means you still have access to food, shelter, and internet. It surpasses the quality of life of the wealthiest people on the planet a hundred years ago.

The World of Today

It's easy to see human history as a perfectly linear upward thrust of progress, but for the vast majority of it we were hunting and gathering. Two million years of running around the forest led to the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. Then the scientific revolution 400 years ago. Then the industrial revolution 200 years ago. And finally the information age just 50 years ago.

Society as we know it is pretty new. There are so many things still broken and we will always have challenges. But my God have we made progress.

The very same glass that revealed bacteria through a microscope lens also enabled the creation of fiber optic cables, which transmit light beams filled with information across thousands of miles of ocean floor, linking the world in a seamless network.

Unless you were a soldier or trader, most people in the Common Era never saw far beyond their village. Think about all of the humans who never saw an ocean or mountain range. Not even a picture of one. Now, $1000 will get you anywhere in the world in a day. You can see the sights for yourself. And you don’t have to spend months at sea like the titans of industry would have done in the 1800s.

In a matter of hours, an infinitely complex supply chain delivers anything you can imagine to your doorstep.

Modern medicine has eradicated diseases and made others manageable, creating a world where a leukemia diagnosis is statistically less dangerous than simply being born in the 1800s.

Governments have been exceptionally good at maintaining peace in Europe, a continent that for thousands of years was constantly ravaged by wars.

Grocery stores are lined with truckloads of food from every corner of the globe; a sight that would make Genghis Khan's jaw hit the floor.

The collective knowledge of humanity lives in your pocket. And it doesn't stop there. You have a flashlight, calculator, and hundreds of other miracles packed into a device the size of your hand. You can FaceTime someone 6,000 miles away in Tokyo with crystal clear resolution that rivals the naked eye. With that same pea-sized camera, you can trace the entire night sky and illuminate the constellations that captivated ancient Egyptians.

In the past, people would have been lucky to hear good music just a couple of times in their whole life. Maybe it was from a traveling minstrel or church performance. But now you can open Spotify to a search bar that says "What do you want to listen to?", taking your pick from the greatest musicians throughout history — from Whitney’s voice to Hendrix’s guitar to Beethoven's sonatas.

You can fill your mind with ideas and knowledge, satisfying any curiosity. You can go on the internet and get a better education than the most privileged people of a hundred years ago. You can learn to program computers, cook sushi, speak Spanish, and absorb the history of a thousand civilizations. You can watch Richard Feynman’s lectures and Christopher Nolan's movies. You can learn how jet engines are made and why the sky is blue.

Progress often compounds too slowly to notice. But when you zoom out, it’s incredible to see what humanity has accomplished. Compare today’s world to the rest of history and you will find that the present day is nothing short of a miracle.

- Sam

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