According To History, You Are Born At The Perfect Time
No one rents pineapples, it’s a great time to be a kid, and light is almost free
Believe it or not, the world you live in is better than you can imagine. Right now, that’s not a popular opinion. Being a natural pessimist, I might know the reasons why.
It’s always been cool to be pessimistic: Generally, the person wagging their finger at the world with reasons why it sucks sounds more intelligent than a smiling optimist.
Our brains are trained to focus on bad over good: Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister claims our brains are so keyed into “bad” as a survival mechanism, it generally takes five good events to overcome the power of one bad one. After all, hyper focusing on bad kept our ancestors alive.
Slow gradual improvement can’t fit neatly into a soundbite: Disaster catches attention. It’s why everyone rubber necks when they see a crash on the highway and why tragedy headlines the news. However, the slow decline of childhood mortality over a hundred years is a tougher sale.
Ultimately, it’s also hard to see beyond your present world without the perspective of time. That’s why trivial problems in childhood seemed so huge then. Years of experience tells you differently now.
With this in mind, let’s stretch this out way beyond our time alive today, and take a trip to the past. It’ll give us a better perspective of our present. Oddly, our first stop may change the way you view tennis courts forever.
It’s Never Been A Better Time For Kids To Be Alive
“It’s much safer to live now than it used to be…The fact that we live in an age where we don’t expect a large percentage of our children to die in childhood makes us the historical anomaly.”
— Dan Carlin, The End Is Always Near
On a random day in 1924, two boys were absorbed playing a game of tennis. The younger of the two, Calvin, was in such a rush to get to the court, he forgot to put his socks on. During the game he got a blister on his foot — really a minor thing.
Well, let’s rephrase that; today it’s a minor thing.
Unfortunately, Calvin died within a week from a blood infection. But this story takes a crazier turn when you realize who the boy was. It was Calvin Coolidge, Jr., son of the current President of the United States of America. He died playing tennis on the Whitehouse grounds.
It didn’t matter that the boy was the son of the most powerful politician in the country, no one could save him from common bacteria. Penicillin wasn’t discovered until 1928, and not widely available till the 1940s.
So minor things could be deadly, especially for children.
In fact, in the year 1800, forty-three percent of the world’s children didn’t make it past the age of five. Fortunately, by 2015 that rate went down to four percent.
Now, what happens if we had 1800’s mortality today? The United States had about twenty-three million children younger than five in 2017. So, nearly ten million of those children wouldn’t have seen their sixth birthday.
That not only sucks for kids, but ruins your world. What would it be like to regularly attend funerals with little caskets, and what would that do to you? Remember, four out of ten kids you know would die.
Obviously, that’s pretty heavy, so let’s tone it down a bit to something less depressing — like fruit.
Pineapples Were Once Worth Their Weight In Gold
In a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast, blogger Gurwinder Bhogal explained how a recent encounter with a tomato made him staggeringly happy. This sounds a bit strange. After all, it’s just a plant, what’s so special about it?
Gurwinder states his happiness wasn’t just about the food saying, “I thought about the work it takes to make a beautiful tomato like that.” He notes that tomatoes originally didn’t look or taste like this, many years of breeding, labor, and thought created it. Gurwinder got to benefit from this.
In fact, we all benefit from the countless hours ancestors before us toiled to create what we take for granted. You could sum this up with the pineapple.
In Bethan Bell’s article for the BBC, she notes that seeing pineapples regularly in supermarkets wasn’t always the case. The fruit was once so rare it was a sign of opulence. In England, they called it “king pine,” due to its green crown, sweet taste, and golden hue.
On the island it could command prices of eleven thousand pounds per pineapple (in today’s money). They were so valuable, the super-rich displayed them as a status symbol. While the middle class would rent pineapples to show off at parties.
It’s just an example of how much we have at our fingertips: from food, entertainment, information, communication, and comfort. Not to mention the ultimate convenience — light.
For our Neolithic ancestors countless hours of work got you limited light and most of it was powered with oil or fat. The nineteenth century got much better though.
Dr. Marian Tupy and Dr. Gale Pooley at Humanprogress.org break it down in a chart comparing how many hours of work were necessary for an hour of light. The results are amazing.
By 1800, six hours of work bought you one hour of light. By 1850, it was about two and a half hours’ labor for an hour of light. By 1900, almost eleven minutes’ worth of work got you an hour. And now?
In 2011, half a second’s worth of work got you an hour’s worth of light. So, it’s technically free.
Forgive me. I know I’ve gone through a lot of data and history over the past few minutes, so let’s bring this all together with our original thought.
Comparing Our World With The Past Gives Us Perspective
The present narrative you’re inundated with everywhere is that our world sucks. It’s an endless parade of crappiness. And it does appear this way if you only watch the news, because bad news is easier to put into soundbites. It also captures our attention five times more than good news.
But there are great positives hiding below the surface in the slow gradual process over the years.
We’re free from the torment of watching children around us die in painful numbers. What’s a tragedy now, used to be commonplace.
Our world has regular access to things only kings could adorn themselves with (including pineapples). Moreover, we get the benefit of the hard work of our ancestors before us.
While light was once a luxury, for us it’s about free. This enables us the ability to turn darkness into daylight, so we can read and learn whenever we choose.
But there’s one more thing to mention. Obviously, the world has countless problems in our present time, just as it did in the past, and will in the future. I have one reply for this: good. It’ll give us something to do.
Viktor Frankl in his epic book Man’s Search For Meaning details how humanity innately searches for something beyond themselves to produce meaning in life. He says it usually revolves around work or loving others.
Both describe eloquently what our ancestors did for us: cratering childhood mortality, bringing us light, and giving common life the conveniences of an ancient king. Inevitably it offers us a challenge too. What good will we do for those that come after us?
That’s why we were born at a perfect time, according to history.
-Originally posted on Medium 8/8/23