The Best Time to Be Alive

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Are you worried about your future? Turn on the TV or scroll through social media and it’s hard not to be. But is there a brighter side to the story? Marian Tupy, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of Superabundance, explains why it’s a great time to be alive.

Script:

Are you worried about your future?

Worse, do you even have a future?

Many—especially those born in this century—are asking themselves these questions.

In 2021 researchers at the University of Bath in England polled 10,000 people all over the world between the ages of 16 and 25.

Seventy-five percent thought that the “future is frightening.”

Fifty-six percent thought that “humanity” is coming to an end.

Thirty-nine percent stated that they were “hesitant to have children” because the future was so bleak.

Are their fears legitimate?

Or is it possible there’s another side—a brighter side—to the story?

That we are, in fact, the most fortunate human beings—ever.

Just how lucky are we?

The late great satirist P. J. O’Rourke summed it up in one word.

Dentistry.

One could easily add electricity, air conditioning, and—lest we forget—indoor plumbing.

Louis XIV’s magnificent palace of Versailles had no proper waste facilities. People relieved themselves where they stood: in hallways, behind curtains, and in the gardens. One contemporary observer noted that Versailles was “the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors—the passageways, corridors, and courtyards are filled with urine and fecal matter.”

This is Louis XIV we’re talking about—maybe the richest man on earth at the time.

Ask yourself this question: would you prefer to live in a studio apartment with electricity, a window air conditioner, and indoor plumbing or a Versailles palace with none of these things?

In nineteenth-century London, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that no one wore white shirts—the pollution indoors turned everything black.

View the full script: https://l.prageru.com/44fMUD2

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