The Best of Times
I have lived in the best of times in all of history — past, present, and future
If you, like me, were born in 1955, white, upper middle class, in the USA, then you are in a cohort who has been fortunate enough to have had it all. We have lived the best possible lives in all of history. For that, I am lucky, grateful, and guilty. Let me elucidate.
The base of the argument is simple: Human civilization and technology have been on an upward trend ever since homo erectus. Up until now. Now, we are living in the beginning of the crumbling of that civilization due to climate change, the sixth mass extinction, and resource depletion.
Things will never be this good again, in terms of living in comfort convenience and material wealth. Being born in 1955, I’ve lived at the peak of human civilization for most of my life. Being part of the narrowing middle class, I will probably remain comfortable for the rest of my days on earth.
1955 is a key birth year if you lived in the USA, because that was the first year that, when you turned 18, the military draft for the Vietnam war had been ended. If you were born in 1954, you had a pretty good chance of going to ‘Nam and getting your ass shot off.
If you were born into the dominant culture of another first-world country besides the USA, you may be part of a similarly fortunate cohort. Your cohort may begin a little earlier than 1955 because you don’t have the sharp demarcation of the Vietnam war military draft. But it won’t go back too much earlier because your country was probably recovering from the devastation of World War II.
1956 is not a sharp cut-off point on the upward side, and perhaps the lucky cohort might include anyone born up until the early 1960s. However, the later you were born, the more of your life is going to be lived in the hellscape of a collapsing global civilization.
Let’s discuss some ways in which our cohort was blessed.
I never went hungry, not even a little bit. There was always a cornucopia of fresh food (and also lot of deliciously processed food) available in an amazing grocery store just a short drive away. Try to imagine how wonderous a modern grocery store would appear to someone from the 18th century, or a thousand years before that, or a million years before that. Or, to someone from a developing country today. I have never had to hunt, gather, grow, or butcher my own food. Or dumpster dive for it. (Though when I was a kid, I did dumpster dive for lettuce as a treat for our pet guinea pig. Fun! for a kid.) I’ve always had plenty of fresh(-ish), potable water at my disposal.
A home with indoor plumbing: hot and cold running water, and a flush toilet!
I’ve always had a roof over my head, warmer, brighter, and more pleasant than any noble’s castle or peasant’s cottage ever was. I’ve enjoyed the privacy and freedom of living in a home dedicated to my immediate family my whole life, except for a few years that I had roommates or apartments when I was young. (And that was no hardship, it was fun!) A home with indoor plumbing: hot and cold running water, and a flush toilet!
My life has been clean! I get to bathe or shower every day. My clothes are freshly washed. Deodorant! Toilet paper! Disposable paper towels! Condoms! No dirt floors. No goats or chickens in the house. No sleeping rough. Washing machines and dishwashers, better and less trouble than any houseful full of servants. What a fine, easy life!
I’ve lived in a self-governing democracy, the best form of political organization ever tried. Best in delivering freedom, wealth, and meaning to the majority of its citizens — well, to my cohort, at least. Maybe more socialist democracies such as are found recently in some European countries are better than the American flavor, but it is overall the historical peak for political organization. Of course, our democracy in the USA has already degenerated to oligopoly. And appears to be headed for fascism.
Technology, whoa! Smart phones, the internet, nuclear power plants, rockets to Mars!
I’ve lived under a capitalist economy providing wealth and the possibility of upward social mobility for my cohort, especially in the first half of my life. Lately, it has been more monopoly and monopsony than capitalism, with consequently less wealth and social mobility even for my lucky cohort.
Technology, whoa! Computers, smart phones, video games, the internet, virtual/augmented reality! The birth of AI! Personal automobiles! Self-driving automobiles! Commercial air travel! Manipulation of our very DNA! Nuclear power plants! Nuclear weapons! Rockets to Mars, and beyond! Rockets soft-landing when they return to Earth! Truly we live in miraculous times, technology-wise. Imagine the Connecticut Yankee from today in King Arthur’s court! (If they brought their smart phone along, and it could connect to the 2023 internet.)
How about the arts? We’ve lived in a time that was particularly rich in music, movies, and television. What’s that you say? Mozart is superior to The Beatles? Rembrandt to HBO? That’s okay, because we have access to both Mozart and The Beatles, both Rembrandt and HBO. This may not be the peak for creating art, but I don’t create (much) art anyway. However, thanks to writing printing and recording technology, I can enjoy the arts from down through the ages. It is most definitely the cultural peak for consuming arts.
Why do I include the word “upper” in my “upper middle class” qualifier for my cohort? It’s not strictly income. Back in the 1950s through 1970s, when labor unions were strong, blue collar workers earned a pretty good living from their factory jobs. But in the 1980s, when Reagan and the Republican right began their destruction of the post-Depression, post-war economy and social contract (as they had been trying to do ever since they failed to stop the New Deal), life went to hell for these folks. Factories closed, jobs moved overseas, and unions were “busted”. Not the best of times for them.
Reagan and his cronies began the first destruction of the middle class in the 1980s. At that time, the upper middle class in white collar jobs were pretty much protected from the storm.
My father was an electronics technician at Litton Industries, a large aerospace and defense contractor. He was good at his job and well liked, so he was lucky enough to never get laid off.
However, he lived in fear of that happening, and was constantly taking classes in HVAC, auto repair, and such to have backup skills at the ready. As a child, my life felt very solid and secure; little did I know how fast the duck’s little legs were paddling just beneath the surface. (As an adult, my life felt very solid and secure up until recently.)
College was cheap if not free when I went.
The second destruction of the middle class has been underway, of course, since the Great Recession of 2008. This time, it is reaching into the upper middle class. The rise of Artificial Intelligence may well be the last nail in the coffin of the middle class, if the Climate Catastrophe doesn’t do us in first.
College was cheap if not free when I went. I had scholarships, help from my parents, and part time work that got me through college and started me out in life with zero debt. A $3,000 gift from my parents allowed me to get established with my first apartment and my (easily obtainable, very good) first professional job. This situation was typical for my cohort. I’ll bet it sounds like heaven to any young people reading this now.
My cohort has also been blessed with good health. We’ve not had to deal with any of the traditional scourges of civilization such as polio, cholera, malaria, and typhoid fever. At least not up until Covid in 2020.
The marvels of modern medicine have grown as quickly as other technologies, and we’ve been the healthiest people in history. Of course, a lot of our healthcare is dedicated to mending and mitigating diseases caused by civilization, but we’re also pretty good at keeping a minor wound from becoming fatal.
In my cohort, most everyone had good healthcare insurance provided by our employers for most of our lives. I just heard on Chris Hayes’ podcast Why Is This Happening? that the annual premiums for company-provided health insurance are roughly $8,000 for a single employee, $20,000 for a family. Is it any wonder that jobs with benefits have practically disappeared?
In my lifetime, we made great strides socially as well. Women’s liberation. Progress in Civil Rights. Abortion rights. Gay liberation. Gay marriage! How sad it is to see all of that starting to crumble.
Our blessed cohort has a lot to be grateful for. And to feel guilty about.
In so many ways, quality of life is already degrading for my cohort, and pretty much everybody. A lot of the change is social and political, and we could fix that over time. But we don’t have time for the pendulum to swing back. There are already too many people on the planet, too many species going extinct, and the Climate Catastrophe already hitting. I’m afraid it is all downhill from here, girls and boys. I’m afraid because it is all downhill from here.
The best of times is behind us now, never to come again. But while it lasted, our blessed cohort had a lot to be grateful for.
We are probably not the happiest cohort in history. I think we are happier than the poor, because money does buy happiness up to a certain point. I think we are happier than the rich, because too much money is a pain in the ass. But spiritually, we’ve been a pretty poor cohort. Connection to family and community weakened. Sex is plentiful but love has been in short supply. Feeling valuable and useful, having meaning in our lives, not so much. Spiritually, we have been on a downward trend my whole life, and it looks to continue to get worse and worse for some time to come. Maybe a silver lining to the cloud of the collapse of civilization will be an enrichment of lives spiritually and socially.
Our much-blessed cohort also has a lot to feel guilty about.
Listen, I understand that my comfort and wealth has been bought by the exploitation of millions of those less fortunate than me. The price is paid by the poor in my own country, who could have healthier, happier lives if my taxes supported a better social safety net.
It is the deadly wealth gap. I did not earn my way onto the winning side of it, I just got lucky.
It is the legacy of slavery that built my country’s wealth.
It is the genocide of the Native Americans from whom our country stole its land.
It is the global American empire that exploits the people and wealth of other nations (and even our own) so that us fortunate few can live in riches.
It is the destruction of the earth’s global climate and ecology, and of our sibling animals and plants, to support my culture’s greed, my cohort’s greed … leading to the end of it all in our lifetime.
It’s an ugly, fatal legacy, and I feel guilty about enjoying the fruits of it. But it is the culture I was born into. I never even recognized its costs until recently. My cohort has been the lucky beneficiary of all this progress, technology, exploitation and greed. It is easy to see that this has been the best of times to be alive, for us.
We brief masters of the earth. For whatever that was worth.
— Lannie Rose, July 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing (except as a thesaurus)
