In This Best of All Possible Worlds
Modern life is a series of miracles that we take for granted
Pull out your cell phone and take a look at it. Nowadays, it’s a fairly mundane thing. 97% of Americans own one. But if you showed it to a computer scientist 70 years ago, it would be regarded as unfathomably powerful and miraculous. The number of transistors, the basic building blocks of modern computing power, has grown exponentially since the 50s, when the world’s first transistor was developed.1
Built in 1945, the ENIAC, the world’s first electronic digital computer, had the equivalent of 25,000 transistors (before transistors, computers used vacuum tubes and diodes for computing power). Deep Blue, the famous IBM supercomputer that beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, had a total of roughly 900 million transistors. Today’s average smartphone has over 10 billion. Your average laptop and desktop computers have even more. In the 79 years since the world’s first computer, the average transistor count has increased by a factor of 4 million
Even more remarkable is the cost of computing. The ENIAC cost the Federal government $487,000 to build, or roughly 7 million dollars in 2024 dollars. The average cost of a smartphone in 2024 is just about 1,000 dollars. The smartphone you have in your hand is 400,000x more powerful than the ENIAC for 0.014% of the cost. Even more amazingly, the ENIAC took up 1800 square feet on the ground floor of a building at the University of Pennsylvania. The average smartphone is just over 13 square inches of area. So not only is your smartphone 400,000x more powerful, its footprint is also 20,000x smaller. That is absolutely mindboggling.
It’s also worth noting that the ENIAC was originally used to calculate the ballistic trajectories of artillery pieces and the program to build it came out of military exigencies of WWII, the most traumatic and violent war ever fought. Any comparison of present day life to any other period of time in history is going to be an extremely lopsided affair. Life as we know it in 2024 is nothing short of miraculous, and with each full rotation of the Earth, all of us rely on a series of miracles to get us through the day.
It Doesn’t Stop At the Supercomputer in Your Pocket
Nowadays it’s fashionable to complain about increases in the price of food. But when you go to the supermarket and look at the produce aisle, what do you see? Oranges, apples, pineapples, blueberries, strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and dozens of other fruits and vegetables available all day every day throughout the year.
In other words, there is no such thing as seasonal foods anymore. Modern supply chains stretch across the world, so that whenever the growing season ends in one region, it begins in another. You can buy any kind of fresh produce at any time of the year, and at a price that you can afford. We may grumble about inflation, but these prices are still much lower than at any other point in history. Before the 20th century, the vast majority of the world spent the majority of their income solely on food.
Going back to WWII, I recently watched the show Masters of the Air2. In one scene, an airman preparing to drop humanitarian supplies to the starving Dutch remarks on how it would have been years since the average Dutch would have seen a fresh orange. If you’ve ever seen an old fashioned juice glass and wondered why it was so small (most are between 4-5 fluid ounces in capacity), it’s because juice was so expensive for much of its existence, only consumed regularly by the elite of society. Nowadays, anyone can afford it.
In the 18th century, it was common for the British middle class to rent pineapples purely for decorative display, as they were far too expensive (roughly $14,000 today) for them to actually eat. Nowadays, I can go into Kroger and buy one for less than 5 dollars at any day of the year. The very notion of renting food for the purpose of showing it off is utterly bewildering nowadays.
Or the Foods You See at the Supermarket
People are living longer and healthier lives. Infectious diseases, the most common cause of death for the vast majority of human existence, now barely registers as a major cause of death. Even during the COVID pandemic, roughly 7 million people died between December 2019 and May 2023 due to the coronavirus, but even that is a small portion of the ~160 million people who died of any cause during that same period.
Antibiotics, a modern medicinal miracle, and vaccines have saved countless lives from so many deadly diseases. Antiretroviral drugs and therapies changed HIV from a death sentence to a condition more manageable than diabetes. We have gene therapies that can cure previously fatal congenital diseases and conditions. There are so many lifechanging and lifesaving medicines available now that couldn’t be had at any price even just 50 years ago.
Travel used to be extremely dangerous and time consuming. Most people would spend the vast majority of their lives within 10 miles of where they were born. Air travel has only been commercially available for a century, and for much of its history, used only by the very wealthy and powerful. Now anyone can fly across the country for a few hundred dollars. Automobile ownership is commonplace through all segments of society, and people now routinely travel 10+ miles every day safely, quickly, cheaply, and comfortably.
Who’s Got it Better Than Us?
In Voltaire’s Candide, Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, routinely insists to Candide that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” as the character experiences tragedy after tragedy in his travels throughout the world. Voltaire portrays Pangloss as an educated fool, utterly out of his depth as the common cruelties and tragedies of the 18th century are inflicted upon the main characters in every chapter.
But even as Pangloss improbably hangs onto his belief that everything works out in the end, the ending of Candide does have (admittedly a far more cynical) Candide and his companions (Pangloss included) on a peaceful farm, content in their existence if not exactly happy.
It’s hard to overstate how well that parallels with the present day. Modern day life is incredible, in every sense of the word. And yet, anxiety, fear, and distrust seem to dominate the headlines while optimism is hard to find. In the real world, Pangloss should be beating his chest and taking a victory lap. But everyone around him is just tired of his shit.
Make no mistake, I am not saying life is perfect and great for everyone. A tenth of the global population still lives in extreme poverty. But by those same standards, just about all of humanity lived in extreme poverty a few centuries ago, and were far more likely to die of pestilence, hunger, and war. But in those intervening centuries, society has progressed by leaps and bounds and now the common person enjoys things today that would be considered impossible luxuries not too long ago.
And Yet…
16 years ago, the playwright David Mamet wrote a piece in the Village Voice titled “Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” ahead of the upcoming election, about his change in ideology from liberal to some sort of conservative/libertarian hybrid. In his essay, he writes that, generally speaking, his life is going pretty well and so are the lives of people around him. But even so:
there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “
Life is great. Unfathomably great. And yet it can always be better. That driving impulse, to seek out a newer, better way of doing things never goes away, and it’s why humanity currently enjoys its newfound superabundance of material prosperity. Conversely, it becomes easy to fixate and well on the remaining inequities and tragedies that still exist in the world.
Adam Smith once remarked that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Even in a country as safe and as prosperous as ours, a country of 330 million people will always have some amount of ruin and tragedy. It’s perhaps ironic that our material prosperity and technological progress has made it incredibly easy to fixate on the negative, as younger generations report increasing anxiety as they’re doomscrolling through the worst of what’s happening throughout the world.
My unsolicited advice to everybody, but to younger people in particular, is to take a deep breath, find ways to be grateful for what you do have, learn more about the world (and don’t just fixate on the negative) to gain a better sense of perspective, and then move intentionally and expeditiously towards the things you want. Modern life is a miracle, make it your miracle.
By the brilliant, eccentric, and extremely racist William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for it.
Although the general critical consensus is that it’s not as good as Band of Brothers, I enjoyed it immensely, and there are many scenes where it equals or betters BoB. In any case, it’s far better than The Pacific.
The thing I think you're missing is that homelessness, for example, isn't some persistent natural disaster like cancer, that we're slowly solving. It's a GROWING problem caused entirely by the way that we structure our society. In traditional cultures, there is no such thing as "homelessness" except for people banished from the tribe for bad behaviour. We invented the concept at the same time that we were inventing electrification. Other concepts we've invented are pollution, unemployment, weapons of mass destruction and genocide. It's bizarre to look only at material well-being and pretend that the massive amount of suffering in the world is natural and slowly receding. It's not. Some of it is man-made and increasing.
Let's see...how many predictable logical &/or epistemic errors can we spot in this stream of consciousness? As the saying goes: consciousness is a hell of a drug, and when combined with culture: *watch out*!