I spent a solid percentage of my life thinking exactly along those lines, with a checklist of medical advances and modern appliances to back it up, but I don't

I spent a solid percentage of my life thinking exactly along those lines, with a checklist of medical advances and modern appliances to back it up, but I don't think that any more. A combination of international (wayyy off the beaten path) travel and super long distance backpacking, coupled with a technologically focused career living in large US cities has convinced me that we've simply forgotten what made people in the past happy, or passionate, or content, and none of things had very much to do with wealth at all. Once basic survival needs are met, it really doesn't take much if you don't know you need it. Put another way, if I were an ascetic monk 500 years ago, I have no doubt that there would be a collection of people ready to tell me that only a fool would live in the woods when I could easily live in a village and have any type of straw mattress I wanted. We could discuss whether or not they had a worse life than us, but we don't really need to because they're just us, but earlier. 100 years from now some father will be explaining the exact life we live today to his daughter, and she'll never believe that we could be anything except miserable in our abject poverty because we what... didn't have a biobelt generated environment shield around us or something. For the same reasons that it took a lot of convincing for people to believe that the entire universe didn't revolve around the Earth, it's almost impossible to take ourselves our of the time we live in and put us the continuum of history where we actually exist. But if you walk away for a little bit to a place where life works the way it used to a few generations ago (but with modern medicine of course, and free food, in historic terms), it makes it very very difficult to understand how people today could ever be happy living anonymous, isolated lives with social interactions mediated by software. ps. I know that there are starving people somewhere, and of course their lives are actually miserable.