We Live Like Gods: The Paradox of Material Well-being

The Paradox of Well-being: Kings didn't have antibiotics, but today everyone does

A retired pastor earns in a month what he spent an entire year preaching. This phrase, spoken by an elder in a viral video, encapsulates the paradox of our time: the material standard of living has reached heights medieval monarchs could never have imagined, yet complaint is the dominant sentiment. The question is not whether we live better than a century ago, but why we don't feel it.

Material pogre is undeniable

The data is stubborn. Any citizen on minimum wage has access to foods that Charlemagne never tasted: tomato, potato chips, chocolate, ice cream. And not only that: they can listen to Bach live, study mathematics with online courses, or tour the streets of New Zealand from their sofa. Philip II, the most powerful man of his time, lacked the information offered today by a low-end mobile phone. Medicine has made routine what was once a death sentence: laryngitis without antibiotics could kill, and tooth decay was living hell. Today, an analgesic solves it.

Nostalgia as a selective filter

But nostalgia is a filter that erases the bad. Those who yearn for the 80s forget there was no internet, that phone booths were the only means of contact, and that film had to be developed. That said, they did generate jobs. Housing is another example: people say life was better before because a poor great-grandfather built a 300-square-meter house. True, but today you can buy one in any village for less than 50,000 euros. The problem is not the housing; it's that nobody wants to work in the fields because it is hard and poorly paid.

The frustration of expectations

Current dissatisfaction has more to do with expectations than reality. They sold us a future we never had: stable work, affordable housing, social advancement. The elder knew from childhood that life was hard and that good times came occasionally. Today's young person compares their situation to the promise of infinite prosperity and feels cheated. And there is the crux: we live better than any king of the past, but worse than they promised us.

Why, having more than any monarch in history, has dissatisfaction become the new standard? Perhaps the answer lies not in the data, but in human nature: complacency is a survival mechanism that runs out when comparison shifts from the past to the neighbor.