The limit of human felicity

I've held a slightly unfashionable view for a long time: that this is the best moment in history to be alive. Not a good one, necessarily — plenty of what's happening right now is horrifying — but the best one so far. The odds that an average person dies of something stupid, or watches their child die of it, have never been lower than they are this morning.

Ordinary Abundance makes that case better than I can, and it does it without a single chart. It's a scroll through an ordinary flat — sitting room, kitchen, back room — pairing the objects you'd walk past without noticing against what people said when those objects were new.

Edward Bellamy, writing in 1888 about a utopia set in the year 2000, imagined music available at home in unlimited quantity, suited to any mood, starting and stopping at will. He called it "the limit of human felicity." He is describing Spotify. He is describing Spotify as the ceiling of human happiness, the point past which there would be nothing left to want.

The rest of it lands the same way. A crowd standing in awed silence in Wabash, Indiana in 1880, under the first streetlights that weren't fire. An Iowa woman remembering her family's first indoor bathroom and feeling like "the wealthiest person in the world." Medieval libraries chaining their books to the desks, because that's what a book was worth. A pound of ginger going for the price of a sheep.

What I like most is that it doesn't argue with you. There's no line going up and to the right, no lecture about gratitude. It hands you the primary sources and lets you do the arithmetic yourself.

The site's own closing point is the right one: our restlessness is to our credit, and we should keep pushing. But it costs nothing to occasionally notice that we're standing inside somebody else's utopia.