Sometimes I step back and look at just how much we have that we take for granted that our ancestors never dreamed of, and others in the world still don't have.
I remember, back in college, I was on an "Entry to Employment" course that, really, is geared toward dropouts and people who just don't know how to function in society. Or at least, that's what you'd deduce from most the students anyway. It was great- thanks to the magic of tax-payer-funded education incentives (read: EMA) I was actually getting paid for the simple enjoyable pleasure of being the smartest person in the room all day long. Even learned to cook chicken curry.
Anyway. One particular exercise saw everyone issued with Argos catalogues and told to furnish a 3-room bedsit (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom) on a £1000 budget. Assume there's already a cooker, shower and some cupboards. It was a simple enough exercise so long as your idea of budgeting is in roughly the same ballpark as "avoid the most expensive thing in the book".
I don't remember how many people in the class had an easy time with it (I challenge anyone to go do this for yourself, it's not all too hard). But I do remember one particular girl who insisted on picking out a medium-sized high-definition television priced at about half her budget. And, despite that this wasn't even a real situation, she stubbornly refused to be talked out of it because of how great it was. Naturally she couldn't stick to the budget. I just included a modestly-priced regular-definition TV, and with all else said and done still had enough budget left for a Gamecube bundle. (Entertainment is good but not as important as other things...)
This is a bit of an extreme example, for sure, but it really goes to show that people take a lot for granted.
Maybe we aren't all so crazy over our HDTVs (though I'm probably the only person I know who doesn't have one I'm sure many of you can exist without such a thing if the need arose) but nonetheless there are many things in our everyday lives that we think of as "essentials" and act with a degree of urgency over the loss of, that other people on this very planet will never own or see.
It became serious fucking business for half my family when the TV downstairs broke. If your refrigerator broke, you'd probably seek an immediate replacement because you just can't function for a week without it.
Just look at the sheer power that we, the First-World People wield in our everyday lives:
Right from the start of your day, you (usually) wake up wrapped in a warm bundle of fine blankets and sheets and such.
As you leave your bed, you probably enjoy the existence of central heating, which allows you to comfortably strut around all but naked when there's a foot of snow outside.
As you reach your bathroom you summon forth as much of Earth's most important resource- water- as you could possibly need and then some, not to mention adjusting the pressure and temperature of it to your exact preferences, only ever having it too hot or cold for a second or so.
You likely use yet more water to dispose of your... well, you know. Do you even know how it works? Once upon a time people just dug a hole in the ground and left it at that. Now you use a significant amount of water to blast it into a vast series of underground tubes that take it to I-don't-even-fucking-know-where.
As your day goes on, you often access a machine that continually drains electricity- commonly created by burning our ever decreasing supply of fossil fuels many miles from you- to keep your food at a cool, sterile temperature. This used to just be achieved by putting things in a backroom without central heating to screw it all up, but our own slavery to convenience demands innovation to support itself.
You probably use other similar machines to heat up and cook your food quickly on demand, clean your clothes, wash your dishes and everything else besides. We even rely on our machines to tell us what time it is.
And you probably travel quite often in a highly complex heavy metal box on wheels that can if misused cause serious harm to others. And is more than likely only useful for travelling along specially-made surfaces (read: roads), which just so happen to be everywhere thanks to the hard work of people who like roads more than they like fields, forests and wildlife.
To any civilization pre-1900s having all or any of this would make me look like some sort of amazing wizard. Hell, there are still people in the world today who get by without any of it and maybe don't even know it all exists.
And yet, most of us who do use it all don't have a damn clue how any of it works. We just tell our robot slaves what we want, and then we have it.
And we've learned to depend on all these things, these things that nobody else ever had. This isn't some moral judgement. I'm exactly the same. It's an observation.
And here I am, telling you about it from an elaborate, complicated machine connected without a wire to an infinitely sized communications network and information database. I am putting this silly blog post into the greatest archive of information to have existed in all of human history. A network that can be accessed by anyone, from almost anywhere, to obtain any kind of information on anything they can imagine.
We have, at our fingertips and in the palms of our hands, the product of centuries of technological advancement and human achievement- we're at the endgame here, we have the means to all but instantaneously beam messages and information from anywhere to anywhere.We have in our hands the means to learn almost anything about anything. This is power, people. The most amazing power to ever exist.
And we use it... to do what? Share hundreds of pictures of your drunk self? Watch videos of cute puppies? Play videogames with irate strangers? Look at me, ranting about it.
We are a worthless bunch of ingrates who wield more power than we care to even try to understand, and have no idea where it comes from or what we can achieve with it.
I am living a life of pure decadent luxury built on the sweat and blood of centuries of hard-working men who achieved great things- right from the agricultural revolution all the way to the invention of social networking. And I do what to honour their efforts and sacrifices?
I sweep floors and upsell carbonated beverages. I'm a nobody, a background person that nobody, least of all the history books, gives a damn about.
And maybe that's all I'll ever be. That's true of many billions of now-dead people after all. But to not at least try to achieve something with all that I have been given would be an insult to the efforts of thousands of people who did so much more with so much less. And to those who never had the chance.
I am going to try. I will try to achieve something. I am going to fly, or I am going to burn trying. To quote a song from the creator of one of my favourite webcomics,
at least Icarus didn't die of skin cancer.
Rant over.
