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Life was dirty, difficult, and dangerous for almost everyone who ever existed
We live in an amazing world, and we should stop taking it for granted.
You can eat a meal—wolfing it down with one hand while checking the news on your smartphone with the other—without a second thought to the tractors and harvesting machines, the irrigation pipes, the industrial furnaces making synthetic fertilizer, the researchers in the lab breeding and engineering hardier varieties of crops. We don’t worry about whether the crops will fail from drought or frost, or whether the creek will flood and wash out the footbridge, or whether we’ll have enough firewood to last the winter, or whether a brother will be lost at sea on his two-month voyage across the Atlantic, or whether a child will die from a scrape by a rusty nail. 4 In winter, our homes are more comfortable than Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles: in its grand Hall of Mirrors, despite two fireplaces, it was “advisable to wear furs for added protection,” and the wine and water sometimes froze in the glasses.
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