You make some good points, fuzzyfungus. I would say a couple of things. The pace of change is, I would argue, near an historical high. We have a new task in just keeping up with this change.
And then, yes, in many ways we live lives that would be the envy of ye olde monarchs, but for every penicillin, there’s antibiotic resistance. My local market has an astounding array of food, but it’s production may not be sustainable in a warming world. The internet makes these conversations possible, and also the global surveillance state. You get a free frogurt, but the frogurt contains sodium benzoate (that’s bad).
So it’s not that we don’t have agency or a lot of things we didn’t used to, it’s that all those things now come with strings attached.
