You never hear someone struggling to pay rent or to buy groceries tell you "God bless we have it so much better than 150 years ago". Guess why?
People who believe the world is great as it is don't spend any effort making the world better.
Only people who believe that the world should be better, AND that it is possible to make it better expend effort to make it better.
I agree, but saying the world is much better than in the past while it still has all the same basic problems (wars, hunger, preventable diseases, poverty, exploitation, etc) sounds to me just like privileged people patting themselves in the back. In the meantime, children die under bombs and starving.
If you imagine too hard, you'll get push back in the form of, "every time we've tried something different, it's been a disaster." Beyond not having an imagination, there are those out there that seek to actively quell imagination. It's literally beyond their reality.
Having electricity in ones house wasnt even common until the 1890s. Racism was common, if not the default.
Does that make a better lifer? Maybe maybe not. Life is about more than what toys you have. There are many negatives about modern life that we didn't have and pointing at how much tech crap you can now afford does not offset that.
> Racism was common, if not the default.
It still is, just not always targeted at the same people.