I don't think that's the thrust of the piece, any more than celebrating your birthday is an invitation to commit suicide. Appreciation of where we are at, like a birthday, seems its point.
And that there are a great many people who don't feel all the blessings of these achievements. Not only is there relative inconvenience and suffering, there are also resentments and those have tangible social and political impacts. One useful step is to simply acknowledge them. I write this from a small town that lacks Uber, Doordash, and has people that basically work for a living, not sit behind a desk. Their construction and agricultural labor enables some of the luxuries-cum-expectations listed in the piece.
We'll always judge ourselves relative to surroundings and peers, so the billionaire needs to be a centibillionaire and the retired cotton field hand would like all their teeth back and AC that works. Let's not forget we, the readers of the piece, were basically born on third base already.
And that there are a great many people who don't feel all the blessings of these achievements. Not only is there relative inconvenience and suffering, there are also resentments and those have tangible social and political impacts. One useful step is to simply acknowledge them. I write this from a small town that lacks Uber, Doordash, and has people that basically work for a living, not sit behind a desk. Their construction and agricultural labor enables some of the luxuries-cum-expectations listed in the piece.
We'll always judge ourselves relative to surroundings and peers, so the billionaire needs to be a centibillionaire and the retired cotton field hand would like all their teeth back and AC that works. Let's not forget we, the readers of the piece, were basically born on third base already.