We Are the Envy of Our Ancestors

Climate change, caused by fossil fuels, and resource depletion are in a neck-and-neck race to wipe out modern civilization. By most sober measures, we are the terminal cohort of humanity.

Although we must face the terrifying end, we are also the only humans to experience our level of material privilege, physical security, and medical advancement.

Consider this: The modern working-class citizen lives better than ancient kings. We live infinitely better than the average person of just several generations ago.

Of course, "better" is a subjective measure. But today, I can avoid the basic bacterial infections that routinely killed my ancestors. I drink shit-free water. I don't have to crawl through a coal mine. Modern logistics can deliver food from every corner of the globe to my front door via a handheld glass slab. Overall, most humans are better off.

No secret to my readers, this blessing is also a curse. Every invention, every safety net, and every calorie of our surplus was permitted by low-cost fossil fuels. The carbon that liberated humanity from drudgery now threatens to collapse the very civilization it built. What giveth life, taketh life away.

Many see the damage and envy the past. I believe this is a coping mechanism - we balance our dread of the future by romanticizing the deep past a small fraction of survivors may once again experience. The romanticizing of the past has been supported by researchers like Marshall Sahlins, who in his 1966 "Original Affluent Society" thesis suggested that hunter-gatherers lived in idyllic harmony, working a mere fifteen hours a week.

Subsequent scrutiny questioned this conclusion. Sahlins had defined "work" only as the time spent actively hunting or gathering. When other researchers mapped the non-stop labor required to actually survive (processing tough fibrous plants, hauling water for miles, fashioning tools from flint, and maintaining camp) the true hunter-gatherer workweek frequently surpassed forty hours. The academic debate continues, but by no means was it a life of leisure.

The reality of pre-agricultural life is nothing to envy. Life expectancy at birth hovered around 30 years. Approximately 50% of children died from infection, exposure, or malnutrition before reaching reproductive age. Even the "communal harmony" was often a façade of survival. Ethnographers living among the !Kung San in the Kalahari Desert recorded that elderly foragers expressed a desperate, secret desire to keep something for themselves after a lifetime of obligatory, forced sharing enforced by relentless social harassment.

Living standards did not improve with the dawn of civilization. We characterize ancient empires by elite achievements, like the Pantheon or the Code of Hammurabi, which skews our perception of life within. For the majority, the daily reality was extreme deprivation and institutionalized hierarchy.

In ancient Mesopotamia around 2000 BC, peasant labor was an endless cycle of physical exhaustion, frequently interrupted by military conscription. Defeat in battle routinely resulted in mass enslavement.

The Roman Empire, for all its legal brilliance, relied upon the absolute exploitation of the masses. In the city of Rome, an estimated 300,000 citizens lived in grinding poverty. While wealthy patricians enjoyed central heating on the Palatine Hill, the urban poor were crammed into insulae, rickety, multi-storied wooden apartment blocks infamous for lethal collapses and frequent fires. These structures lacked sanitation; residents either utilized public latrines or dumped human waste directly from upper-story windows into the narrow alleys below.

The Subura, Rome's most infamous slum, was a wet, mosquito-infested hovel where the destitute slept beneath stairwells or inhabited the stone crypts of the dead outside the city walls. The working-class Roman survived on a wheat porridge called puls, facing a life expectancy of 20 to 30 years. A third of infants died before their first birthday. Resistance was crushed with systemic brutality; following the Spartacus rebellion in 71 BC, Roman legions nailed 6,000 people to crosses along the Appian Way and left them to rot as a public warning.

The eighteenth-century rural farmstead was no more wholesome. The diary of Mary Cooper, a woman tending a Long Island farmstead in the mid-1700s, provides a bleak glimpse into the "simple" life. "I am dirty and tired almost to death," she wrote. Her records document days of "much sorrow and toyle," where the only rest was the sleep of the exhausted.

For mothers, the birthing bed was frequently a deathbed. Women faced a 1% to 2% chance of dying during every single delivery. Postpartum hemorrhage and lethal infections, introduced into the womb by the unwashed hands of physicians, did death's work.

Obstructed labor brought unimaginable horror. In the late eighteenth century, Scottish doctors invented the first chainsaw (a hand-cranked device with moving teeth) specifically to saw through a conscious woman's pelvic bone to widen the birth canal. Anesthesia did not exist. Surgeons relied on four or five strong men to pin the thrashing patient to a wooden table while she remained entirely lucid as the blade ripped through tissue and bone.

Up to 30% of children in the 1800s died before their first birthday. Primary death records list the causes: consumption (tuberculosis), croup, whooping cough, and dysentery.

The Industrial Revolution brought a population explosion that outpaced sanitation. In Victorian London, millions relied on overflowing basement cesspools, pits dug directly beneath homes. As early flush toilets were introduced, these pits backed up, flooding cellars with liquid excrement and methane. This waste was eventually routed into the Thames River, the primary source of drinking water for the poor, exposing them to diseases like cholera. Victims of cholera suffered dehydration so catastrophic that their blood thickened and their skin turned a corpse-like blue, often killing them in less than 24 hours.

In the tenements of New York, families hauled heavy buckets up six flights of stairs just to boil water for a sponge bath, while toilet facilities were rotting wooden privies in courtyards shared by hundreds.

Then came the discovery of fossil fuels. This is the central paradox of our current existential dead-end. The fossil fuels that now threaten our biosphere are exactly what rescued us from those Victorian cesspools. The period after 1870 marks the single greatest discontinuity in the history of our species. By burning dense energy, we decoupled from our millennia-long baseline of starvation, disease, and filth.

The average citizen today has the equivalent of over 8,000 human laborers at their disposal in the form of energy. Machines do the heavy lifting, the washing, and the transport. They absorb the drudgery and sanitize the world that used to break, maim and sicken our ancestors' bodies. Arguably, the economic surpluses produced by cheap energy also helped unlock an era of progressive thinking and socialized care.

How do we measure the quality of a modern life relative to the historical human experience?

Here's a thought experiment:

If I offered a resident of a collapsing Roman insula, or a grieving mother in eighteenth-century England, the opportunity to trade places with me today, would they take it? Even if I told them that the modern world faces ecological catastrophe and might only offer ten years of stability before civilizational chaos, I am certain they would accept without hesitation.

A single decade of modern warmth, health, and safety, plentiful food, freedom from filth, and the miracle of antibiotics would be worth more to them than a lifetime of squalor.

Now reverse the proposition. Would I trade the existential anxieties of the twenty-first century for a "normal" life, absent of looming threat of civilizational collapse, as a Victorian peasant? Would I choose to watch my loved ones die from an infected scratch or be chewed up by unguarded factory machinery?

The answer is no.

A raw understanding of our ancestors' struggles introduces a perverse appreciation for the situation we’re in. The fact that we would all prefer to live in the present suggests our destiny was predetermined by our pursuit of convenience. Humans discovered an energy source that could lift us from squalor, and it's in our nature to exploit it, despite learning the consequences a century ago. The tradeoff for our comforts is the end of humanity, and it seems we wouldn't have it any other way. We may be the generation facing the end of an era, but as we descend into a frightening future, we remain the most envied cohort in the history of humanity.

Thank you for reading.

My name is Sarah and I run Collapse2050 by myself. It is a passion project to explore humanity's frightening future - a topic traditional media ignores.

The site is free for all, as I believe this information shouldn't be locked behind a paywall. I also don't accept corporate advertising so I remain totally free to tear the kleptocracy a new one.

To fund this site, I depend on the kindness of strangers. Paid subscribers and one-time contributors to help me cover research and production costs.

Thank you.

Sarah