“Why do you know all this?”
“Why don’t you know all this? This is the fundamental context of your life! I mean, you don’t even have to get into the big-picture stuff—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, civil rights, way fewer people dying in dangerous jobs—I could spend the next week just listing all of the little everyday improvements we don’t even think about. If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of timing, we’re fucking lottery winners! Only we know the pleasure of a climate-controlled room, a daily hot shower, of cheap and delicious food and drink, of comfortable shoes and a dazzling ocean of entertainment so vast that we get stressed out trying to keep up. Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost.

— Abbott and Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 241