Like sometimes in my head I compose a “you kids don’t know how good you have it” where I talk about how I’ve witnessed significant quality/accessibility/price/mortality gains in food, clothing, medicine, cars &tc in my life since the 1980s alone

But let’s turn that around on myself – a lot of my sense of an ideal world was inherited from the world I was born into, and a lot of that was based on that coming before statins, cancer treatments, post-Nader car safety, the stigmatization of domestic violence, tobacco understood as a danger, Prozac, modern ideas of psychic trauma, modern medicine re: physical trauma, the post-Vietnam civilianization of paramedics and helicopter medevac, the concept of “addiction rehab”, the end of direct involvement in Cold War combat…

In which at each stage of life a lot of people were mortally wrecked, (often in a way that was ultimately accepted as a feature of life) and thus independently of race, class, education, Internet, age-cohort (the boomer bulge) or other factors each stage of competition would be against fewer rivals, tenures would turn over more often, and the installed establishment by necessity had a more memento mori fatalism, had treasured memories of celebrating untimely deaths, etc.

I remember from childhood a “Don’t Make Fun of the Bald Girl, She Has Childhood Leukemia Charlie Brown!” thing and the thing was they were trying to establish new norms, she was bald cause she was getting chemotherapy which was novel, before that you just took to bed and died.