#20 Medieval Alphas and Clean Water
...and the people behind our comfortable lives.
Have you ever heard of the concept of the Medieval Alpha?
I learned about it a few months ago, and thought it would be particularly pertinent to talk about this Thanksgiving weekend.
Essentially, the Medieval Alpha concept is the idea that young men were born in the wrong era.
That somehow if they would have been born hundreds of years ago life would have been better.
The irony is that the chances of you being a peon serf living in abject poverty are exponentially greater than any chance of you being a successful conqueror living off the spoils of war.
This idea expands to more than just men and medieval times.
There are all kinds of ideas that hold the way things used to be done are preferable to the way things are now.
But, they completely ignore how incredibly difficult life was even just a short 100 years ago.
The other day I toured a water treatment plant, and was amazed at the amount of technology and infrastructure that goes into getting clean water to residents.
Hundred of millions of dollars of human ingenuity, technology, and infrastructure – just to make sure water comes out when you twist the handle on your faucet.
So what does this have to do with Thanksgiving?
It’s easy to express gratitude for the things we see, but it’s much more difficult to be grateful for the things we don’t even realize.
Most of the people reading this have never experienced starvation, lack of clean water, or the inability to get basic necessities like antibiotics.
Yet here we are acting like the food we buy at the grocery store and the antibiotics we can easily get for a few dollars are commonplace.
How quickly we forget the immense suffering and struggle people went through just to get us our most basic necessities.
Of course, it’s important to be thankful for family and friends, but don’t forget about all the people who made, and continue to make, our comfortable lives possible.Â