Take a moment, I want you to look around and observe your environment. Whether it be the desk you are doing work on, or the bed you are laying on, or the infrastructure beside you. Let’s say I give you 10 years of uninterrupted, independent time. Would you be able to build that thing?

Most infrastructure or material items you see around us nowadays is a culmination of the work that the human race has put in years, and years of effort to ideate, create, refine, and repeat. Almost everything you have, takes an unbelievable amount of work to create. The fact that we have all of these things is simply amazing!

I want to take you through a journey today to the beginning of time (as we know it). Our story started a long, long time ago, way before we could imagine. But we really became human when we mastered the control for fire 3 million years ago. I will define this the beginning of human race (although there is no consensus on when we become human, so take this with a grain of salt).

For 2.99 million of these years, here is what happened each day for us humans. We wake up, went hunting consistently in the morning, then the afternoon. And depending on what we get, we have one meal at the end of the day. There was no consistent sleep schedule for humans back them as we had to be alert of any predators or natural dangers. Nighttime is especially dangerous as the coldness wore down the human body (there is no blankets to keep you warm or Netflix to entertain you back them). In fact, nothing that even remotely resembles modern tech existed back them. That is simply bonkers to think about today (2.99 million years is a long time).

Out of the remaining 4%, a huge chunk of the period (99.5%) was humans going out to fields in difficult conditions every day to work on fields with almost no rest. Laws were extraordinarily harsh and are inconceivable in today’s time. There was almost nothing that was ever too interesting. Scientific discoveries were slow as even a small discovery in a lifetime will be significant. When you are born, you will pretty much die very close by to where you are born. Your role is also assigned at birth with no room for change. It is almost expected that you will never see change.

Take a moment and just imagine all of these humans. Around 90 billion of them, had to live out their lives without any expectations of anything, with almost no change by today’s standards but built the foundations of what there is today.

We are now arriving at an inconceivably small period, a time that still seems like ages. The last 500 years of human history up to this point, was still extremely static. There were a lot more activities that have happened at this time including new scientific discoveries and movements, but nowhere to the scale of the last 100 years. People for the most part still lived in tents, small dirt houses, without anything of particular interest. 99% of the things we see around us today don’t exist at that time. People who lived 200 years ago still in large part lived in ancient society almost, with no change to the agriculture model and lack of social mobility. They never learned what we have learned so much of at all. All they can hope for is to keep working, just for a future, where potentially, things will become more comfortable.

Hundreds of generations of humans, just working, so hard, with no change in 99% of them. But they never gave up. No matter how tough these conditions were, they kept grinding, and progress was finally observed slightly. Throughout all of these times, wars have been constant and people died in so many different ways. The sufferings from diseases were numerous. Life was miserable in many ways. Imagine what people back then could have done with the scientific knowledge we had today?

Evidently, in these 500 years, really only around 10% of the people in the past 50 years can experience even remotely the lives we have today. After so many iterations, people grinding for their lives. We finally have arrived at a time where we could talk about a time where things were so much more enhanced. These are the people we could interact with like parents, grandparents, middle-aged people, etc. But even then, there are so many struggles they had. A lot of countries were still very unstable, wars still existed a lot. Technology still wasn’t developed enough for the most part. Even though their lifestyles were somewhat similar to ours today. There is so much, they just didn’t have.

And only then, do we reach today. After all the zooming in, the scrolling of the history, we reached a period where we live. The whole modern human history, a period of 200,000 years, is still only 0.1% of dinosaur history. Imagine that for a moment. Everything we ever knew about, all these sufferings, everything the humans ever built, it is such an insignificant time that it might as well not matter. Earth existed for 20,000 times longer than that and went through so many changes. Comparing the magnitude is like comparing a short day to the entire human lifetime.

The things we have today are honestly, beautiful. Look around you. Everything around you is the cumulation of years of work by the past generations of humans. The food we eat is honestly awesome. The choices we have are honestly endless. The environment we live in feels very comfortable. Air condition makes an environment feel very comfortable. We get to experience entertainment so addicting that it changes the wiring of our brain. All the information humans have gathered for thousands and tens of thousands of years. Are all in one place online. This piece you are reading right now is in a place that none of the 98% of humans ever existed was ever experienced in their entire lives.

The world is in the most peaceful era nowadays with the least amount of wars. The technology we get to witness is honestly so awesome, so many humans were never able to experience it, they have to work and work every day without the expectation of seeing it. Imagine the millions of slaves farming land, the tens of billions of people before us, building up the evolution of humans, changing our biology to what it is today. The possibilities of what you can do today are endless. There are so many things