We have it so good

It dawned on me the other day when I was sitting on the toilet, which was connected to indoor plumbing.

I noted the toilet paper -- soft -- next to me, and saw my feet on the heated floor of my bathroom, which is right outside the bedroom, which has central air. And oil heat.

Anyway, after I finished with the toilet I used the seemingly infinite amount of water that came out of the sink -- hot or cold, your choice -- to wash up. I then decided why not, I’ll take a shower -- going to go “hot” with that one -- and use all manner of soaps and shampoos. I’ll dry off with a towel.

From there, I got dressed in natural and synthetic fibers, all very comfortable and breathable. Checked my phone, which holds, near-literally, every morsel of human knowledge, to see what the weather was going to be for the next week before I went downstairs.

While down there, I decided to see if there was anything on television. I have about, well, golly, who knows how many choices I have for entertainment down there. Could also listen to music -- any music that was ever recorded, mostly -- if I chose.

But you know what? First I was hungry, so I went into my kitchen where I checked the refrigerator and the freezer. Again, choices beyond the imagination. Could even cook something in the oven. Or microwave. Or air fryer. Or toaster oven. Or stovetop.

I settled on coffee. Beans that grew on a mountain in a country I’ve never been to, roasted by strangers, delivered to a store six minutes from my house, and I ground them up and ran hot water through them in about ninety seconds. Had a banana with it. In July. Which, fine, bananas are a July thing somewhere, but I also could’ve had a strawberry, or a mango, or a pineapple, and none of those are a New Jersey thing in any month.

Then I remembered I was out of a few things, so I got in my car. My car. A metal box that sits outside doing nothing all night and then, whenever I feel like it, moves me at 60 miles an hour in whatever direction I want. On roads that somebody else paved and somebody else maintains and somebody else lights up at night.

I went to a building filled with food. Not some food. All the food. Aisles of it. Food from every continent, most of it fresh, none of it going to poison me, and if it did there’s a whole federal agency that would get involved. I paid for it by tapping a piece of plastic against a machine, which then talked to another machine somewhere else, and money I have never physically touched moved from one place to another.

Drove home. Put the food in the cold boxes. Did a load of laundry, which involved putting clothes in a machine and pushing a button, then moving them to a second machine and pushing a second button. Put the dishes in a third machine. Pushed a third button.

Took a pill for my back. Two of them, actually, and my back stopped hurting, and that’s so unremarkable I nearly didn’t mention it.

Called my mother. She was not in the room. She was not in the state. I heard her voice like she was sitting next to me and it cost me nothing.

Somewhere in there a truck pulled up and left a package on my porch that I had ordered from my couch two days earlier, using the glass rectangle in my pocket, from a warehouse 1,000 miles away.

The lights came on when it got dark. All of them. Every room. No fire involved.

And at no point today did I worry about the well running dry, or the crop coming in, or a fever taking one of my kids, or a tooth going bad and killing me, which, and I want to be clear here, used to be a thing that happened to people. A tooth. Killing you.

Anyway, it dawned on me: We have it pretty good.

Now read all this again, and pretend you’re a time traveller from 1800.

I’m not saying you can’t complain. Complaining is a birthright and I intend to keep exercising mine. But every so often, sitting there on the heated floor with the soft TP and the endless hot water, it’s worth remembering that by every historical measure, we are living better than kings.

Kings didn’t have toilets that flushed.