Four thousand years ago, a full day’s labor bought about ten minutes of lamplight. By 1800, after forty centuries of human ingenuity, an hour of decent light still cost around five hours of work, and a family lit a room the way a family today might book a holiday, occasionally and deliberately. Tonight the same hour of light will cost you less than one second of work. The economist who traced the price of light across those millennia found a collapse so steep it broke the standard tools for measuring progress, and light is only the loudest example. Heat went the same way. So did distance, hunger, and the brute physical labor that filled nearly every day of nearly every life that came before ours.
By any ledger our ancestors kept, the war is over and we won it. Yet the reports coming back from the winning side read like dispatches from a losing one. Anxiety rising decade over decade, steepest among the young. Despair concentrated, of all places, in the most comfortable countries on eart…