I often reflect that I live like a king compared to how even kings lived in centuries past. If one ever has a chance to visit the Palace of Versailles or any of the great homes from 200 or more years ago, one will first notice the absence of electricity, indoor plumbing (the servants would bring in chamber pots), refrigerators and microwave ovens, modern heating and air conditioners, televisions, radios, computers. One might also notice the absence of general sanitation, automobiles, modern medicine and the like. Please don't even ask how the servants lived in their homes! (In fact, much of the world outside the west ... even sometimes in it ... still lives so).
So, it is hard for me to feel sorry for the little drafts and inconveniences in my own home which is big and more than spacious enough, with a garden (not quite the size of Versailles) and having all of the above. The fact is that even the typical home of a family under the poverty line these days in the west will still usually have many of the things that kings of old never dreamed of ... a fridge, electric lights, a microwave, constant entertainment on the tube, heat (hopefully), a phone, toilet, shower, recorded music at one's fingertips. Our rising expectations cause us never to be satisfied even when we live better than kings!
That does not mean that I think it perfectly fine that many in my own country still live in violent and drug filled neighborhoods, in rat filled housing where kids live in terror. I do not, and it is the great disgrace of America that so many live in such way. I also dream of the day when everyone in the world can have access to the basics of life ... a warm place to sleep, health care, education, safety. We must keep striving until all our fellow human beings are so. I think it also fine that most of us might want to move to a home or neighborhood cleaner, quieter, safer than where one now finds oneself (my gosh, I think back to some of the horrible noisy and run down apartments I used to live in in rather dangerous neighborhoods. I am glad to be out).
However, it is also so easy for us to have ever rising standards of what we "need", never realizing and satisfied with what we already have even if far from "perfect". Most of us live better than Louis XIV.
http://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showt...l=1#post131161