In my book “The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son” I talk about how terrible the past actually was for the human race. Our dominance as a species was far from guaranteed. Besides the evidence of a genetic bottleneck, it’s already known that the human race has exactly one common ancestor, a woman named “Mitochondrial eve” who is the common female ancestor for every living human, and in addition to that there’s a “y-chromosomal Adam” who was the common living male ancestor for every living human. This suggests that the human race has been shockingly close to extinction on a number of occasions. (It’s true that you don’t need to reduce the human race to just one person for mitochondrial eve or y-chromosomal adam to exist assuming the descendants of those two just survived better than the others, but imagine how small the human race must have been for these two to have common ancestry of the entire human race, for there to have been few enough humans that the descendants of two people could have enough number)

It’s an important reminder that even if comparatively speaking times are hard, they aren’t as hard as they have been at many times in the past, and while we should always strive to improve the world we must always be grateful for how far we’ve come.