I can’t help but draw your attention to a wonderfully thought-provoking post here.
The opening:
The age of Christendom, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, then the Moderns. The age of religion, the age of reason, the age of industry. What will our own age be called once we’ve finally grown out of it?
I say the later half of the 20th and the 21st will be The Age of Everything. An age when everything was possible, everything was done, everything was made and everything was purchased. In a thousand years, it will be said, “A thousand years ago, there was a time when you could buy anything you wanted. Big yellow couches shaped like bananas. Cars as big as houses. Houses as big as cities. Switchblade hair combs. Machines that could put you anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. Magic powder that could make a forty year old mother look like a new bride. Pills that made Herculean muscles grow on the arms and legs of a man. There used to be a time when a doctor could cut you open, pull out a diseased organ, and a man could live another twenty years.” And there will be some who don’t believe such stories, but for those who do believe these stories, the response will not be jealousy, but vertigo and terror at the thought of living under such conditions.