Ordinary Abundance

What a beautiful website & a beautiful reminder of the absolute abundance that many of us live with compared to our very recent ancestors – https://ordinaryabundance.com/

If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.

Edward Bellamy, 1888 — From Looking Backward, his utopian novel set in the year 2000. Before recordings, listening to music meant having instruments or performers nearby, and favorite songs could go unheard for years at a time.

And I love that the site just keeps going on, and on, throughout every room in this imagined apartment.

Water! Water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.

Philip Hone, 1842 — On the arrival of Croton water in New York City, in his diary. Manhattan’s wells shared soil with its privies and burial grounds; the cholera epidemic ten years earlier had killed 3,515 New Yorkers.

And on, to even negative abundance that everyone on Earth takes for granted…

You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest. … Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed, and by you has been extirpated.

Thomas Jefferson, 1806 — In a letter celebrating Edward Jenner’s vaccine, sent to Jenner’s nephew. Smallpox killed about three of every ten people it infected, and in Jenner’s century it killed an estimated four hundred thousand Europeans a year.

And for basic daily functions that were luxuries, even in America…

It just felt like I was the wealthiest person in the world. It felt great not to have to go outside to go to the restroom.

Patty Doak, 2003 — Recalling her family’s first indoor bathroom, rural Iowa. Well into the twentieth century, most rural American homes had no indoor bathroom, and every gallon of water for cooking, washing, and bathing was carried in by hand.

I won’t keep quoting because the site is just lovely and brilliant. It’s a reminder that we are all here in a long chain of humans who all tried to make life just a little bit better. Appreciate it all then keep it going.