We Live in an Age of Miracles and We're Too Bored to Notice

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.

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If you were born in 1988, the same year the FDA approved AZT as the first antiretroviral drug for HIV, you didn’t know about it until you were an adult. It certainly never felt connected to your life. Why would it? By the time you were old enough to understand what HIV meant, it was already becoming a manageable condition rather than a death sentence.

The miracle had already been absorbed into the background of the world.

And therein lies the rub.

We’re living in an era without historical precedent. The average human lifespan has roughly doubled since 1900. Child mortality has collapsed. Smallpox, a disease that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, was eradicated in 1980 through a coordinated global vaccination campaign. You don’t think about smallpox. Nobody does. Nobody has to.

In 1854, John Snow mapped cholera deaths in London’s Soho district and traced the outbreak to a contaminated water pump on Broad Street. His work helped establish germ theory and, eventually, the sanitation infrastructure that now makes it possible to drink tap water without dying. I drink water from the tap every morning. I’ve never once thought about John Snow while doing it. My indifference, as smug // selfish as it may be, is a pretty standard measure of how successful his work was – and how completely we’ve stopped thinking about what the alternative looked like.

But the alternative looked like this: in 1347, the Black Death reached Europe and killed somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the continent’s population. In some cities, the dead outnumbered the living. There was no germ theory, no public health system, no way to understand what was happening or why. People carried flowers to mask the smell of the dead. That’s where we were.

I’m not trying to make you feel grateful by showing you various historical horrors. Gratitude as a performance is useless.

I’m trying to give you an accurate picture of where we are and how we got here, because I think most of us – myself included – are operating with a badly miscalibrated sense of what’s normal.

What feels normal to me:

• I carry a device in my pocket that gives me access to almost all of recorded human knowledge.
• If I get a serious infection, I take antibiotics, and it goes away.
• My children will almost certainly survive childhood.
• I can communicate with anyone on earth in seconds.
• I can fly across an ocean in less than a day.
• I can see a doctor without having to travel for weeks on foot.

…none of this is actually “normal.”

Almost all of it is recent.

Almost all of it would have been incomprehensible to the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and died before us.

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about medieval European life in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, described a world in which violence, death, and suffering were immediate and constant daily realities. People didn’t have a buffered, mediated relationship with mortality. It was there, in the street, in the house, in the body - a massive, blood-soaked, filth-ridden chasm between every past reality and ours.

Our great tragedy is that we’ve stopped noticing it.

Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill // hedonic adaptation: the tendency of humans to return to a relatively stable level of happiness after a positive change. We adjust. What was once astonishing becomes ordinary, what was once a luxury becomes an expectation, and what was once a medical miracle becomes the thing you’re annoyed you have to get at the pharmacy.

It’s not a character flaw, and it’s not anything conscious. It’s a cognitive feature. It frees up attention for new problems. But it makes us systematically bad at valuing what we have, including things that took an enormous toll in human effort and suffering to produce.

The global campaign to eradicate smallpox took 13 years, involved 150 million people, and required logistical coordination across countries that were actively hostile to each other during the Cold War. D.A. Henderson, the American epidemiologist who led the campaign, spent decades on it. The eradication of smallpox is probably the single greatest public health achievement in human history.

You can look that up; there’s reasonable consensus on it.

And yet: I don’t know one person who thinks about it. I don’t think about it. I didn’t think about it until I deliberately made myself think about it for this essay.

The same is true for the Green Revolution. In the 1960s, Norman Borlaug developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are estimated to have saved over a billion lives by averting famine. A billion. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. When he died in 2009, he was 95.

The obituaries were respectful but brief.

The world had moved on.

It had already adapted.

If you don’t know what you have, you can’t protect it. You can’t make good decisions about it. You can’t allocate resources to maintain it. You can’t build institutions that preserve it. You can’t explain to the next generation why it matters, because you’ve lost the ability to articulate the counterfactual – to say, clearly and accurately, what the world looks like without this wonderful // commonplace thing we’ve built.

Edmund Burke argued that institutions are compacts between the living, the dead, and the unborn – that we inherit things we didn’t create and we have obligations to pass them on. The sanitation systems, the vaccination programs, the antibiotic supply chains, the food safety regulations, the public health infrastructure, the original Star Wars trilogy, etc. - these are things we inherited. It’s up to us to maintain them, however imperfectly.

And we will fail to maintain them if we forget why they exist.

I’m not being hysterical here.

Measles, a disease that the United States declared eliminated in 2000, has returned in recent years due to declining vaccination rates. The reasons are complicated, but one of them is simple: people don’t remember what measles does to children.

The disease has become so rare that its absence feels like the natural order of things, and so the vaccine seems - to some, at least - like a pointless intervention against a mythic bogeyman.

This is what taking a miracle for granted does; it makes the miracle disappear into the background.

And so - almost inevitably - the infrastructure that produces it starts to seem unnecessary, or excessive, or politically suspicious.

What happens next is obvious.

The writer Lewis Thomas, in The Lives of a Cell, described medicine as “the youngest science” and noted that for most of human history, doctors could do almost nothing. They could observe, comfort, and occasionally make things worse. The germ theory of disease, the development of antibiotics, our entire understanding of the immune system, etc., came late and fast and changed everything.

When Thomas was writing in 1974, he was already struck by how quickly people had forgotten what medicine had looked like before…

I’m a natural optimist, but the current state of the internet is testing my limits. We are living through an epidemic of institutional distrust that treats a flawed system exactly like a failed one. People are eager to dismantle public health networks, scientific funding, and regulatory bodies without pausing to ask what actually vanishes when they’re gone. We’ve built a culture uniquely obsessed with everything wrong in the present, yet dangerously amnesic about everything wrong with the past.

That’s a dangerous combination.

It generates a politics of pure negation – tear down this, dismantle that, fuck with everything – without any reckoning with the possibility that some of what we’ve built, as annoying as you might personally find it, is the reason we’re alive and relatively well-fed and not dying of cholera in the street.

Accurate perception is a prerequisite for good judgment.

But we’re not perceiving accurately - are we?

We inhabit a baseline of existence that would look like pure witchcraft to almost every generation that preceded us; but our rapid adaptation to this comfort has effectively blinded us. By normalizing a world of daily, uninterrupted miracles, we have lost the capacity to grasp what is truly at risk when we tinker with the fragile machinery that keeps us alive.

We make constant, sweeping decisions about public health, science funding, and infrastructure while completely ignoring the foundations of our survival. We aren’t lacking data; we have just stopped looking at how the machinery works.

And if we don’t start to appreciate the miraculous nature of our world, and the miraculous accomplishments that have made it a reality, we will - on a long view - be utterly fucked.

Our ruin won’t be cinematic or even vaguely Nolan-esque, and the lights won’t simply go out overnight. Instead, we’ll dismantle our prosperity through a thousand small, careless decisions. We’ll steadily chip away at our own life-support systems, with each budgetary cut and deferred maintenance schedule seeming perfectly rational in isolation. None of those isolated choices will account for the cumulative, devastating loss of the whole. But the outcome will be the same.

The trap of our modern comfort is fundamentally misunderstanding what a miracle requires. We’ve been taught that miracles are divine gifts, asking for nothing but a passive ‘thank you.’ But the miracles of human survival are engineered and unforgiving. They are a profound defiance of nature, and nature wants them back.

Sustaining a man-made miracle takes maintenance, massive capital, and boring, grinding, dull-as-fuck repetition. You don’t just thank the machine; you feed it with your money, your labor, and your paranoid vigilance every single year just to keep the lights on.

We inherited the machine from people who barely got to see it run.

The least we owe them is not to let it break down on our watch.