I was under the impression though that the 30-40 years average life expectancy is commonly misunderstood?
The mean life expectancy at birth might well have been 35 years but that's dragged down by massive infant and child mortality in the first 5 years of life - if you made it to adulthood, you had a reasonable chance of making it to 60.
I'm not sure claims about a topic such as happiness can ever be "indisputably" true.
Would you not even entertain the possibility that your "median inhabitant 1000 years ago" was actually quite happy with her unvaried subsistence diet, since it was a little bit more varied than her that of her poorer neighbour, and not much less varied than her much richer cousin's?
I doubt he would feel unhappy or unfulfilled for being illiterate - in his sphere of existence, what would he have read? To whom would he have written? Do you feel constantly unfulfilled though being unable to communicate with dolphins, or through being unable to interpret Tibetan Prayer Flags, or (perhaps more topically) through not regularly listening to oral poetry passed down from bard to bard? I suspect not - because you have no expectation of being able to do these things.
The mean life expectancy at birth might well have been 35 years but that's dragged down by massive infant and child mortality in the first 5 years of life - if you made it to adulthood, you had a reasonable chance of making it to 60.
I'm not sure claims about a topic such as happiness can ever be "indisputably" true.
Would you not even entertain the possibility that your "median inhabitant 1000 years ago" was actually quite happy with her unvaried subsistence diet, since it was a little bit more varied than her that of her poorer neighbour, and not much less varied than her much richer cousin's?
I doubt he would feel unhappy or unfulfilled for being illiterate - in his sphere of existence, what would he have read? To whom would he have written? Do you feel constantly unfulfilled though being unable to communicate with dolphins, or through being unable to interpret Tibetan Prayer Flags, or (perhaps more topically) through not regularly listening to oral poetry passed down from bard to bard? I suspect not - because you have no expectation of being able to do these things.