From Forbes magazine:
In a powerful study entitled “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford and the founder of Our World in Data, we learn that on virtually all of the key dimensions of human material well-being—poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and education—the world is an extraordinarily better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago.
It is truly incredible how the world has changed within the last couple centuries. We have everything at our finger tips. The things that were once enjoyed by the few in the upper-class as a commodity are now available to all persons.
It was very expensive to possess sugar in the past, mostly due to the highly labour-intensive production in both growing and processing it. Nowadays, I can easily drive down to my local market within a few minutes and purchase a pound for a dollar from off the shelf. We live in great abundance.
Education was not available to all, but now (in the West at least) children are required to attend primary schools and have the basic knowledge of every subject (math, language arts, history, etc). Almost everyone are literate in this side of the world, and there are libraries everywhere, with books of every kind to be easily accessible. The internet alone gives us the power to learn anything, anywhere, all the time. We are farther in human development than most of human history as a whole. We no longer need scribes to hand-copy manuscripts, we can print and email documents as much as we desire. We can translate the works of men in different languages.
These are some examples of how very different we are than our ancestors. They would not be able to comprehend the kind of world we live in, it would be too much for them to process. The world then didn't progress very much within the same space of time as we have in these last couple centuries. It almost is scary to think about. What if we are near the end of this world, and these are signs of the times? Something to chew on. Since the beginning of the industrial age, things have rapidly been changing than ever.