History is pretty great. Apart from having the benefit of hindsight and being able to look back and judge all those poor dumb bastards for treating things with leeches, or painting their faces and making water pipes out of lead, it’s pretty amazing to hear about some of the things people have gotten up to— you wouldn’t think to make half of it up.

But do you know how lucky we are to not be living in history? I mean, yeah, of course everything we’ve done is technically history already, but in reading about some of the things people have gotten up to, well, holy shit there was a lot of shit.

Not even counting all the wars that seem to have filled most of our time and taken most of our money since we came up with both of them, there’s all the medical stuff. The Black Death, Spanish Flu, appendixes and childbirth and lead poisoning… I’m pretty glad that they’re not much of a concern these days. But that’s not what this blog is about.

How many of you wouldn’t have had a job a hundred years ago? Fifty? Ten?

I know I woudn’t, even fifty years ago. Automation wasn’t exactly a thing, theatrically speaking. So how cool is it I get to work on something I love that I’d have never been able to do fifty years ago? In all the thousands of years of humanity, I’m lucky enough to be alive NOW, and do the stuff I enjoy. But it’s the same almost across the board, except for farmers, merchants, and ladies of negotiable virtue.

And even they have it better, I’d argue. Farmers get all the machinery to use, merchants can sell things to people halfway round the world with a click of a few buttons, and again, medicine has been good for sex workers.

I digress. I get to be an automation operator/programmer, a career that wasn’t a thing such a short time ago. I want to get into writing movies and TV— again, a career that wasn’t a thing a short time ago. And can anyone tell me what the hell influencers would be doing if they weren’t influencing? How lucky are those bastards?