True. We live better. We eat better (well, we certainly eat more). The implication is we are better.

But are we? Are we really?

I have to say no.

Yes…

Maybe…

Okay, I don’t really know. The only law is the law of change (if I may borrow a cliché). You, me, us, everyone changes. There is no “better,” there’s just the elusive theory of progress, a movement from, through, and toward something else. There is only difference. A lack of wrinkles does not make me “better.” It might mean I’m better looking longer than those who get “pruned” early on. But how can I be “better?” No Great Depression. No World War. Not much of a Vietnam (I was crapping my pants, remember?). By the same token, I have a daily view of the expanse of the great, wide world, a view of the great scope of existence my grandparents couldn’t possibly envision. At the touch of my fingertips, on this very machine I’m using to type these words, I have trillions of bits of data, illuminated in words and pictures – parsed phrases and points of view come to me, a lone figure sitting on my porch in the dirt speck that is Kyle, TX (population, a few thousand). I am God of a universe whose scope fades to such incredibly wide margins that my all-seeing eye is blinded by the brightness.

Yet, I am not better than anyone now, nor anyone who came before me, unless the very act of realizing my own diametrically opposed significance and singularity makes me so. For my grandparents’ world, narrow in scope compared to mine, was at least condensed for them into the very simple, basic, near-universal things that have always been what is actually important – family and community. Can I truly say, and in saying so actually believe it, that when my community becomes the world, it is that much greater, that much more important, better, than the hands of a single loved one stroking my neck when I am tired, or the whisper of “good night” echoing from my lover’s lips, as we fall into our own condensed version of the world that is our bed? In truth, is there anything better than that?

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade our advances for anything. This wonderful machine replaces my abysmally horrid script with perfect letters (C’s in handwriting on my all-A kindergarten report card – still a great blotch on my academic record, and my greatest shame). But it is not better because I work less to produce more. For in the end, my machine runs on a battery, and my bed does not.

Let the world expand as it will. I will revel in the advances, as they are miracles, and they are good. But when my eyes close, all light fades, and the one thing I want before receding into the oblivion of the dream are the hands on my neck, and the good night she whispers to me. In that moment of half-darkness my world becomes as small and as important as it ever shall be. And I am as grand and Godlike as mountains eternal in the streaming clouds of heaven.