Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

A few weeks ago, a self-described fitness enthusiast described life today this way.

Quote, work a desk job, grind nine to six, lift weights to feel something, marry someone beautiful enough,

move to suburbs, get a dog,

have two kids, drive an American SUV to Costco on weekends, buy a house you'll never finish

paying off, call it happiness. Is this the dream? Or just the life we were sold? End quote.

Well, the responses to his formerly called tweet were varied. Many responded that he should stop complaining.

After all, objectively speaking, the world, especially the western part of it, is way better off

than it's ever been. One scientist noted that people used to live an average of 35. Half of all

kids died in childhood. Even minor infections would often lead to death and starving was a common human

experience. As my colleague Shane Morris has often observed, just visit any old cemetery. It'll be

full of tombstones with only one year inscribed for both the birth and the death year. Though

miscarriages are still tragically common, deaths in infancy, they're increasingly rare.

It was just only less than a century ago that nearly everyone would have had one or more siblings

die in childhood. Today, our biggest health problems come from obesity, not starvation.

Modern medicine, dentistry, technology, indoor plumbing, all kinds of other things, prevent and protect us from

the diseases, the calamities, the accidents that did end previous generations. On the other hand,

a different doom and gloom, the kind that's reflected in the ex post above, still resonates

with many people. In fact, his post sounded an awful lot like a work of poetry written about 3,000

years ago by a man of wealth and power who also learned that having it all just isn't all

it's cracked up to be. That man's words are still often quoted, perhaps most famously by the

...