The Abundance We Forgot How to Feel

Europe has become very good at explaining why it is doomed.

That is not the same as being honest.

Sometimes pessimism is just vanity wearing glasses. It makes us sound serious. It lets us signal that we are not fooled by the brochures, the politicians, the TED talks, the American founders, the billionaire moonshots, the absurd promises of AI, robots, longevity, Mars, fusion, abundance.

But the stranger truth is this: we live inside one of the most abundant societies human beings have ever built, and we complain as if hot showers, antibiotics, safe streets, surviving children, schools, pensions, smartphones, cheap energy, instant translation, abundant food, public transport, clean water, and access to most of the world's knowledge were the natural state of mankind.

They are not.

They are miracles that became boring.

A video went around with Jimmy Carr talking about what he called "life dysmorphia." The phrase is useful. We look at our lives through a warped mirror. We compare upward, adapt quickly, and then feel poor inside a level of comfort that would have looked like royalty to most of human history. His line, roughly, was that happiness equals quality of life minus envy.

That sounds too simple. But it is not stupid.

Envy is not just wanting what another person has. Envy is a machine that erases the gift in front of you. It takes a warm house and turns it into a smaller house than someone else's. It takes a safe country and turns it into a slow country. It takes health care, education, leisure, mobility, and freedom from famine, and says: yes, but look at their valuation, their weather, their villa, their rocket, their AI cluster.

At the level of a person, that is miserable.

At the level of a civilization, it becomes dangerous.

Factfulness is not cheerleading

Hans Rosling spent much of his life trying to repair this failure of perception. He was a Swedish medical doctor and professor of international health, but he became famous because he could do something rare: make facts feel alive.

His book Factfulness has a subtitle that still annoys professional pessimists: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. The point was never that everything is fine. Rosling was not selling a scented candle version of history. He had worked with poverty, disease, and death directly. His claim was harder: most people are wrong about the direction of the world, and that error matters.

We are trained by news, politics, social media, and biology to notice what breaks. The thing that breaks is sudden. The thing that improves often does so quietly, over decades, in a graph nobody reads.

Max Roser at Our World in Data has one of the cleanest formulations of this tension:

The world is awful.

The world is much better.

The world can be much better.

All three are true.

That is the only adult position. If we only say the world is awful, we become bitter and passive. If we only say the world is better, we become smug and blind. If we hold all three together, progress becomes visible without becoming an excuse.

Roser uses child mortality as the brutal example. In 2021, around 4.4 percent of children globally died before age fifteen. That is still a horror. Millions of children. Thousands every day.

But historically, around half of all children died before adulthood. Half. That is the emotional background of almost all human life before modernity. Parents did not merely worry about losing a child. They lived in a world where death sat inside the nursery.

Now compare that to the European Union, where Our World in Data cites child mortality around 0.47 percent. That does not mean Europe is paradise. It means the survival of children, one of the deepest human hopes, has been transformed from a fragile wish into a near expectation.

We should pause there longer than we do.

Because if we cannot feel that, something in our perception is broken.

Europe is rich in ways it has forgotten how to name

This matters especially in Europe.

I have been writing a lot about Europe's weakness: lack of leverage, too much regulatory theater, too little builder culture, too little venture courage, too little appetite for scale. I still believe that. Europe can regulate the gate while others build the next door. Europe can talk about sovereignty while depending on American platforms, American AI, American cloud, American capital, and increasingly Chinese industrial capacity.

That critique stands.

But there is another truth beside it. Europe is not a poor continent. Europe is not a failed civilization. Europe is one of the most sophisticated abundance machines ever built.

We have public health systems that, even when frustrating, would have looked supernatural to our ancestors. We have social protection systems that support people through unemployment, sickness, disability, parenthood, and old age. The European Commission describes social protection as support for people who cannot earn income or face extra needs, through pensions, unemployment benefits, disability support, care services, and other public systems. That language sounds bureaucratic. The underlying reality is enormous.

A widow does not automatically fall into destitution.

A sick child is not only a family tragedy but a public responsibility.

An old man is not left entirely to the market price of his remaining usefulness.

A student can often access education without having rich parents.

This is not nothing. It is not just policy. It is civilizational beauty.

And yet we speak about Europe as if the whole thing were a waiting room with taxes.

Something has gone wrong in the story.

Pessimism flatters the educated mind

Pessimism feels intelligent because it sees cracks.

And there are cracks. Housing is too expensive. Energy policy has been insane. Defense was outsourced to American seriousness for too long. Regulation often arrives before capability. The tax and labor systems punish the weird founder who might actually build something large. The European relationship with risk is often maternal in the worst sense: caring, anxious, and quietly suffocating.

But the problem is not that we see these things.

The problem is that we start to enjoy seeing them.

Critique becomes identity. Decline becomes a style. The educated European learns to perform disappointment. Every American breakthrough becomes vulgar. Every Chinese buildout becomes authoritarian. Every billionaire project becomes obscene. Every moonshot becomes a distraction from more sensible committees.

Then we wonder why the future is built elsewhere.

Gratitude is not the enemy of critique. It is what keeps critique honest.

Without gratitude, critique becomes resentment. With gratitude, critique can become stewardship. You can say: this inheritance is magnificent, and therefore we should stop wasting it. You can say: our welfare state is beautiful, and therefore it needs growth, productivity, energy, technology, and builders if it is going to survive. You can say: our values matter, and therefore they need power behind them.

A civilization that only complains about its inheritance will eventually lose it.

Abundance was built by people who refused the normal story

Peter Diamandis built an entire worldview around abundance. I attended his Abundance Summit a few years ago. Even Elon Musk has called him an optimist. Diamandis would probably correct that word. His point is that optimism should be rooted in facts, not temperament.

In a conversation Diamandis wrote about, Musk made a simple observation about the news: with billions of people on Earth, something terrible happens every day, so the news can always answer the question, "What is the worst thing that happened today?" That is not the same as describing reality.

Reality also contains the quiet compounding of medicine, logistics, software, energy, materials science, agriculture, aviation, satellites, robotics, and trade.

Johan Norberg, in Progress, puts the European version beautifully: "We complain about everything, while we are sitting here, better fed, more literate, and richer than ever." He argues that openness, trade, technology, and the spread of ideas explain much of the progress we now take for granted.

That is the part we often forget.

Abundance did not fall from the sky. It came from people who did not accept the normal limits of their time. Scientists. Engineers. Founders. Traders. Explorers. Doctors. Farmers. Builders. Investors. Operators. People who turned knowledge into systems.

The modern European comfort layer was not produced by complaint. It was produced by competence plus courage, repeated for generations.

This is why the current contempt for builders is so self-destructive. Yes, American tech monopolies are too powerful. Yes, gatekeepers extract too much. Yes, platforms distort attention, politics, markets, and culture. But it is childish to look at the companies building AI, rockets, chips, robotics, electric vehicles, global communications, and medical tools and see only greed.

They are also carrying the frontier.

Europe does not have to worship them. But it does have to learn from the part of them that still knows how to move.

The new Golden Age will not be tidy

The Dutch Golden Age was not a seminar. It was trade, ships, maps, capital, violence, art, science, speculation, risk, empire, beauty, cruelty, and discovery all tangled together. We should not romanticize it. But we should understand one thing: it happened because a small country looked outward and built systems that touched the world.

The next Golden Age will not be Amsterdam alone. It will be planetary.

AI will make intelligence cheaper. Robotics will make labor more abundant. Solar, batteries, nuclear, and new grids can make energy less scarce. Biotechnology will change medicine. Space will pull materials, science, ambition, and myth out of the atmosphere. The Moon and Mars matter partly because of what they are physically, and partly because great adventures reorganize human desire. They remind a civilization that the future is not only a budget line.

This is why I find the cynical reflex so boring.

"Mars is a billionaire fantasy."

Maybe. So were many things, the day before they became infrastructure.

"AI is just a hype cycle."

Some of it is. And some of it is the beginning of cognition becoming a utility.

"Robots will never work in the real world."

Until they do.

The serious position is not to believe every promise. The serious position is to stay awake enough to see which promises are becoming real.

Europe needs that kind of optimism. Not soft optimism. Not the poster version with children, windmills, and smiling officials. I mean hard optimism: the discipline of seeing possibility before the committee has approved it.

Gratitude is a strategic faculty

We usually treat gratitude as private morality. A nice feeling. A mindfulness exercise. Something to write in a journal.

That is too small.

Gratitude is also a strategic faculty. It is the ability to see what is already working clearly enough to extend it. If you cannot see the gift, you cannot protect it. If you cannot feel abundance, you will either waste it or turn it into guilt.

This is Europe's psychological trap.

We have enough abundance to become soft, enough education to become cynical, enough bureaucracy to confuse procedure with wisdom, and enough historical guilt to distrust our own ambition. So we oscillate between comfort and complaint.

But the way out is not American imitation. It is not to become louder, harsher, cheaper, or more brutal.

The way out is to recover the builder inside the steward.

Europe's welfare state needs productivity. Its morality needs power. Its beauty needs energy. Its freedom needs defense. Its humanism needs technology. Its critique needs gratitude. Its gratitude needs courage.

That is the balance.

Not less analysis. Better analysis.

Analysis that remembers hot showers and antibiotics. Analysis that remembers the child who lives. Analysis that remembers the pension, the school, the ambulance, the library, the public square, the train, the lab, the small company, the weird founder, the engineer, the nurse, the satellite, the farmer, the chip machine, the rocket.

Analysis that can look at Europe and say: this is not enough, but it is also astonishing.

What abundance is for

A spoiled civilization asks: why is everything not perfect?

A grateful civilization asks: what can we build from this impossible inheritance?

That is the shift I want.

The point is not to stop criticizing Europe. I will not stop. There is too much theater, too much institutional vanity, too much safety masquerading as wisdom. But the critique has to come from love of what is possible, not addiction to decline.

We do not need less analysis of Europe's problems.

We need analysis that remembers what abundance is for.

Not comfort.

Courage.