The glass will be half full 500 years from now

I'm very lucky not to have been born in the year 1000. That would most likely mean a life of hardship, back-breaking labor, near-starvation, and an early death from some nasty disease that today is only a minor inconvenience. I have no evidence for this, of course, but I'm convinced that if we could survey all of the people who reached adulthood before the Industrial Revolution and ask them if they'd rather never have been born at all, much more than ninety percent of them would have said "yes." Even if I lucked out and were born into the very richest tier of the society, I'd still prefer my life now to that of an 11th century king of England.

The flip side of it is, of course, that I'm very unlucky not to be born 500 years from now. I don't know in what ways, but it's a good bet that life then will be unimaginably better than it is now. There's no reason to expect that income growth will slow down by then, and even if it does, the accumulated wealth should still lead to a quality of life that now we can't even dream possible.