Excerpt:
"We are living in the most materially abundant moment in all of human history, yet most of us move through life unaware of it.
We turn on a faucet and clean water appears. We flip a switch and light fills a room. With the tap of a finger, we can access the sum total of human knowledge, entertainment, and communication. We not only expect these things, we consider them normal. But none of this is normal. It is extraordinary.

Here in the United States, nearly every home has running water, electricity, paved roads, refrigeration, sewage systems, and buildings engineered to withstand storms and time. Our daily lives operate inside a lattice of infrastructure so reliable we forget it exists. We drive across bridges without a single thought for the men who hung from steel beams suspended high above rivers to construct them. We rely on power lines without remembering that someone once risked freezing temperatures or electrical burns so that power could flow uninterrupted to our homes. We flush toilets without considering the generations of engineers and laborers who built systems to prevent disease and contamination.

Civilization did not happen by accident. It was built piece by piece by millions of people, many with blistered hands, injured bodies, and some who never made it home again."