Perspective

In short, we all know the world we live in is far from perfect. Yet there is great satisfaction to be found doing some small part to make it better. Meanwhile, a bit of context might help you recognize that your life today is almost certainly better than it was for 99 percent of your ancestors.

If you want to improve your life, you might start by changing your perspective.

during the Middle Ages:

The vast majority of people were peasants who labored hard for a subsistence living.

There was no social safety net and hunger was often terrible. During famines, people devoured bark, roots, grass, even clay.

Political freedoms were nonexistent. Despots, confronted by opposition, could be counted on to strike back with fury. Enemies of the king were routinely hanged, drawn and quartered.

Abduction for ransom was an acceptable means of livelihood for skilled but landless knights.

It was an era of shocking everyday violence. Murders were twice as frequent as death by accident. (And English coroners' records show that only one of every hundred murderers was ever brought to justice.)

Outlaws were seldom pursued. Anyone intrepid enough to travel between towns alone was on their own. Thieves, kidnappers, and killers simply hid in the forest and waited. In A World Lit Only By Fire, historian William Manchester writes that, "honest travelers carried well-honed daggers, knowing they might have to kill and hoping they would have the stomach for it."

Villagers were insular, staying close to home and marrying their neighbors. Local dialects were often incomprehensible to those living only a few miles away.

The vast majority of men and women were illiterate and believed in magic, sorcery and all manner of myths, routinely killing those whose superstitions were different from and, therefore, an affront to, their own.

Witch-hunting was a popular sport. When a witch - often someone with a mental illness - was discovered, he or she was generally put to the stake.

Sanitation was primitive; plumbing was unknown. Excrement, urine and offal were simply flung out windows. This created rat and flea infestations. These, in turn, bred deadly pandemics.

The Black Death is estimated to have killed up to 60% of Europe's population in the mid-1300s. At night, carts creaked through town streets, with gravediggers crying out, "Bring Out Your Dead!"

The Church - often doubling as the government - taxed workers without their consent, made war on its enemies and offered to erase transgressions by selling indulgences.

The threat of capital punishment was often used in religious conversions - and medieval threats were seldom idle.

Death was also the prescribed penalty for hundreds of other offenses, particularly those against property.

Courts required little evidence and were frequently merciless. A slanderer might have his tongue ripped out. A thief could have his hand cut off. (And the medieval age was not a good time to be an adulterer.)

Females were often married when they reached the age of twelve. Needless to say, they seldom chose their mates. Parents usually arranged their children's marriages by their seventh birthdays.

The toll at childbirth was appalling. A young girl's life expectancy was twenty-four.

Men rarely reached their late forties. If they did, their hair was as white and their backs as bent as an octogenarian's today.

People marked time by the sun, the stars and the changing of the seasons. There was no such thing as a clock or - apart from the Easter tables at the local church - anything resembling a calendar.

To the average person, the earth was flat, the population beset by demons and the lands beyond the horizon a total mystery.