"If someone asks me how one can stay in this dirty den of all the vices and all the evils piled one on top of the other, in the middle of an air poisoned by a thousand putrid vapors, among the butcheries, the cemeteries, hospitals, sewers, streams of urine, piles of excrement, dyers', tanners, tanner shops; in the midst of the continual smoke of this incredible quantity of wood, and the vapor of all that coal ; in the midst of arsenical, sulphurous, bituminous parts, which are constantly exhaled from the workshops where copper and metals are tormented,
if you ask me how we live in this abyss, whose heavy and foul air is so thick that we can see and feel the atmosphere more than three leagues around; air which cannot circulate, and which only swirls in this maze of houses, how finally man voluntarily languishes in these prisons, while if he released the animals which he fashioned at his yoke, he would see them , guided by the only instinct, to flee with haste and seek in the fields the air, the greenery, a free ground, embalmed by the perfume of the flowers:
I will answer that habit familiarizes Parisians with humid mists, harmful vapors and foul mud. "
"Table of Paris", by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1781
No, it was not better before. Progress is real, whatever the adepts of catastrophism and degrowth say, and all the haves complaining about the least of their boo-boo: they ignore their privileged condition compared to their ancestors and their chance to live today.