For forty years I’ve been one of the most fortunate people I’ve ever heard of.
Starting from the global perspective, there is of course hardly a single country on Earth where people live under such good conditions as in Sweden. This goes for all of us here tonight. If we had ended up somewhere else, ourselves and our loved ones would in all likelihood have had to endure illiteracy, slavery, tyranny, torture, famine, war, severe illness and a very early demise.
With my slightly odd professional perspective I’m also acutely aware of how lucky I am to have plopped down not just where I am, but when. From an archaeological perspective there is no other period in time when people have been able to live so well as we do now. And you don’t have to be very pessimistic to believe that this is as good as it will ever get. Our great grand-children will in all likelihood see even worse environmental troubles than we do, even greater overpopulation – and they will have no fossil fuels to keep the wheels turning.
But OK, let’s ignore this greater perspective and pretend that Sweden today is a completely normal historical environment for people to live in. Then I am still one of the most fortunate people I’ve ever heard of. One of the luckiest of the lucky, as it were.
I have good health and a healthy family. I have a nice house in a verdant area. I have almost never had to do anything boring or exhausting to support myself. I have almost never had to obey orders from a boss. Since my mandatory schooling ended, when I was 15, I have told society, “This is what I want to do”. And with very few exceptions, society has replied, “OK, go ahead, here’s your livelihood, do what you want”.
With such an hedonist and individualist attitude, you might think that I would be a pretty lonely person. But I am lucky on that account as well. For all of my life I have been swimming in love and friendship. I am thinking particularly about my wife and kids. And you, dear people around me, have happily accepted my love and my friendship.
A flattersome listener might interrupt me here and say that my good relationships with people and my comparative professional success are due to good characteristics in me. But I haven’t earned those characteristics. I’m the way I am because I pulled a series of winning lottery tickets from the urn. I was born with a friendly and energetic disposition and found myself with loving parents who commanded rather ample and varied resources. Dumb luck.
If I live as long as my maternal grandfather did, then I have come almost half-way now. Living half a life the way I have is extremely lucky. But I’m optimistic about my future as well. People are commonly divided into those who see their glass as half full and those who see it as half empty. I belong to neither group. I tend to see my glass as 75% full. And so I raise this glass, dear friends, and suggest a toast to good luck, lots of fun and lots of love for us all as we travel on into the future.