The entirety of humanity sweeps me along as I drive across the capacious expanse of Kansas
A deeply blue sky stretches across the Kansas plains, as witnessed from a rest stop off Interstate 70. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
Driving across the toasted green plains of Kansas toward an event in Lindsborg on Sunday, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude.
Not gratitude toward a particular person or institution, although goodness knows I’ve been beyond lucky in my associations with both. No, I found myself grateful on a much deeper level — grateful for the ability to live and work and exist at this moment in 2026, in this place — the state of Kansas.
I understand if you don’t share that feeling. There’s a lot awry in the world around us. Political ads for this fall’s election already pollute the airwaves, and the threat of technological upheaval lurks around every corner.
Yet I am nonetheless lucky. And I suspect that you are too.
This past week, I found myself returning to a deceptively simple webpage called Any Human Ever. I would recommend you click on the link and go try it yourself, but in essence the site allows you to simulate, at random, the life of any human being who has ever lived. Ever.
More than 100 billion people have lived on Earth, from the beginning of our species until now. That’s a lot of folks. Many of those people lived and died before the advent of modern medicine and commercial agriculture. Many of them died in infancy or had their lives cut short by diseases like cholera.
Those who are lucky enough to make it into their 40s or beyond seldom traveled more than a day or two away from their home villages. Most weren’t literate. And because of the mortality rates mentioned earlier, these survivors witnessed their parents and children die around them at alarming rates.
We talk a lot about trauma these days. We talk about trauma created by our upbringings, neighborhoods or other challenges in life.
Imagine the collective trauma experienced by billions of human beings who lived through our planet’s past. Their lives were, as British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Many experienced their allotted span of years as little more than a unyielding agony of loss and privation.
They were not rich. They were not even middle class. They were dirt poor, malnourished and without the access to resources or entertainment we take for granted today.
Here are just three of the randomly generated people produced for me Sunday. We start with an unnamed girl.
In 45,665 BCE, a girl was born on the Ganges Plain, near present-day Varanasi. Her name went unrecorded. She lived in a mobile band of about 40 people. Her dwelling was a brush or grass windbreak. She was the second of six children. She mostly ate foraged roots, river fish, wild boar, and wild greens and roots, with wild berries in season. She was about 143 cm in height (4 ft 8 in).
Of the three children she had, two boys survived past childhood. The farthest she ever travelled from home was 3 days’ walk, to the far edge of the band’s seasonal range. She spoke an unrecorded prehistoric language, and her faith was animism and shamanism. She spent her working life as a gatherer of wild plants and small game. Death came at 19, in an accident.
Urraca was born on the Iberian Peninsula, near present-day Toledo, in 659 CE. She grew up in a hamlet of about 40 people. Her home was a whitewashed stone house. She was the third of four children. Her father died when she was 42, her mother when she was 47. Urraca’s table was mostly wheat bread, chickpeas and broad beans, pork and cured ham, and cabbage and onions, with grapes, figs, and olives in season. She stood about 157 cm tall (5 ft 2 in).
Urraca married at the age of 27. She had six children; four boys survived past childhood. Her farthest journey was half a day’s walk, to a neighbouring village. She spoke Late Latin, and practised Christianity. Urraca’s work was that of a farmer working the family land.
At 23, she lived through a cold, sunless year caused by the far-off eruption of an unidentified volcano in the tropics. At 25 she watched Halley’s Comet pass. The Umayyad conquest of Hispania broke out when she was 52.
She died of typhoid fever at 52. Her line came to a single grandchild. Her body was buried in consecrated ground beside the church, in a shroud, and later in a coffin.
Kotys was born in 89 CE, in the countryside near Belgrade. His village was home to about 350 people. Kotys’s dwelling was a timber and wattle-and-daub house. Among five children, he was the fourth. He ate largely wheat and millet bread, beans and sheep cheese, pork and lamb, and cabbage, onions, and leeks, with plums and apples in season. He followed Thracian polytheism and spoke a Palaeo-Balkan language. He died still a child, in an accident.
Lindsborg painter Mike Hartung (right) explains his latest exhibit at the Smoky Valley Arts & Folklife Center on Sunday. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
Yes, we are lucky.
I believe that most of us understand this, deep down. We don’t have to look many generations back in our families to find subsistence farmers or voyagers who traversed continents in search of better lives. We understand that our predecessors struggled because we are not so many generations removed from them.
Yet our minds become accustomed to our circumstances. We have all become accustomed to living in a world with transport and nutrition and entertainment, and socialization all at the ready. We may face fiscal stress, but for many of us that stress mostly affects the size of the bounty we enjoy.
I do not mean to cast aspersions on anyone’s efforts to better themselves or set an individual court. After all, the reason I was driving across the state to Lindsborg was to sign copies of my new book and hobnob with Kansas Reflector fans.
I wrote the book. I’ve worked five years at the Reflector. I created the circumstances that made my trip possible.
But the opportunity to live here in this moment, and in these circumstances, was entirely luck. I could have been born or raised in an entirely different time — with an entirely different outcome.
We don’t like to dwell on these topics. So much about our lives remains outside of our control. We are so many grains of sand, tossed in the air and coming to rest wherever we may. Even those of us with religious faith must acknowledge that the God has, at the very least, smiled upon us.
So for a moment this morning, during this Labor Day vacation, remember the question posed by Dr. Seuss: “Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?” Spare a moment for gratitude at the cosmic chance that deposited us here and aware.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.