at://rude1.blacksky.team/app.bsky.feed.post/3lwxap3o5tc2k

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        "alt": "on the matter, from his doleful Civilization and Its Discontents:\nOne would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal\nincrease in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child\nof mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time\nafter a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult\nvoyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously\nreducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and,\nindeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?\nFreud knew full well that technical and scientific advances are not to\nbe taken lightly, which is why he begins this passage by acknowledging\nthem. But he ends it by reminding us of what they have undone:\nIf there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his\nnative town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the\nocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-\nvoyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of\nreducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest\nrestraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear\nno more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we\nhave created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage.… And, finally, what good\nto us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we\ncan only welcome death as a deliverer?2\nIn tabulating the cost of technological progress, Freud takes a rather\ndepressing line, that of a man who agrees with Thoreau’s remark that\nour inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end. ",
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  "text": "Similarly\n\n\"If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice\""
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