I drew Vuk,a boy who lived in the 13th century Balkans. He died at 2. His dad was already gone. According to the statistics the life expectancy at birth for him was around 50%. I suspect a lot of our random people would have died early, if they were born before the 19th or 20th century...

I had a similar sensation. I often think about a friend of mine who mentioned, in passing, a sense of having won the lottery of life for being born in this day and age, in a first-world country

yeah, and you don't have to go back that far

last night my wife and I were watching the first episode of a TV show Deadwood (set in the Dakotas in late 1800s), and my wife commented "I could never have lived then; I would have just killed myself immediately". The irony of course is that she would have been fine had she been born in that era as it would have appeared as "normal" to her then as the world today appears to us (ok things aren't normal right now, but I mean comparatively speaking), and "better" than 100 years earlier.