I believe we live in one of the absolute best times to be alive, and too many of us don’t even know it. Speaking materially, regular people in America have their struggles, no doubt. We aren’t a utopia. But we are the wealthiest and the most well-off we have ever been.

And yet, look at where we are. It is often claimed that regular people are falling behind. Barring the fact that this has been said since time immemorial, what evidence is there to support it? Virtually none. The income of the average American has risen drastically in real terms in the last 40 years. The average American home is 1,000 square feet bigger than it used to be 40 years ago (despite the fact that our families are smaller). The average American diet is 500 more calories/person than it was 40 years ago. The average American turned a wheel multiple times to call someone 40 years ago. Now we have smartphones that give us access to virtually any media, information, or person in the world, and it fits into the palm of our hand. Life expectancy has gone up over a decade in the last 40 years. Emissions have plummeted in the last 40 years.

Is healthcare too expensive? Yes. Is education too expensive? Yes. Do we have inequities in our society (one that is particularly close to my heart is school quality, particularly in minority neighborhoods)? Yes.

But none of that can obscure the absolutely stunning material advances that have been made in the last four decades.

And yet, look how dissatisfied everyone is. Have we ever seen more people so entirely accustomed to complaining, and making excuses for everything under the sun? Have we ever been this utterly spoiled before? Have we ever seen a society so well off, but at the same time so full of people claiming the fact that they don’t have even more is a matter of “justice”?

Don’t misunderstand me: we are far from perfect, and we have a lot of problems to fix. But the point remains: despite all the claims constantly being made about our material condition and how Americans are “suffering” and “falling behind,” overall, the material condition of our society and the average American has never been better. We have never had it as good as we have it right now (in a material sense).

So has this abundance induced thankfulness on our part? Has it induced awe and wonder at our utterly fantastic situation, and an appreciation for how rare it is, even compared to the rest of the world today (let alone 40 years ago)? Does the average American, let alone perhaps the slightly poorer American, realize that they live a more materially comfortable life than the Czars of Russia just 100 years ago?

The answer to all the above is “no.” We have not a clue how good we have it. And the fact that we do not is indicative of the profound crisis of spirit that is making itself felt in this country. The fact that we fall for the narrative of grievance in the midst of such unparalleled prosperity shows the depths to which we have fallen. We are so unconcerned, dissatisfied with or apathetic about spiritual things, that our demands, expectations, cravings for material things have become way out of proportion. We have less security spiritually, so we seek it out materially (which is a phenomena apparent in both the most ardent secularist, as well as the believer in some variant of the “prosperity gospel”).

This is why my book Liberty’s Secrets included a substantial section about the Founders’ views on “luxury” — in other words: materialism. Their prognostications were brilliant, but too often neglected today.

“Human nature in no form of it could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams said. “Religion begat prosperity, and then the daughter consumed the mother,” Benjamin Franklin warned (quoting the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather). “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly? When you will answer me these questions, I hope I may venture to answer yours,” Adams wrote to Jefferson. “The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty, when they have been in competition,” he further warned, which is why Montesquieu had also warned that “every lazy nation is grave, for those who do not work regard themselves as sovereign of those who work.”

And perhaps most startlingly, Montesquieu also predicted that an age of materialism would coincide with an age of sexual gratification: “[W]e have spoken of incontinence [inability to restrain sexual appetites] because it is joined to luxury. It is always followed by luxury, and always follows luxury. If you leave the impulses of the heart at liberty, how can you hamper the weaknesses of the spirit?”

And Americans, who represent the proverbial “one percent” of the world, have almost certainly forgotten the wisdom from Poor Richard (Benjamin Franklin), who said: “To be content, look backward on those who possess less than yourself, not forward on those who possess more. If this does not make you content, you don’t deserve to be happy.”

This is, in my opinion, why we are where we are right now: an age that is experiencing a level of prosperity and material wellbeing never before seen in world history, and yet so rife with envy, greed, entitlement and narcissism. We are a people of full bellies and empty hearts. We have neglected the weightier matters of the law. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind. Our own success is undermining us and sapping our strength.

What Adams said of materialistic people like us could easily be said of us ourselves: “They neither act nor think like men in sound health, and in possession of their senses.”