Societies of the past and present are just complex systems comprising of people and technology.

Although we have better technologies, we are not immune to the threats that faced our ancestors. If anything, our technological abilities bring more challenges. Our globalized economic system may be more likely to cause a crisis to spread.

It doesn't work like a check-list: You can't check each item off, get to be happy and old for a couple of decades, then you die. Problems don’t go away, they change and evolve. And accepting life's imperfection is hard because it forces us to accept that we have to live with things we don’t like.