Nice topic. Still I feel your opening argument is not the strongest. Maybe people can't mention as many names from earlier times, simply because that's not the time they lived in. Skip another 200 years and ask a person from that future to name musicians from their vs our time - he'll probably be able to name more from his own time, right? The thing is - it's so hard to make any judgements about a life we never lived. The other day I read that the hunters, from the hunter gatherers time (of whom I thought they worked very hard, always) did their hunting stuff for just a few hours a day and had a whole lot of lazy time too. We can make up stories about different era's, which make them sound either very tough or very easy. But life is life for all of us, more than what we face surrounding us, we have our own thoughts and cognitions to either survive or take charge of...