Over the past century, infant mortality in developed countries plunged from 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 1900 to under 6 per 1,000 today. Nearly all that drop—from sanitation, antibiotics, hospital births and pasteurization—happened between 1870 and 1970, long before the internet or iPhones existed. Seeing your unborn child in 3D is neat, but it’s a novelty grafted onto medicine whose life-saving breakthroughs took place decades ago. Smartphones pack cameras, GPS, telephony and messaging into one gadget, but each feature has roots stretching back 35 to 130 years: portable TV in the 1950s, handheld radios earlier, telegraphs in the Victorian era. The digital age has mostly honed cost, convenience and integration. Real invention—indoor plumbing, widespread electrification, the airplane—reshaped daily life far more than faster chips ever will. Economic growth reflects that slowdown. Post-war productivity gains have halved since 1970, despite the internet’s promise. Material routines—cooking, heating, housing construction, auto and air travel—look much the same now as they did a half-century ago. Medicine still advances, but most of its dramatic life-extension work wrapped up long ago. Innovation has given us streaming video, frictionless payments and AI chatbots. Those count for something, but they don’t match the scale of the breakthroughs that slashed child deaths or brought electricity into millions of homes. We’re benefiting today from our great-grandparents’ era of radical change more than our own.