" ...I spend ten entire minutes trying to open a plastic package of Weeble-wobbles...,my fingers raw, the three little Weebles obstinate in their PVC clamshells. I can't help but wonder, as I saw with a bread knife at the seam of the package, about technology and the sprint that is a modern life. Is progress really a curve that sweeps perpetually higher? Wasn't packaging (or toymaking or cobbling or winemaking or milk or cheese or cement, for that matter) often better three hundred or seven hundred or nineteen hundred years ago? "

― Anthony Doerr , Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World