This is a nice sentiment, but it’s built on a very selective reading of history.

Cathedrals weren’t just the product of some enlightened, purpose-driven culture. They were funded by heavy taxation, indulgences, and concentrated power. The same societies building them also had widespread poverty, limited mobility, and brutal labour conditions. It’s not obvious that they were “better” at allocating resources, just that they produced monuments that lasted.

We also forget survivorship bias. Cathedrals are still standing, so they feel representative, but medieval societies also spent enormous resources on wars, court luxury, and things that didn’t endure. Future generations will likely remember our best achievements—space exploration, medicine, the internet—and ignore our equivalent of “junk.”

And the comparison itself is off. Gambling apps aren’t the modern counterpart to cathedrals. If you want a fair analogy, compare cathedrals to things like universities, infrastructure, scientific research, or open-source systems, long-term, collaborative projects we absolutely still build.

If there’s a real critique here, it’s about incentives: modern systems often reward short-term engagement over long-term value, but pretending the past was uniquely noble and the present uniquely shallow doesn’t help us understand or fix that.