Alexander the Great of Macedonia was conquering the known world at age 17 or so. My...how times have changed. We wouldn’t want our children to get stressed now, would we?
High cost of living etc. nowdays. You can’t seriously compare today to the time of Alexander the Great.
Though at the time of Alex the Great (300 BC), the average life expectancy in Macedonia and Greece, not to mention the civilised worlds of Persia, Egypt etc. was still 35-40.
Deviating from the topic, but my pet peeve is that Alex was not quite so great. He inherited a strong army, a stable bureaucracy and organization from his father, Philip the Great of Macedon (now THAT guy really shook up things). And, he was lucky that the Persian Empire was ruled by a weak king (remember at that time the Persians ruled over all of what is now Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE and parts of India, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman (or had influences in these places). Alex just toppled the weak king and everyone came to his side.