So much of our essential outlook on life is a construction based on the assumptions our technological power and safety has given us. We can do whatever we want, be whatever we want, the possibilities are open and limitations are illusory. We take our position of power and freedom for granted as the default right of every human, rather than as a tenuous position dearly bought through years of extreme effort, loss, and careful construction, building the world we enjoy today.

Just purely on a medical basis, how much of the freedom and comfort and security we enjoy is all because we’re sitting behind a firewall of vaccines that no other civilization before us had to protect them? For past civilizations, you had to take for granted that the plague or flu or diphtheria or syphilis was going to be coming through again and again and there was very little you could do to stop it. You had better start a family and have a lot of kids because the diseases that target them mean you’re probably going to lose a decent number before they reach adulthood. Forget “you can be anything you want to be”, you’ll be lucky to grow up to be anything at all, because even the president and the emperor can’t keep their kids safe. And without them there’s no guarantee you’ll have enough people around you to take care of everyone and everything sufficiently to keep you and your family alive.

The world we live in and take for granted now isn’t the default, it isn’t a necessary outcome, it isn’t a guarantee or entitlement. It’s a miracle. It’s a gift. It’s not the natural state of the world. It isn’t arbitrary how we respond to the world, with no better or worse choices or outcomes. We’ve turn the world into a walled garden of delights, a child’s paradise. But that isn’t its natural state. And it’s harsh to be reminded of that, and of how easily that garden can be breached and overrun if we don’t guard its walls. And nature is always finding ways to breach them.

It’s easy to forget now after years of living behind their protection, that vaccines were such a big deal because for the first time you had something that didn’t just seem like a good idea and made you feel like you were doing something (like bags of incense, chasing out gypsies, drinking arsenic, and rubbing snakes on your skin); they were something that, when confronted with a genuinely overwhelmingly powerful evil, such as a terrible, recurrent disease, actually definitely worked and was proven effective at stopping or reducing it. That was quite a novel change to our circumstances. That was such a big, new thing it changed our whole view of the world within a few short generations.

So now we’re being reminded that that position of safety isn’t the default. That it does make a difference what we have and do. We’re being reminded that the world is actually a difficult, scary place we can’t always control, that it isn’t our personal playground to just romp around in with no possible dangers and consequences. And we only enjoy that position because of extreme effort and learning and work and planning and building that safe, luxurious playground for us to run around in and take for granted. And that bucks our whole mental outlook. We haven’t been toughened up by the recurring health disasters that previous generations had to live though.

I mean, it’s wonderful we’ve had this luxury to enjoy, and I’m so thankful not only for the work of the scientists who helped provide our current health security, but also the generations before me who built all the municipal infrastructure, dams, levees, sewers, interstate road systems, pipelines, electrical infrastructure and so on I take for granted every day. We take it for granted so much we’re likely to complain loudly and demand compensation and pillory you if they malfunction or lapse or fail.

I’m thankful for all the strategists and soldiers and FBI agents and police who have worked to secure our position of safety by seeking out and confronting and cutting off dangers before they could ever reach me and affect me.
I’m thankful for the food scientists and safety experts who have made it their job to make sure I can take for granted that the food I buy won’t poison me and will contain what it’s supposed to contain.

I’m thankful for the diplomats and lawmakers and judges and lawyers who saw potential dangers and abuses internally and externally and worked to find solutions and establish policies to prevent them from spreading.
I’m thankful for the generations before me in my family who worked so I could be here. A lot of them died young, a lot of them didn’t have education or good health care and worked at very hard jobs. They died during childbirth and had their sod houses collapse during rainstorms. They raised me up from behind, so I’m only standing as high as I am because of every moment in their lives they chose to lift instead of lie down.

So when the world suddenly reminds me that we all have an implacable foe, a challenge, that in fact the world is a scary and difficult place that we prosper in only at the luxury of great effort, that it can suddenly turn against us and destroy us and destroy the things we’ve built, especially if we’re unprepared, that it’s a constant force of chaos and entropy and evolving challenges and threats that is not out to promote and preserve our wellbeing or comfort, I remind myself to be thankful for the work and sacrifice and courage and creativity and cleverness of others. It wasn’t easy for them to choose to confront those challenges, they had to make a lot of personal sacrifices, especially of their own comfort and preferences and what would have been easy and preferable for themselves. They had to confront a very difficult, unhappy, dangerous, and unfair world. Not just the world of people, but the natural world itself, from top to bottom. Life is a kind of miracle, an anti-entropic process of creativity that struggles against the very laws of nature.

If you can find the time and the courage to confront it, here’s a nice article on entropy, or more colloquially, chaos. https://fs.blog/2018/11/entropy/

The conclusion isn’t a pleasant one, but it’s a solidly established fact. “Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.” That may be a slightly more negative way of putting things, even if it isn’t actually untrue. Another way to say it is: chaos and disorder aren’t a mistake, they’re the default destiny of things. Order is always the result of creativity and putting in energy. And it only lasts as long as you keep putting effort and energy in to maintain it.

That is an uncomfortable conclusion, because it shifts a heck of a lot of the responsibility for our own health and safety and happiness to ourselves. It’s not something we can just expect the world to provide as a matter of course. Even when we do the right thing, we might not get what we want. The world might kick back harder and steal away the expected fruits of our efforts. And that’s pretty darn depressing.

Sometimes the most carefully healthy of us still get cancer. Sometimes the smartest of us still miss the answers. Sometimes the most diligent of us still fail. And that’s just how the world is. You would expect that at least, even if the world is hard, you would be consistently rewarded for doing the right thing and punished for doing the wrong thing. And largely that’s true, you reap what you sow, but you also often reap what you didn’t sow, both positively and negatively. The wicked prosper and the good suffer. You can rage against it, you can complain, you can point out that it’s excessively unjust. And you would be right. It’s a hard world. But that doesn’t make it less hard. And it’s not clear that it makes you better able to confront it.

So what does? Well, there are lots of practical answers to that. People work, every generation, to make life safer and more secure and more able to be navigated to accomplish what we want. For ourselves and for our successors. And if we’re smart and lucky, it lasts for a good while. We’re still enjoying today in America the benefits of the postwar construction boom.

I’m still enjoying today the benefits from when my grandpa and grandma managed to create a stable enough life for their kids so that those kids were able to go to school and be the first of their family to go to college, resulting in my dad becoming a physician. And my dad had the option to squander that gift. He actually dropped out and became a ski bum after a semester of college, and made his mom cry, but eventually he decided it was a lonely and selfish sort of life, came home, went back to school, failed to graduate, took stock of what needed doing, changed majors, went back to school, and became a doctor. He took what his parents gave him and added to it, and gave it in turn to me.

And I hope to hand some of that on to my own kids, in turn, if I can keep myself together enough (and believe me, it’s not easy, I’m ungrateful and lazy and entitled and disappointed and greedy to an immense degree, because I’m used to having it all and not used to not having it and wasn’t here to see the work that went into it; I was too busy enjoying the results, in fact I’m the main person who needs to hear my own arguments here, which is why I’m recording them).

It took generations for my family to get to this point, and they nearly lost their footing and died out many times, and they had the chance to lose it with every new generation, if they didn’t see the value in the gift. So if I had to pick a single thing that is the cure to the risks we constantly face of losing our way in life, one thing that would help to cure the fear and anxiety that we modern Americans feel today, I would have to argue that it’s something like gratitude.

I think gratitude is the cure for our tendency to take for granted the gifts we enjoy and the work others have done and are doing. We should be grateful for the chance to contribute ourselves, and grateful if we manage not to screw things up to badly or lose it all to bad fortune. Even if we do find ourselves in an unlucky circumstance (like, say, a sudden new disease emerges), we can still be strengthened for the days ahead by our gratitude for all the safety and opportunity we have enjoyed previously, and all the strength and tools we have to respond and survive that we might not have had and others in the past have not had.

And knowing that the world is hard and life is hard will help us be kinder and more appreciative to others and ourselves. My dad wasn’t perfect, nor was my grandpa, nor his dad. Not in the least. They were surrounded by chaos, struggling to survive and carve out a path, and often that chaos lived inside them and through them. But it’s just a little bit easier forgiving their faults and mistakes and appreciating their virtues and work and gifts when I remember that perfection and ease isn’t the default, it’s the dream.

Any bit of growing order and stability is a real accomplishment, a miracle of life and creativity. Imperfect, arising out of a tide of chaos and disaster, often going wrong, often wasted, often misguided, rarely perfect. And it’s good to see where things went wrong so you can do them better. But if you can just recognize that it’s amazing that they went right at all, you’ll have more mercy and perspective on them and on yourself and be able to keep moving forward.

And that’s the real gift of gratitude, the ability to freely take the gifts of the past, along with the challenges of the present, and move forward as best as we can. It orients our spirit in a way that makes us stronger instead of weaker, more understanding instead of fearful and critical, more able to act instead of paralyzed and helpless, more aware of our capabilities and responsibilities instead of our expectations and demands, more aware of our gifts and limitations instead of our disappointments and regrets, more aware of our riches instead of our poverty.

If the world fills you with fear, stress, worry, disappointment, anger, envy, resentment, and sadness, practice gratitude. It might be painful. Recognizing that the world isn’t an endless resource of ease and satisfaction, recognizing that it’s a place of great difficulty and often injustice can break your heart. It can break your spirit. It can turn you depressed or resentful or careless or even cruel. If good things are so precious and rare and bought so dearly that we need to grateful for each and every one of them, might that not make us greedy and callous? Might it not bring out the predator in us? The canny predator (predation is fundamentally associated with intelligence) who seeks to devour others in the life and death struggle to survive? Is not the world itself a kind of predator, preying on the weak and sick, devouring any who fall behind and can’t run fast and enough and far enough, and runs all down in the end?

I think the answer, both psychologicslly and historically, is of course! It’s a dangerous struggle. That competitive approach, that desire to see what can survive and succeed and win persist and what cannot survive and grow and prove itself fall away is our first defense against the entropic nature of the world. By setting our enemy as a fixture within our own minds and seeking to weed out and put to death our own ideas and concepts and plans that will result in failure, we save ourselves from the worse pain of living it out again and again in every generation. Taking that danger in, making it part of us, makes us stronger better able to face the challenges ahead.

But if we lose perspective, if we forget what we’re trying to find a path toward, the world as we wish it to be, if we become only that inner enemy, we will become tyrannical and arbitrary and callous and destructive as the entropic forces themselves. (And, for the record, you can make the opposite mistake and give all power to your inner comforter and friend, and fail to properly develop your inner foe, and lose all its benefits and protections and power, making yourself uncharacteristically weak and niave and unprepared for the trails of life. There are always two ways at least to go too far.)

But gratitude carves a narrow course between extremes. It’s smart enough to realize that there’s something really good there that’s worth appreciating and wanting and having and pursuing. But it’s also wise enough to realize that you can’t take those things for granted or just expect them; you’ve got to count them and value them and respect them and understand where they came from.

Gratitude is neither naive nor cynical, neither entitled nor hopeless. It sees the world as it is, accepts the challenges as well as the accomplishments, and orients you as you should in order to understand where you are, appreciate what the past, and empower you toward your future. Gratitude give you the power to change yourself and the world, and to live with it when you can’t.

And in times of fear and trial, it’s the hardest thing to find in ourselves. Anger and despair are tools that leap much more easily to the hand. But one counts only the mistakes of the past, and the other sees only the failures of the future. Neither provides a path forward. And the more we waste our time on them, the more we will find ourselves trapped. We need the future and the past. We need the knowledge of our failures and the hope of our successes. We need we need the knowledge of our accomplishments and the fear of our potential mistakes. We need everyone and everything they can do.