This post is inspired by Dynamite's 2-year tradition of doing the same. I promise I did not intentionally repeat some of their gratitudes, but apparently, we both appreciate shoes.
Mass production of food is a thing. I can find exotic fruits, ready-to-bake meals, and sugary concoctions my ancestors could only imagine at the multiple grocery stores in town. I can (and do) walk around the store for an hour just looking at how much stuff there is. Getting food used to be a survival activity; now, pizza is delivered to my door. There was a time when peas were reserved for Italian Nobles. Now they cost pennies. Like, there are so many gallons of milk in my store, and there are so many stores in my town. Want Oreos to go with that milk? Done. Want to choose between 20 types of cheeses? Done. It's magical and we treat it as mundane. I can’t get over it.
Transportation used to consist of a lot of walking. Then it consisted of an animal doing lots of walking while flies and the sun made you uncomfortable. Now, I drive for hundreds of miles in the air conditioning with my music blasting. I stop by a convenient gas station to add decomposed organic carbonaceous material every few weeks; the process takes 5 minutes. To me, none of these infrastructures are a ‘given’.
There used to be pothole-ridden dirt roads, but now there are (sometimes pothole-ridden) highways. I can get from my house to a parent’s house 250+ miles away in < 7 turns1 while barrelling down the road at 70+ mph with my hand out the window.
You can jump out of a plane and experience freefalling toward Earth at 120+mph. Importantly, you can live to do this more than once.
The Internet - I mean come on. So much information and entertainment are accessible on demand. I grew up with this. In my life, libraries have been the place you go to ‘disconnect’ from the information influx of everyday life, not the place to find information. I can watch the world’s highest-rated chess player play other grandmasters while drunk with techno music in the background. Or, I can watch high-definition documentaries showcasing the exotic alien biology of the oceans. Want to be more ‘productive’? Why not watch MIT lectures on quantum superposition? All of these are just from YouTube; they are not even fully representative of everything to be grateful for about ‘The Internet’.
We haven’t had a Chicxulub-type event since… apparently the dinosaurs.
The lights are on - I walk into a room and turn on the light. It's so easy. A one-centimeter flick of my finger and the room comes alive with light. No more candle squinting. My circadian rhythm isn't grateful for the midnight light reaching my retina from the refrigerator bulb when I want a snack in the middle of the might, but I am.
The lights are on - I have yet to find a satisfactory answer as to why the performance of neural computation (or information processing more generally?) should be accompanied by a phenomenological experience. Even as we explain away the various functions and abilities of the brain in terms of neuroscience, cognitive networks, and brain chemistry…Why doesn’t all this information processing go on ‘in the dark’? Fortunately, instead, the lights are on.
Shoes.
It’s hard to imagine a world in which this is not the case, but nonetheless, we live in a world where one’s conscious experience can be tinkered with via pharmacologic compounds. Caffeine, intentionally designed psychopharmaceuticals, recreational drugs, etc. Someone in the Amazon a long time ago realized if you boil the torn leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub with the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, you are rocketed into an altered state of consciousness where you meet (errr…. have the experience of meeting) numerous spirit entities.
Once a year, my society has this tradition where people dress up and eat candy. Because of this, I got to watch my two-year-old little human experience her first Reese’s. A gustatory experience of intensity beyond what evolution had prepared her for.
Macaroni and cheese
The whole English alphabet fits onto a QWERTY keyboard pretty easily.
On that note, I can’t eat anything. Still, the process of extracting energy from other sources pretty much is just putting food in my mouth and, regardless of what I eat, my body makes little adenosine tri-phosphate energy packets enabling me to walk around and think about philosophy or something. There are essential vitamins and health considerations, but on a practical day-to-day basis, I just eat and the rest happens in the background.
I’m of the view that the sense of self is a subtle, deeply embedded illusion arising from the process of our Markovian Blanket endlessly interacting with the rest of the universe. What starts out in plain sight, slowly becomes deeper and deeper entrenched until it becomes like water is to a fish. Escaping this illusion is a liberating experience worth pursuing, but holding onto it without attachment and relishing subjective experience of ‘being you’ in the infinitude of other possible ways it could have been is cool too.
You usually don’t feel your tongue. I had a viral illness and an inflamed tongue for three days this year. I could barely drink water, my jaw got sore from constant clamping secondary to pain. Now that that is over, I am eternally grateful for the 99% of my life in which I am oblivious to the fact I have a tongue. There’s a metaphor here for appreciating health in general more while one has it, but I won’t internalize that until it’s too late.
I can imagine a world where the qualia of experience is not on a spectrum from ‘good, pleasing, yes more of this’ to ‘bad, ouch, pain, stop this it hurts, ahhh’.2 but instead on a spectrum from ‘neutral’ to ‘bad, ouch, pain, stop this it hurts, ahhh’.
Stanislov Petrov who, for all intents and purposes, saved the world.
My trash and feces disappear without me worrying about it. The only time I had to worry about where my poop went was on a multiday hike I did a few years ago in the Lake Tahoe area. Burying my poop with our poop shovel for a night was quite the inconvenience, and it made me appreciate how much literal shit the modern industrial sewage infrastructure of large cities like New York handle.
Embryologically, we are symmetric beings. This is probably because it means fewer fundamental, independent steps/laws are required to get a creature up and running (in a theoretical sense). Thus, more bang for the genetic buck). It turns out that symmetry is helpful for getting creatures up and running (literally - think bipedalism) as well. That’s convenient
The microbiology of a single cell is fascinatingly complex with enzyme cascades, epigenetic markers, organelles (tiny, cell-sized organs), etc. The leap from unicellular to multicellular creatures is a wild happenstance to me. How billions of these things coordinate from a single sperm-ovum starting point into a fully functioning living beyond is absolutely bonkers. You just ‘hit play’ and watch life unfold.
Someone out there makes music that I vibe hard with. His name is Deca. The best description I have for him is psychedelic rap. Spotify let me know last year that I was in the top 0.5% of listeners for the year. That's cool for me, but why does it matter to you? Up until ~ 1900, music was only heard live. Hearing any music would've been on their gratitude list. The nostalgia of hearing the music of one's youth wasn't an experience, because there was no music available to be nostalgic about! 3
Over the course of millions of years, water erosion slowly carved a tiny slot canyon out of the sandstone in the southwest USA. It is about 100 yards long and 100 feet tall. It's inconspicuous from the outside. You could pass by it for a lifetime without thinking much of it. But inside is truly surreal. I've seen similar fascinating things - Firefall at Yosemite, Castner glacial ice cave in Alaska, the Hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, etc. These temporary (in geologic scale) marvels are super fun to come across, and repeatedly smash the gratitude button in my brain when I am in their presence.
Antelope Canyon, 2022
Maybe a dozen turns if you count my apartment complex parking lot and the less conspicuous highway splits that aren’t really turns though
For what it is worth, I don’t think this simplification is entirely correct.
Probably, the church played a big role in bringing music to people in the form of choir and organ-based music. I'd imagine, it would be a nice attractor to the weekly Catholic mass (in addition to the threat of hellfire of course)