What we should be grateful for
reflecting on thanksgiving
Last thursday Americans (or people living in America) celebrated thanksgiving. I thought it could be a good idea to write a blogpost about things to be grateful for, not so much about what I’m personally grateful for but about what every each of us should be grateful for.
We are unbelievably lucky to be alive right now. Every day, we benefit from thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge, scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations. The average person can sleep in a warm bed, live in a safe home, wear comfortable clothing, and access information instantly and all this without having personally contributed anything to the creation of these innovations. If you go to a museum and see how the kings hundred years ago lived you’ll be shocked by how bad they seem to have lived compared to the average person of today, pretty much we all today have a higher standard of living compared to the kings of the past. That’s the myth of the “good old days”, life was nasty and short before industrialization. Those people that talk about the “good old days” have a romanticized view of the past and none of them would sanely say they would like to live in these “good old days” precisely because they are everything but good. This is a proof that everyone benefits from capitalism and economic growth. I didn’t in any way contribute to the invention of smartphones, antibiotics, or chatGPT, yet I get to use them freely just like everyone else. So for this reason I’m deeply annoyed by people that criticize innovators of any kind (of course some innovators do make the world a worser place but I’m speaking about the good kind of innovators). They make everyone and indeed themselves better off. Most of humans alive today are just enjoying all this while contributing nothing to the human experience of the future. But this is okay, because most of us are so comfortable in this world because of these same innovations that we become complacent, not makers or creators. But this comfort shouldn’t nevertheless blind us to gratitude. We truly are living inside the achievement of others, or in other words, achievements of the human race. Because it’s also wrong to think that the world of today was built by a very tiny group of people, we should think about it as a kind of mountain that people build upon. For instance, Darwin wouldn’t build his theory of evolution without first Lamarck build his (mistaken) theory of evolution. We move from mistaken theories to less mistaken theories always and because of this we shall always have a mistaken theory to start with, to build upon.
Civilization is better off with innovations and new knowledge. But for most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped creating new knowledge. And this is still true when we look at our current educational theory (see here). People used to use their knowledge to suppress change other than to cause change. But we know that the growth of knowledge (novel or new knowledge) is the engine of progress. And we have (selfish or personal) reasons why we want to have this new knowledge. And this all happens of self interest, of people realizing what they like and solving the problems they’re interested in. It still amazes me that people don’t realize this and don’t follow their passions. The view that you have your job (something that is not fun) and your hobbies (what you actually have fun doing) is so weird. There should be no such thing, your job should be your hobby. You (likely, at this pace) will gonna die, after all your life expectancy is something like three thousand weeks, that’s nothing. Why spending your so precious time doing something you don’t absolutely love? We intrisincly know this but we forget. Don’t do something you don’t want to do, there’s so little time on this planet.
Let’s be grateful that human agency matters more than ever. No matter where you’re born today, you can achieve great things. Opportunities are more equal than ever. For most of human history, the talent that used to be wasted just because those talented people were born in places where they weren’t allowed to flourish was giant. But today, opportunities are virtually distributed equally, just like talent. And it seems to me that the country that most rewards human agency is the United States. Just the amount of stories that you have of extremely poor people that rose and became extremely wealthy trumps any other country, you don’t really have those stories in Europe.
Let’s be grateful that some of our deepest and fundamental ideas are already discovered and known. I’m talking about Einstein’s theories, Darwin’s theory, capitalism and much more, and of course the ideas of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. Just the fact that we already have the answer of how to construct better societies and how to advance human civilization is massively important here. We don’t need to figure it out how to solve these problems, we’ve pretty much worked out all of the essential answers to human progress either in economics, science or any other field. What I’m not so grateful for though is that so little people actually listen to these ideas.