Thanksgiving is a difficult time for those of us who do have perspective or those of us who adhere with conviction to social rituals.
Both can apply of course and to those poor souls I wish proportional good luck.
The hardship of the latter is logistical and often emotional. The pressure of putting on or attending the event can be substantial to put it mildly. Many people feel quite forced, and some literally are if they are under 18 or are otherwise beholden.
This pressure (ironically thankfully) doesn’t apply to me. My true family is quite small. My extended family for one reason or another lives entirely separate lives from mine. Likely this is a good thing as our extreme differences would only bring us pain were we forced to be together.
The second hardship however, perspective, is for better or worse one which most vexes me. I feel like it hits me harder than most. I could argue this as a fact by way of statistics. But justifying my use of oxygen is not the point of this writing. I simply wish to share some of my perspective to publicly announce my gratitude and to maybe help those who share something of this issue.
Things across the planet are embarrassingly grim for a species that likes to call itself “advanced.” (Click image below for merely one ironic example.)
But that’s not the whole story. Perspective isn’t just awareness of atrocity. It’s also awareness of what isn’t news. As Theodore Parker said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Accordingly, if I were capable of making a truly complete list of all the people to whom I am grateful and why, it would consume the storage capacity of the world. A list invariably leaves off names and of course memory is always incomplete anyway. I truly love my few friends and family and I’m confident they know how I feel. (Indeed, poor souls, they graciously hear about it with great frequency.) For those whom I can’t honestly say I feel love there are always degrees of positive regard.
This includes you. More than most on Earth in fact, simply by virtue of reading my blog. I am thankful to every person who has spent even a single intentional second reading my blog.
Beyond that I care about every person ever. Even the monsters. I care about everything in the universe which is capable of feeling. And I am grateful even to things which cannot. Such as the chair I’m sitting on, or the rice in my bowl, or the bowl itself. I am grateful to the humans that provide me these things, and that list is extensively long to a person with perspective. Very possibly even so long that it encompasses all humanity.
Think about every human being whose actions, inaction, choices, and nature contributed to transforming sunlight and dirt (and of course I am grateful for the sunlight and dirt as well) into a delicious bite for me to enjoy and be grateful for.
Every person I angered who didn’t bash my head in with a rock, every person whose efforts made it safe to move the food from field to store, every researcher whose product kept me alive to this point, every tax payer who’s ok with a bit of their payment going toward keeping me and tens of millions of others from starving, and on and on. I’m grateful for all of you and I thank you on behalf of myself and all those who would but can’t for whatever reason.
I am grateful for every agent of pain and death reduction and joy and life magnification in existence. If you can look at your life and honestly say that you bring more joy and life than would have otherwise been here, you are a good person and have my personal approval and respect. If you do not and wish you did, then let me say you can possibly start soon and you still have my gratitude for your sincere desire to do so.
If you are an agent of pain and death however, you have my pity. I pity your victims and I pity you. The future must be terrifying for you simply because you have a shrinking place in it. Change is coming that will exponentially weaken your ability to do the harm you do. The cosmos lacks a sense of vengeance, so it’s possible that your pathology will be ultimately rewarded by life. But that only makes the choice of becoming an agent of life and joy all the more worthy of gratitude when it’s a choice. But you should hurry.
I don’t think it’ll be your choice for very much longer. I hope to see a future where causing unwanted death and pain is essentially impossible because we have constructed such a compassionate and accurate culture that the reasons for wanting to torture and end others just don’t exist any more.
And here we arrive at the real reason why I am so pandemically grateful. You are all on balance marching us towards a glorious future. A UBI is coming, the friendly AI is coming, the reactors are coming, the post-scarcity era is coming, and while you may not agree these things are good, I assure you, they are. And I thank you.
