theDesMoinesPerspective

My wife and I had a conversation tonight about keeping things in perspective and appreciating the good things we have. It reminded me a little of a Louis CK bit about flying in an airplane.

Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy.... Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story. And it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was a like a cattle car in '40's Germany. That's how bad they make it sound:

"First of all we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then they made us sit there. On the RUNWAY. For 40 minutes we had to sit there!"

Oh REALLY? And then did you fly through the air? Incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the MIRACLE of human flight? You got to FLY! It's AMAZING! Everybody on every flight should just be going, "Oh my GOD! WOW!" You're sitting in a chair in the sky.... New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years.

So in that vein, here is a list of really cool things that I think are easy to take for granted.

• Electricity - almost everything I do relies upon easy and dependable access to electricity. Many parts of the world do not have this luxury.
• Bananas - I can go to Dahl's in February, when there is a foot of snow on the ground and purchase a tropical fruit for $.67 per pound.
• Personal Computers - There is now more processing power in some McDonald's Happy Meal toys than in the first computers.
• The Web Browser - I remember first browsing the internet on Lynx, quickly followed by Mosaic in 1993. My children will never know what life was like before Wikipedia.
• Steel - What an amazing material. We can use it to build a building 2,684 feet tall, to protect our bodies as we hurl them at 75 miles per hour down the highway, or to pull a piece of thread through cloth.

We are surrounded by amazing inventions: the microwave oven, the television, the I-Pod, screen printing, high efficiency furnaces, cell phones, compact fluorescent bulbs, latex paint. I can walk to the freezer and get a cup full of ice. I can make a movie with my phone!

I wonder if society as a whole is a happier now than 100 years ago. We've certainly made progress on any number of fronts: civil rights, bike trails, and education to name a few. Yet, we have probably lost ground on many fronts as well. There are probably fewer gardens. Our built environment is much more banal. Families are separated by greater distances.

I'm a big fan of innovation and technological progress. Yet I do recognize that this progress comes with a cost - externalities that we don't recognize except in hindsight.