While each Thanksgiving I typically reflect on what I’m most grateful for during that particular year, I also experience an ever-present undercurrent of gratitude that runs broader and deeper.
That is, I never take for granted that I was born after the Industrial Revolution, when human life and flourishing rose to dramatic, unprecedented heights. For millennia prior, the vast majority of people worldwide lived, from our perspective, in unimaginable poverty and an average of 30 years or less—a statistic substantially driven by the fact that many died in childhood, from disease to starvation.
I’m thankful that I was born (and chose to remain) in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history, the United States of America—essentially the first country founded on a philosophic idea: each individual has a right to be free to pursue their own life and happiness as they see fit. (For details, read my article What is ‘Freedom’?)
I’m also perpetually thankful that my parents provided me with a good, stable home while growing up mainly on Long Island. I got to live next to the greatest, most exciting city in the world, New York—a bustling, productive, prosperous metropolis with soaring, inspiring skyscrapers—which was greatly responsible for breathing life into the rest of the nation, starting with its status as the financial capital of the world.
In short, I’m thankful to all of the men and women—the scientists, inventors, engineers, financiers, entrepreneurs, industrialists and businessmen—who produced everything from labor- and time-saving machinery, to advanced medical care, to futuristic technologies, to an incredible abundance of food. That is, I’m grateful for the individuals fundamentally responsible for dramatically raising our standard of living—an amazing achievement considering that it mainly occurred over the past 250 years after human beings evolved some 20,000 millennia before.
These are thoughts I always entertain when I sit to eat a lavish meal on Thanksgiving, a distinctly American holiday that essentially celebrates all of this productive achievement and abundance that, in the grand course of human history, is truly unique.
Happy Thanksgiving!