Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully

I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago.

Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities.

I’ve previously described my favorite illustration of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn’t even have textiles yet, discovering a modern landfill. It would be an unimaginable sea of blessings: tools, materials, clothing, food, and ideas galore. The hundreds of circling seagulls alone would be a such a blessing they’d tell the story for generations. They’d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures.

Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer’s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse — an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury in the ground.

We have the same vulnerabilities as our premodern ancestors: disease, loneliness, fear, shame, and death. But we have so many unearned blessings for contending with those problems that we can’t even use them all. You certainly don’t have to max out the utility of a found piece of copper, or a captured goat, in order to survive the winter.

Such an avalanche of blessings and opportunities is a strange problem to inherit. It creates a mental logjam; which ones do you cultivate and which do you ignore? You could get good at the sewing machine, the carpenter’s workshop, or American sign language, but you could also build a dog-walking business, or a formidable chess rating, or 20-inch biceps. You could read the hundreds of unread books stacked against your walls, or design a robot butler, or become a Zoroastrian Magi.

The other day, while I was doing none of those things, and instead watching The Sopranos for the fourth time, I was thinking that there’s something wrong with how the modern human being tends to manage its avalanche of blessings.

Not only do we not take full advantage of the blessings we have, but we do something completely crazy, or at least I do: I often behave as though I have even more and greater blessings that I don’t actually have.

For example, I’ve always enjoyed the blessing (knock wood) of all the food I need. In 45 years I’ve never lived a single day when food was unavailable. I get angry that food is more expensive than it was five years ago, but it’s always been there in great varieties and quantities. For all of my worries, death by starvation has always seemed about as likely as a direct meteor strike.

Despite this blessing, which would be unimaginable to anyone who wasn’t born right into it, I often act like the recipient of an even crazier blessing that was never given to me: the ability to eat whatever I want without causing serious health and quality-of-life problems. I try to enjoy the blessing of available wine or sugary frozen cream not just on special occasions, but when the mood strikes me, which is often enough that I get fat, sleep badly, feel ashamed, and age prematurely.

What is going on here? Well, I’m trying to enjoy a blessing that I haven’t been granted, on top of the piles and piles I have been granted.

Another great blessing is access to information and instruction. Practical know-how on doing basically anything is freely available. The best spiritual and philosophical insight is there waiting for me: the work of the smartest philosophers, ancient wisdom from every tradition, priests and places of worship that would be thrilled to take me on, commentaries and treatises on every type of human contemplation. I have the best literature ever written right here in this room right now, translated into my language, and my predecessors made sure I was literate.

I could spend my whole life trying to take advantage of the best of these gifts. Instead, I insist upon an even more gratifying blessing I don’t actually have: the ability to graze hyper-stimulating mobile-phone media designed to control and addict its user – rapid-fire videos, political soundbites, inane memes – without degrading my mind or wasting my other blessings.

Somehow, I’d like to make a simple recalibration:

• enjoy the abundant blessings I have
• do not try to enjoy blessings I don’t have

Wine is there, whenever it’s needed, for feasts and special gatherings. It’s not there for when I’m eating store-brand penne at my coffee table, watching Christopher and Paulie Walnuts whack a guy. If I insist on claiming that reward too, I am throwing away other, much better blessings (good health, relative youth, time to read).

We’re all different, but it would probably serve each of us to sit down and list the blessings we have, and also the ones we try to have but don’t.

I have warmth, shelter, friends, and food, seemingly (but not really) guaranteed. I have available to me occasional booze, sweets, festivals, and parties. I can read. I have functioning senses and a mobile body. I have a spiritual path and excellent guidance. I have a business with tremendous growth potential. I have computers to look up anything and automate once-tedious operations. I’ve got some knowledge of the world and command of the language. There are people who will read what I write. Blessings as deep as the ocean.

I have not been blessed with time to waste. I cannot eat or drink as my appetites dictate without serious consequences. I can’t grow my business without engaging in challenging and frustrating new tasks. I can’t enjoy the fruits of spiritual or religious life while also being a part-time hedonist. I cannot park myself in front of a content feed without degrading my health and mental faculties. I cannot indulge in pleasures responsibly and never feel deprived or left out. I do not have the ability to read great works of literature and also unlock my phone 80 times a day. I think I do but I don’t.

My blessings are great, but not quite that great. The extent of one’s blessings is also its limit, and not to recognize that line either way is tragic. It’s like winning ten million dollars, then insisting you won fifty million and spending as though you did.

Now and then someone like Paulie Walnuts oughta grab me (maybe you too) by the lapels and shout, “TAKE THE TEN MILLION! Enjoy it! You won!”

***

Fix One Thing

On the topic of neglected blessings, you may remember this haunting insight from Seneca:

We are not given a short life but we make it short; we are not ill-supplied with time but wasteful of it.

Addressing one long-neglected task might take all of an hour, but the load off can be tremendous. It also reminds you how much power you really have when you act decisively.

I’m about to offer a three-day mini-course doing exactly that, for those interested. You’ll pick one small thing that’s been bothering you, and knock it off your list for good.

This course is free.

Sign up here if that sounds good to you!

***