{"id":7078477,"date":"2026-10-06T19:53:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7078477"},"modified":"2026-10-06T19:53:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:53:13","slug":"count-your-blessings-but-count-carefully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7078477","title":{"rendered":"Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully"},"content":{"rendered":"


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I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve previously described my favorite illustration<\/a> of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn\u2019t 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\u2019d tell the story for generations. They\u2019d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures.<\/p>\n

Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer\u2019s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse \u2014 an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury in the ground.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t even use them all. You certainly don\u2019t have to max out the utility of a found piece of copper, or a captured goat, in order to survive the winter.<\/p>\n

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Once basically the best thing you could get<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/em> get good at the sewing machine, the carpenter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The other day, while I was doing none of those things, and instead watching The Sopranos<\/em> for the fourth time, I was thinking that there\u2019s something wrong with how the modern human being tends to manage its avalanche of blessings.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> greater<\/em> blessings that I don\u2019t actually have.<\/p>\n

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Hunter-gatherer encountering modern-day landfill<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

For example, I\u2019ve always enjoyed the blessing (knock wood) of all the food I need. In 45 years I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Despite this blessing, which would be unimaginable to anyone who wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

What is going on here? Well, I\u2019m trying to enjoy a blessing that I haven\u2019t been granted, on top of the piles and piles I have been granted.<\/p>\n

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Blessed with family and plentiful gabagool; would kill for more<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t actually have: the ability to graze hyper-stimulating mobile-phone media designed to control and addict its user \u2013 rapid-fire videos, political soundbites, inane memes \u2013 without degrading my mind or wasting my other blessings.<\/p>\n

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Waiting for years, three feet from me, while I fish for Reddit upvotes<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Somehow, I\u2019d like to make a simple recalibration: <\/p>\n