Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful • Hacker News Board

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#101

Post by matbatt38 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

riazrizvi wrote: post #45

Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…

Also #23 is mostly based on slavery. It's easier to have smart elite when nobody really works

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#102

Post by lisper » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #91

butwhywhyoh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thankful for oxygen because we can breathe it! And it can be found pretty much everywhere in the atmosphere of planet Earth. And I'm thankful for all the other elements that I'm composed of. They can even be used to do other miraculous things. Wonderful!

Nestle is fighting over control of freshwater sources. I reckon oxygen is next. In the future, be thankful with your wallet.

You don't have to wait. Oxygen bars are already a thing, and have been for quite a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_bar

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#103

Post by notreallyserio » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

matbatt38 wrote: post #100

Most items are speculative, subjective or even historically inaccurate.

Maybe that's why I found this article kind of weird or off-putting. A lot of these things, if they happened or didn't happen, would have meant I wouldn't be alive and thus I wouldn't know to be unhappy about it.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#104

Post by lisper » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

I've done a lot of traveling in less developed countries. That has taught me to be thankful for the fact that I live in a house with heat and air conditioning, and hot and cold running water that I can drink without getting sick. Many people in developed countries (especially the U.S.) take these things for granted, but in many parts of the world these are things people only dream of.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#105

Post by koheripbal » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #13

>That even though the turn humans made from hunter-gatherer bands into agriculture pretty clearly made life worse, it eventually led to the industrial revolution Which also made life worse to begin with. Without the enclosure movement depriving peasants of their land and pushing them to work in the factories in horrendous conditions for pitiful pay it likely wouldnt have happened. Though I'm pretty thankful for the w…

Hunter gatherers routinely starved to death, and had violent confrontations with other tribes. This is evidenced by the different propagation of Y chromosomes vs mitochondrial DNA, as well as other evidence.

It was not better. It was just different, and ultimately less safe than living in agricultural communities.

The unibomber's manifesto goes into a lot of detail on the merits of nativeist life, and many modern anarchists subscribe to this philosophy and co-opt it into a neo-socialist dogma, but it is entirely without scientific merit.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#106

Post by arduinomancer » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

#5 is actually pretty amazing if you think about it

If zero-calorie sweeteners didn't exist I feel like we would view discovering one as a holy grail/miracle drug

I bet a ton of obesity has been prevented just due to diet soda

Imagine if the same thing existed for carbs

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#107

Post by a_wild_dandan » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #76

mrtnmcc wrote: post #70

"Oh, and also that the universe exists at all" That's the one to keep coming back to. Could've been nothin.

On the other hand, nothingness has no cause or means for suffering.

Which comes back to #19:

> That even if, as most scientific-minded people seem to assume, there is no afterlife, that’s not ideal, but is much better than other possibilities like, say, being tortured for eternity.

Like, we could all be a bunch of Boltzmann brains[1] popping into existence in an empty universe, writhing with unimaginable pain in every pseudo-neuron of our temporary brains. But it's not like that, at least yet. Which is pretty cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#108

Post by lnxg33k1 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

I'm grateful to have been born in the good part of the world which allows me to be grateful that we're allowed to sustain our lifestyles thanks to the exploitation of others, and I'm not the exploited one

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#109

Post by mistermann » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #69

riazrizvi wrote: post #45

Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…

To be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off: Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC Aesop (?) 620-56…

> is more accurately something like:

> In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.

Your restatement excluded what I think is the most interesting part:

>> and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?

"Why aren't we working on this" seems like a very good question, one that you don't hear very often - "Why don't we even encounter these sorts of questions more often?" might be an interesting sibling question.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#110

Post by cgriswald » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

k8sToGo wrote: post #99

wintermutestwin wrote: post #94

I'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized: 1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for. 2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves. I find that bookending my days with…

To me this sounds too much like the daily scrum meetings or stand ups where you have to come up with something just so you can say something and, in this case, go to bed. But I only mean this as a joke. I think it is great to have "rituals" that help us look and appreciate more stuff what we have already or where we are and where we came from.

Maintaining sleep hygiene takes precedence to me over essentially anything else and coming up with four things before sounds anxiety-inducing. We do this type of thing before our evening meal, instead. For me, anyway, this is much lower stakes and so there is less anxiety. Which results in it just sort of flowing out—especially after doing it for awhile—but not in an 'autopilot' sort of way.