Perspective and Gratitude

And #FreedomMusicFriday on a Wednesday

It is easy to lose perspective—to focus on the minor problems of the day while forgetting all the major blessings in one’s life. Several forces conspire to cause this…

Humans are adaptable. As my late friend Sam would frequently say, “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” A dark side of that phenomenon, sadly, is the fact that we can also get used to how good we have it. Our blessings become a baseline, and then even minor deviations from this baseline feel like a big deal. A small setback that is no big thing in absolute terms seems like a big thing in relative terms.

Humans are also biologically programmed with a negativity bias. Plopping on my armchair evo-psych hat here for a moment—I am pretty confident that this is designed to serve as a survival mechanism.

We need to watch for threats. We need to be on the lookout for problems. Like a deer that stops eating every 20 seconds and pricks up its ears at the slightest noise, we must stay alert for things that might harm us. We are wired to identify bad things, focus on them, and look for solutions. And so we do…even when our lives in general are pretty darned good.

My wife and I try to remind each other of this frequently. We even have a picture on the wall of an old perspective study, showing lines heading off into the distance, to remind us of the concept of perspective.

Unfortunately, it is easy to forget the picture is there. Like the baseline of blessings in our lives, it becomes a part of the scenery, and the little problems of the day once again seem amplified. Overcoming this phenomenon takes constant work, and it helps to count one’s blessings.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I won’t spend time enumerating all of the private blessings in my life. But I will mention a few that are pertinent to our relationship here on Substack…

I am thankful for you.

I am thankful for all our great conversations.

I am thankful for your interest in the distributed nation. Proposing a new type of country is definitely going out on a bit of a limb, but your interest has justified my conviction that this is the right way to go.

I am thankful for all the new friends I have made here. I am grateful to people like Demi of

The Starfire Codes

, who was the first to make me feel like Substack was more than just a website—that it can be a community.

I am thankful to those who have chosen to support me monetarily. This is my full-time job, and I cannot keep doing it without that support. And I would very much like to keep doing it—I believe our work here together is vital.

Your support also helps me keep as much of my content free as possible. Not everyone can afford to do paid subscriptions, especially in this funny-money economy our overlords have created, and I want them to be able to be a part of what we are doing too. I am grateful to everyone who chooses to engage with the ideas we are discussing here together.

In fact, I have an idea. Since crazy Black Friday sales are a thing here in the States, I think we should have one too. Not a pretend one, where they jack up the price on a TV just before lowering it to make it look like a sale, but a real one.

For today through Friday, a yearly subscription will be 95 percent off. Not 20 or 50, but 95 percent. That’s like $2.50 (instead of $50) for the whole year. Basically free. Just use this special link to get the discount: https://christophercook.substack.com/5efbb9c1

The purpose of this post was not to have a crazy Black Friday sale, but it suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.

Either way, I am counting my blessings, and all of you are among them.

I also decided, last minute, to add the K-Flay song below because I remembered one of its lines:

But rather than counting my curses, I try to stay positive.

Excellent advice.

I wish you a great Thanksgiving, filled with warmth, mirth, and lots of stuffing with gravy!